I enjoyed Disclosure: Trans Lives Onscreen, Netflix’s new documentary about how we as trans people have been represented in film and TV. I’m also inclined to agree with Willow’s take on its defining shortcoming:
“From the beginning [Disclosure] makes the fundamental mistake of positioning itself as an educational video for cisgender people who may not understand the extent to which transgender bodies have been neglected, punished, or mocked on screen.”
More than one of Disclosure’s trans subjects points out that the occasional bigoted representation of a trans person (psycho man in a dress! ugly lesbian thinks she’s people!) wouldn’t be so dangerous if it was outweighed—or even balanced, or even just countered by—more honest depictions of our lives; a teaspoon of poison will have a different effect in the Pacific than a glass of water. In the same way, corrective or even reactionary counter-narratives like Disclosure would be less grating if there was also more mainstreamed media by trans people that doesn’t see “representation as the ultimate goal of transgender acceptance in the mainstream,” which is, as Willow puts it, “foolish and naive.” But then, as I said to J last night, a documentary that was truly for trans people, truly critical of cis-supremacy, would probably never have aired on Netflix in the first place. Y’all remember the The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson “controversy”?
Still, I do think the education of cis people has great value for us, and am grateful to the very generous trans people who take it upon themselves to do the educating. And let us not forget that it’s not only cis people who are educated by self-realized trans people, but the closeted and eggy among us, not to mention our queer and trans youth! It’s also not lost on me that it’s pretty much only projects explicitly about the trans experience—envisioned and helmed and created by trans directors, writers, researchers, and performers—that pay trans people en masse for their brilliance, and that only recently.
In any case, I enjoyed Disclosure as a Celluloid Closet redux. I learned a lot about the history of racialized gender-nonconformity in American film, and was also reminded of many of my own cinematic a-ha moments that had been forgotten or buried. It’s strange to be excited to see oneself onscreen—a few of Disclosure’s subjects describe the tricky sensation of feeling both afraid and validated by the “My girlfriend used to be a man!”-type daytime talkshow schlock in the 90s—while being simultaneously distrustful of where that depiction will go. Maybe excited is the wrong word. As a young person, whenever I felt a tug of recognition, I experienced it more like titillation than excitement—a dangerous, sinful feeling. In search of safer identification, many of us looked elsewhere. At one of the NYC launches for the Lou Sullivan book last year, I read an essay about my own sublimation with Al Pacino’s turn in Dog Day Afternoon. I’ll publish it, one of these days.
Still and all, the “representation” discourse is knotty, sticky, divisive, and ultimately caters to the shallowness of corporate “diversity & inclusion” talking points. Disclosure, while a showcase of many very brave, thoughtful, and whip-smart trans people, is a more sophisticated Trans 101 for a more sophisticated cis. Like a funhouse Skynet, the target cis audience for Disclosure starts out self-aware and then just stays that way. They narcissistically view themselves as granting us our personhood out of the goodness of their hearts. As Morgan tweeted in what I’m guessing is a response to n+1’s recent transmisogynist blunder:
(Regarding the piece in question: Transmisogyny is already unacceptable, but an editor’s defense of its language as “Nabokovian” betrays an inability to differentiate between erudition and baloney. Sirin would be offended. More like wordwork, am I right?)
“Because of poor representation,” says Willow, “we have been forced to chart our own paths to find outlets of transness that speak to us, ones that may not directly feature a transgender person.” Representation requires minority. As people marginalized by our identities, our sense of self must stand next to our oppressors’ sense of us (as a white trans person, I hesitate to apply Du Bois's term double consciousness here, but you get the idea).
Because in a gender-binarist world, we understand ourselves by what we are and also what we aren’t. As I wrote in another DAVID,
“What do you do when you don’t exist? You go in search of reference points. You hunt for clues. You cling to almosts and sort-ofs and good-enoughs. You take things that don’t belong to you and appropriate them for your own ends. You identify with people and sensibilities that aren’t really for you, making them your own through sheer force of will.”
But this applies to cis people, too, to anyone with a gender, not to mention those of us who haven’t any. When my youngest sister was little, I discovered just how difficult it was to convince a 6-year-old that there was no such thing as a “boy” toy. She already knew to second-guess her interests in little cars or little action heroes, the edges of her allotted gender demarcated by the only other one of which she was aware.
In Disclosure, Laverne Cox does a transfeminine reading of Yentl; I myself could write write a book on the Tony Perkins’ undercurrent of transfag in Psycho. The inverted subtextual narratives remind us of the inadequacy of cis (and white) logics. Not only do we understand ourselves by what we aren’t, but where we end, brushing up against what we aren’t—a porous and polymorphous boundary, to be sure.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.