I am not that Caitlin: a critique of both the transphobic media reaction to Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover shoot and of passing

ABSTRACT

In this article I discuss and critique transphobic media reactions to the celebrity Caitlyn Jenner’s 2015 Vanity Fair cover shoot. I then consider these in the light of Garfinkel, H. [1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall] concept of ‘passing’ in his celebrated case story of Agnes and argue that ‘passing’ is often conflated with ‘being out’. I argue that the two are significantly different and claim that the former is implicitly based on a public lie. I use several auto-ethnographic narratives to illustrate the argument.

KEYWORDS:

• Passing
• transgender
• transsexual
• transphobic media reaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use trans in common with many transgender people as an abbreviation to denote transgender person, or transwoman or transman.

2. I will try to refrain from placing ‘pass’, ‘coming out’ and their various derivatives in quotations as much as possible for the sake of clarity but remain aware of the issues that surround and complicate such terms.

3. I capitalise the former two as the dominant partners of a grouping where bisexual and trans identities are marginalised, glossed over and often discriminated against in what is an increasingly homonormative subculture.

4. I intentionally transgress academic referencing standards here as I deliberately will not cite much of the transphobic academic literature that stretches from the 1970s to the present day. Any reader who wishes to read what this literature says, either from curiosity, or for their own research or perhaps if they doubt what I claim as a ‘deceitful’ transsexual say may refer to works by Stone (1991) and Connell (2012).

5. Anyone interested in how the political left of centre UK media have published transphobic op eds. may wish to investigate those of Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill published in The Guardian and The Observer in early 2013. Burchill’s openly transphobic op eds. for The Guardian can be dated back however to at least 2002.

6. The op eds. from academics like Burkett (2015) and Garelick (2015) reflect nothing but themselves ad infinitum, ad nauseam without even a tain to their mirror. See Gasche (1986) for a prolonged discussion on the tain of a mirror, reflection and reflexivity.

7. For those who may think that I exaggerate or that I am too melodramatic see Butler’s (1993) description of the murder of Venus Xtravaganza (see also Prosser’s 1998 critique of Butler’s reading of ‘Paris is Burning’); Halberstam’s (2005) discussion of the murder of Brandon Teena and; the murder of Gwen Araujo (Lloyd 2013). The Human Rights Commission estimates that “one out of every 1000 homicides in the U.S. is an anti-transgender hate crime” (Human Rights Commission 2011 cited in Lloyd 2013). In 2015 there was nearly 1 homicide per day of a transgender person (TDoR 2015).

8. In a reply to a UK public petition to recognise the right to self-identity the UK Ministry of Justice stated that non-binary’ transgender people do not exist. We must therefore be imaginary.

9. The existence of gender non-conforming people unmasks the lie of a natural binary heterosexual society. Furthermore if, as Butler (1993) has argued, there is no originary ground for sex and ‘man’ or ‘woman’ then gender performativity may itself be the repeated iteration of a fiction. This is an impossible dream where the transgender person has a doubled ‘never-never’: I was never male and so have never lost being male; I was never a female, can never become one as there never was female. (One might add that the second ‘never-never’ is partially distorted in feminist criticisms of transgender from academics such as Grosz [1994] as ‘I was never female and can never become one’. See Salamon [2010] for a critique of Grosz.) What is elided following Butler – binary cisgenders are also implicated as their gender – is also based on nothing: there was no ‘(fe)male’ that you could ever have been and so a claim to be a ‘(fe)male’ is a fiction. So who is lying now? To paraphrase Rogers (1992a), ‘we are all passing: we are all lying’. It is beyond the scope of this article (yet gain) to do this argument justice.

10. With apologies to Pete Shelley and the Buzzcocks.