I walked two miles in the rain in a suit, my feet torn up by my father's shoes. Receipts and cards stumble out of my pockets to the floor of the station, I still don't have a wallet. Up a flight of stairs, to Harold Square, the umbrellas of New York take up too much air, so we'll just walk real slow, at double arms length in unison!

Epistemic Injustice, Trans Representation in Media, and Cissexist Society

January 21st, 2025

Trigger warning for general discussion of transphobia, but also mentions of suicidal ideation and use of transmisogynistic slurs. And spoilers forAce Ventura: Pet Detective? But that movie sucks anyways; don't watch it.

The term epistemic injustice refers to inequalities in a person or group's ability to know things or express knowledge they hold about something. In cissexist society (one biased in favor of those whose current sex & gender align with those assigned at birth), transgender people are routinely reduced to the margins, told we are somewhere in the spectrum of negligible to actively dangerous. Key in maintaining the illusion that this oppression is not just natural but just, is the role of mass media: television, movies, news, social media, etc. Consciously and unconsciously, anti-trans messaging rings out loud and clear across these mediums, constantly suppressing our own attempts to know ourselves and communicate to others our knowledge. I'll be detailing key aspects of how this injustice functions and spreads, but focusing mainly on transmisogynistic (targeting especially trans women) formations of it, as that is my experience with it.

Trans women are conceived of by cissexist media as a separate entity between man and woman, a hyper-sexualized entity who seeks to deceive good heterosexual men, encroach on and abuse cissexual women's spaces, or some combination of the two (or whatever boogeyman the right needs at any given moment, if we're being quite honest). Consider the first two times I would ever see a trans woman represented in culture. The first time, I was watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, beloved mid-90s Jim Carrey comedy, with my family. At the climax of the movie, it's revealed that the villain our titular hero is trying to catch has disguised himself as a woman within the Miami PD when they are stripped to their underwear, causing every man in the scene to vomit in disgust. They are not a woman but instead a deceitful man, one who tries earlier in the movie to have sex with the main character and trick him, and is publically humiliated for it.

The next place I would see a trans woman was in porn. Videos with slurs like 'tranny', 'ladyboy' and 'trap' in the title were everywhere on internet porn sites in the 2010s, and I have little reason to imagine much has changed in this regard. In these porn videos, trans women's penises are highlighted as the thing that differentiates her from a real woman, the part of our bodies that is most widely fetishized. This third-gendering is so pervasive that, if you were to go on PornHub right now and look under the categories menu, you would find three options: Straight, Gay, and Transgender. Again, we are not real women, only a facsimilie, and this is used to both deny us womanhood and treat us as merely sexual objects.

The last dimension of transmisogynistic rhetoric that is perpetuated by mass media in the West is the fear of us encroaching on women's spaces, especially women's sports and restrooms. Over the past few years trans woman athletes have been harrassed by conservative news and their viewerbase, but especially UPenn swimmer Lia Thomas and San Jose State volleyball player Blaire Fleming. Thomas was scrutinized all throughout her collegiate career and has been denied the ability to compete in Olympic trials, while Fleming was outed by her teammates and had opposing teams forefitting conference games out of exaggerated fears that Fleming would constitute serious harm to their players. The harrassment both athletes have been subjected to lies in the belief that their transness (and therefore "previous malehood") has given them an unfair, innate advantage over the cis competition, when evidence shows that any such advantage plainly doesn't exist. Why use this line of attack, then? For one, transmisogynists don't really care for the truth. But this fiction enables them to stoke the fear in "moderates" that their precious, perfectly feminine cis daughters are in danger by someone irredeemably evil, so vote for this anti-trans legislation.

Taken as a whole, all these depictions of transness give an audience one message: do not, under any circumstance, be trans. TO do so would mean to make yourself unsafe, undesireable, ugly, other. By laundering this sentiment, cissexist society oppresses trans people at the very point of our divergence from cissexual norms, preventing us from knowing or expressing our transness positively, which makes the acts of realizing and coming out of the closet feel insurmountable. What if doing so makes you unlovable, then everyone you care about rightly abandons you? Beyond these initial moments of transness, though, these images and tropes create lasting insecurities for trans people throughout our lives, ones we constantly have to fight back against constantly; no matter how much progress you've made in your life, there will always be more people you meet whose understanding of transness is shaped by these images, and you have to keep re-explaining the basics over and over again. This cycle traps us and our knowledge production to be forever tethered to the realm of cissexual understandability, and surpresses our ability to express anything beyond it lest we get labeled as crazy transvestites.

Clearly, obscuring knowledge of transness is not an incidental part of being a minority in the world, but an active decision cissexist society makes, and enforces this by any medium it can. But why? Why go to these lengths? Why make actions against trans care the first actions of a presidential administration? The answer is simple: for the comfort of cissexual people. Thinking about your own gender and sex critically is, in fact, incredibly daunting. It feels like disassembling something critical to yourself and how you relate to the world, and there's always the chance you can't put everything back the way it was. So, instead you can posture as thought Man and Woman are natural, entirely distinct categories that do not overlap (or do so minimally). This helps you navigate the world and interact with people by heuristics: men do x, women do y, men don't do z, etc. The appearance of any non-conformance with this system throws a wrench in all of this, breaks down these nice little conveniences, and forces one to grapple with the truth. Transness is the most visceral, most visual way this illusion of order is broken, and is therefore the one that gets pushed to the front when the culture war comes knocking.