Abstract
Despite the growing popularity of television documentaries featuring transgender subjects, very little critical attention has been given to them. This article investigates ‘trans visibility’ and how visual narratives and the knowledge produced by them contribute to the ways in which trans subjects form themselves between knowledge products. Such documentaries form a notably ‘popular’ route to obtaining trans knowledge – what it means to be trans or what trans is.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jay Stewart is co-founder of Gendered Intelligence and Director of the organization. Jay carries out and oversees the main activities that take place across the organization. Recently Jay has lead on the projects: ‘What makes your gender? Hacking into the Science Museum’ – a £10,000 project funded by Heritage Lottery Fund with the Science Museum, London - and ‘GI’s Anatomy: a life drawing project for trans and intersex people’ – a £30,000 project funded by the Welcome Trust carried out in collaboration with Central School of Speech & Drama, London Drawing and the Gender Identity Development Service, Tavistock Clinic, NHS Trust. Jay is also a mentor. Jay Stewart’s own PhD was carried out in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College. The thesis is entitled “Trans on Telly: Popular Documentary and the Production of Transgender Knowledge” and explores understandings of trans identities through mainstream televisual documentaries.
Notes
1. The BFI database offers the following synopsis:
Part one: ‘The first of a two-part programme which examines the plight of five Britons who suffer from gender dysphoria, men who are convinced they should be female and women who feel they should be male. The five featured are female to male transsexuals who fly to Amsterdam and Utrecht as they prepare for the mental and physical upheaval of hormone treatment and surgery’ (http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/543351?view=synopsis).
Part two: ‘The second of two programmes about female to male transsexuals following a party from Britain to the Netherlands to meet Europe’s largest and most experienced gender reassignment team. A top plastic surgeon describes to them the surgical options available and demonstrates how successful the outcome can be. Once the group is home it is time to decide how to readjust their lives’ (http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/544273?view=synopsis).
2. For discussions around the behaviours of TV consumption, see Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham (Citation2010); Fiske (Citation2011); and Glynn (Citation2000).
3. ‘Trans’ is a term I use to mean those people whose assigned sex at birth does not sit easily or match their sense of self. It includes transsexual or transgender people and cross-dressers, as well as gender variant and gender queer people and anyone who challenges gender norms. Historically, transsexualism is a clinical word, coming from the German term ‘Transsexualismus’, which was coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in an article ‘Die Intersexuelle Konstitution’ in Jarhbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1923). ‘Transgender’ – a term stemming from the US trans community in the 1960s – initially described trans people who did not undergo medical intervention, but cross-dressed all of the time (Ekins & King, Citation2006; Kotula, Citation2002; Stryker, Citation2006). In the late 1990s, Leslie Feinberg used ‘transgender’ as an umbrella term to politicize all gender variant people and to offer a united political project against oppression (http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/transgender.html). Where transgender is used as an umbrella term, I use ‘trans’ as a more contemporary version. ‘Gender queer’ describes a person who identifies their gender as outside of, or other to, the gender binary of ‘male’ or ‘female’ and is aligned with a queer politics which looks to challenge gender- and hetero-normativity.
4. An interesting project, Open Barbers, is a hairdressing service for all genders and sexualities in the London area of England. They ‘offer a personalised and warm haircutting experience with a queer and trans friendly attitude … [and] seek to promote the diversity of identities in society and celebrate people’s appearance in the way they wish to be seen’ (http://openbarbers.co.uk/).
5. For the purposes of this article, I use ‘being trans’ to describe a trans subject. This does not mean that I am subscribing to a notion of ‘being’ in an essential sense, but rather that I intend to mean a being-ness of those people whose selfhood, subjectivity or identity formation is lived or experienced in relation to the term ‘trans’.
6. Butler writes, ‘My own thinking has been influenced by the “new Gender Politics” that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, Intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory’ (Butler, Citation2004, p. 4).
7. In the documentary it is referred to as ‘The Portman Clinic, Tavistock’, but the current Gender Identity Development Service is part of the Tavistock and Portman Clinic, NHS Trust.
8. This performance of permanence is also required if anyone wishes to receive a Gender Recognition Certificate. The trans person must pledge to remain in his or her ‘new gender until death’. See Gender Recognition Act 2004 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/pdfs/ukpga_20040007_en.pdf).
9. Halberstam states: ‘Conversation rather than mastery indeed seems to offer one very covert way of being in relation to another form of being and knowing without seeking to measure that life modality by the standards that are external to it’ (Halberstam, Citation2011, p. 12).
10. We could certainly think, for instance, of the relevance for other ‘minority’ groups, such as the way race is articulated – and studied – through many different discourses and academic disciplines, in a manner that could be seen to be analogous to trans. For instance, race is established through varying discourses that set out to achieve particular ends. We might think of race as genetic or epidermal; as cultural, social or psychoanalytic. We can recall Fanon’s noted 1967 text Black Skins, White Mask. Critical Race theory has been brought into the realm of the visual and the art world, particularly in the work of Adrian Piper, as well as race as performative, where we can also think of the works of E. Patrick Johnson. In addition, race as a category itself has been considered something to be resisted, transcended or even done away with. See Gilroy (Citation1993, Citation2000).