When cis people say that trans stuff is new to them, what they really mean is “treating trans people w any dignity is new” because they were watching Ace Ventura and Jerry Springer decades ago.
As a cis person who was unaware of the tranphobia in Ace Ventura and Jerry Springer (having never seen either) I did a little research and thought I’d add to this post for others like myself. The Jerry Springer transphobia is pretty easy to find, and falls more or less along the same lines as that in Ace Ventura; in effect, both play off the (unfortunately common) media trope of trans women as “not real women” who simply dress so to trick men into gay sex (and male disgust at discovering this, usually followed by slews of slurs). Don’t know why that stuck with me, but I figured if I was going to educate myself I might as well help some other people improve themselves at the same time. (having read more about Ace than Jerry, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective also uses the mentally ill as a pinata for cheap laughs, so that’s nice.)
I’m gonna be a little more explicit here. Trigger warnings for some pretty nasty transphobia:
‘Ace Ventura’ is a ‘family film’ from 1994 that a lot of people saw as young children and that still gets repeated on tv.
In it the hero, Ace, discovers that a beautiful woman he has kissed is a criminal and a trans woman. He responds to this information by:
– burning his clothes, taking showers and doing other stuff that significies he is horrified about kissing a trans woman
– stripping her down to her underwear in front of a crowd to expose that she has a penis
This is treated in the movie as both righteous and hilarious and the ‘reveal’ scene is presented as his heroic triumph over evil.
This is a movie milions of us saw as kids. This is a movie that was many young people’s first exposure to the existence of trans women. This movie tells us that trans women are disgusting and it is okay to strip them naked in public.
This movie should be banned and everyone who made money on it should donate it to trans groups that fight violence against trans women.
QueerAnarchism 