Its never just that one thing…..
CW and TW: Transphobia, slurs, F&%k its a dumpster fire down below, take care of yourself and for the love of God, if you don’t got the spoons don’t proceed. I don’t want to ruin your day and that’s sincere.
Okay, so I am late to the Dave Chapelle turd missile festival, but hear me out…..
I am a transgender person and I have opinions, but not the opinion you think I have.
Oh and before you continue, I don’t care for one second if Dave Chapelle is transphobic. This article isn’t an argument for or against that, because I simply don’t care what Dave Chapelle thinks of trans people.
I am not going to argue that Chapelle’s humour harms trans people. I am not going to explore the complex transphobia coded into his humour. Personally I don’t think it was funny enough to call humour. Not because I am trans and I demand more respect from society. I didn’t laugh because it was juvenile. The closest he got to funny was likening a neovagina to a vegan hamburger that also happens to offend the only people laughing at “Impossible Pussy”. It’s funny because the people who complained about the “impossible burger” never ate an “impossible burger” and so didn’t know what they were complaining about. Those same people have a nasty habit of being caught balls deep in a trap……..without a neovagina.
But I am trans and I grew up in white South Africa during the dying and death of Apartheid. It is through this lens I view and critique Dave Chapelle.
I spent a goodly chunk of my life passing as a cis white male. I got to hear what was said by white cis males in a society where racism was, and to a large extent is still, acceptable. I grew up in close proximity to a cis white male, lets call him Jack. I will use him as a demonstrative example. When both he and I were in high school, Apartheid came to an official end. In South Africa, the period shortly after the fall of apartheid became known as the “New South Africa”, it represented a break from a racist past.
He, like his entire family, is vehemently opposed to the New South Africa. The New South Africa threatened the hegemony of cis white heterosexual people and as such was a direct and tangible threat to their privileged existence. Currently Jack is a minister for a congregation of the Afrikaans Protestant Church. A church that insists that apartheid was god ordained. This is based on their view that god separated the Israelites from the surrounding nations and instructed them to not marry non-Israelites. The extrapolation being that this was god’s desire for all nations to remain…….racially pure so to speak. As such, black and white people should not live in close proximity. That is to say, our man Jack is on the more advanced end of the racist spectrum.
Interestingly enough, before I came out to Jack we had some interesting conversations about the LGBTQIA community. During one of these conversations, I asked Jack how he thinks society should handle the existence of gay people, his answer was that they should be stoned to death. On another occasion he informed me that trans people should be “burnt at the stake”. Oh he also believes that women are subject to the wills of their husbands and when probed about the possibility of one of his kids having a relationship with a black person, he said he would kill the kid. He may have been speaking metaphorically about that last point.
Clearly Jack is an asshole.
Where Jack becomes instructive is looking at how bigotry presents. People aren’t bigots about just that one thing. Jack doesn’t confine his hate to one particular group. His version of Christianity was formed solely because it opposed the integration of society in South Africa. It so happens that when LGBTQIA liberation came along, they opposed that as well. There is always a cluster of bigotries. Jack is a racist and a homophobe, a misogynist and a transphobe. Needless to say, Jack is extremely comfortable with jokes about the LGBTQIA community, sexist jokes aimed at women and of course racist jokes.
Did I mention he is an anti-Semite as well? Well he thinks “Jews control the banks” and he loves those “Auschwitz” jokes. (Auschwitz is in quotes because Auschwitz is never funny and you can eat a bag of dicks if you think it is)
Jack likes humour about anyone who isn’t a cis white dude or Jesus and he likes it when that humour is mocking or degrading toward the other. And that’s where we get to Dave Chapelle.
Dave Chapelle’s routine, the one with all the trans jokes. People like Jack, they find that hilarious. When someone tells a joke that ends with a BIPOC punchline, Jack loves that too. It takes a bigot to laugh at humour that punches down and as we have seen from Jack, bigotry is never just that one thing. It was people like Jack who made memes about George Floyd. It was people like Jack who had Whitney Houston albums in their collection but made awful racist comments about her when she passed away.
Dave Chapelle doesn’t get it, because he is blinded by money or adoration or stupidity. However those people laughing at his trans jokes, they may be laughing with him today, but when jokes about black people are made, they will be laughing at him. Dave Chapelle isn’t providing the entertainment for his fans, he is the entertainment. It ain’t trans people who will laugh at his misfortune, it’s his fans. Dave Chapelle has made a fortune based on second class philosophy and spiteful humour he has somehow sold as insightful commentary on society.
What does that make Dave Chapelle? I don’t know but I am not trying to get a laugh out of terfs either. I don’t dance for those who sharpen their knives for my throat. So maybe he is the winner here, but then again, the fattest pig at the abattoir is still at the abattoir.
May I suggest that if you find Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais’ humour around trans women hilarious, you spend some time in introspection because it’s never just that one thing.
