Sex Trumps Race

My social media feed of late has been populated by stories of transgender athletes from the Olympic Channel. The stories are interesting and well-produced but it made me think about the relative prevalence of stories about transgender people in the media.
According to the New York Times, 1.4 million people in the US (0.6% of the population) identify as transgender. According to Pew research, another minority group, Muslims, make up more than double that amount at 3.3 million souls. Latinos make up 18%, African-Americans 13%, and Asians 5–6% according to Wikipedia. A whopping 19% of the Americans have a disability according to the U.S. census; that’s 1 in 5 Americans or 1 in every 2 households.
Yet, in the last few years there has been an explosion of positive stories about or emphasis on transgender people. This seems disproportionate when one considers 1) the demographic composition of the U.S. and 2) the amount of time it has taken for other minorities to get meaningful media representation and coverage. In addition to the news stories about bathroom bills, army-funded gender reassignments, and pre-pubescent kids getting HRT, you will easily find personal stories of transformation and struggle within the transgender community. On top of that, popular media has given us award-winning shows with fantastic writing and great actors such as Transparent, Orange is the New Black, and Sense8 just to name a few.
But taking a closer look, I noticed something. With the notable exception of Laverne Cox on OITNB, the majority of these stories present white subjects. Google image “gay celebrities” or “gay icons”. Notice anything?I had to really think to find non-white examples and I could only recall RuPaul, Margaret Cho, George Takei, and Wanda Sykes. Of course there are more but clearly, specific examples are not as “available” to us as others like Anderson Cooper, Ellen Degeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, Elton John, Ellen Page, and a bunch more who I know visually but can’t remember the names of.
This absence of colour is also palpable in the current discourse about feminism; regardless of whether people call themselves feminist or not, whether they love or hate the current “wave” of feminism or not, the vast majority of speakers are white. White men, white women, but ultimately, white. The arguments and level of discourse are excellent, I cannot fault it. But I do wonder, where are the people of colour? I am not saying that people of colour are purposely excluded, nor am I advocating some intersectional worldview. But it’s kind of weird if you consider how many people get upset by the lack of women on discussion panels. There is even a pledge started by a very well-respected development economist for people who refuse to participate in male-only panels.
Just a few days ago, the BBC published a list of its top earners, a list of 96 people on its “official” payroll that earned over 150k. Of the top 20, 5 were women, none were ethnic minorities. Note, I am not arguing for a 1-to-1 equivalence of representation. What is surprising though, is that almost no media outlet lead or focused on the racial under-representation. The story of outrage (because, you know, everything has to be outrageous today) was almost entirely centred around gender inequality.
As a society, we are still afraid to talk about race. We are so afraid to talk about it, we would rather explore every single facet of “transgressive” sexuality and create movies about superheroes destroying cities and each other before we seriously acknowledge the issue.
Just look at The Danish Girl. This is a film about one of the first gender reassignment surgeries with a white cast, headlined by an actor educated in the hallowed halls of Eton and Cambridge. This is Oscar-baiting s***! Of course, no one wants to talk about the fact that the violence against transgender people in the U.S. which so many use to justify awareness of the transgender community is overwhelming inflicted on people of colour. No, we don’t want to look at that. That’s just a little too real. Anyway, those people didn’t try hard enough to look the part — they were ugly, ewwie— and attracted too much attention to themselves. Or maybe they were prostitutes. Drug addicts. No wonder they got into trouble, right? Supremely unworthy of our attention.
This post is not a pity party about under-representation or an attempt to attack certain groups or ideologies or a desire for more polarising discussion based on identity politics. What I’m getting at is the nature of the discourse. Yes, there are structural reasons for why we have certain inequalities. While we cannot change them immediately — nor would I advocate a society attempt to do so unless it has some strange desire for wide-scale violence and anarchy— we can try to have more equivalence and intellectual honesty in the conversation.
