Evidence from film, plays, etc of the historical background of casual accepable male violence against transwomen

[seethesuninwintertime]

I am trying to engage more effectively locally and to redirect attention to the real issues transwomen were trying to overcome pre GRA in the hope of highlighting the modern attacks on actual women for what they are i.e. misogny. I'm a great believer that if you gather data and put it on a timeline then it will confess its secrets and show its patterns.

Happy to look at Gender studies literature i.e. stuff written by people I don't agree with.

My tentative hypothesis is that transexuals were a legitimate target of male mockery and male violence until very recently. What I wonder if whether there was always misogyny behind the abuse of transexuals and whether that misogyny has now changed. I wonder if the abuse that was casually directed at transexuals has now been partially redirected at gender critical women but it's the same old thing. I wonder whether all that hatred needed somewhere to go once it became less acceptable to simply mock transsexuals. I dont' know.

Off the top of my head I can think of:
"She-man" in Sopranos series 2
Crocodile Dundee scene where he grabs the transexual's genitals and everyone laughs and mocks
"Rent" (which had a bizarre line about the transsexual being a better woman than other women).
Rocky Horror Show which was how most people born in the 1970s were introduced to transvestism/transexuality.

But someone must have done a phd in this - in fact loads of phds must have been done. so I don't need to reinvent the wheel

In terms of my bona fides, I am a regular but frequently name change.

Nor me, I was only wee! My logic just figured that early nineties would have meant that the majority of trans portrayal in media would have been HSTS, and that the risk if someone "stealthed" a straight male would therefore include the risk of HIV.

I can't think of any specific media portrayal that relates to that - which I find weird in itself, given the paranoia I have seen at that time

Aids ad 1987.

General broadcast. Looks like govt sent leaflet to all homes.

Note they say anyone can get it. No saying it's these people etc.

HIV/aids was and is a global pandemic and yes there were probs with arseholes being homophobic of course. But there are always homophobic arseholes iyswim!

The series recently Russell t Davies started in early days when young men started dying and no one knew why. And the reaction in the gay community in esp... was it set in London? Around it. Views on the series on other threads!

Yes there was gay plague type stuff but at my age and in London that seemed like you know. Miserable horrible people.

Here's a BBC timeline with first hand interviews.
www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-55983269

Freddy died 1991. Feels longer ago. He was so massively famous, well known and well loved. It was massive in news papers etc. Young talented amazing loved man dead of AIDS.

The concert for him was huge.

Decent drugs didn't come for YEARS. there's still no vaccine/ cure. But, in the UK it's a positive picture and with prep and various other drugs it's now generally not going to reduce life if caught young ish. And the horror of so many young men dying is very much in the past.

Sean Bean?

images.app.goo.gl/SToZBgGdBnPC7e5G9

It's true!

OP a lot of fairly unconnected info here!

Is this helping? What are your thoughts?

I find it so interesting as someone getting on a bit the way so many young people (on Twitter etc not here!) make assumptions about past.

Esp 70s 80s!

But then every generation thinks they have discovered sex, first to feel teen angst etc etc. And that's nothing new either!

Dick Emery used to do drag as well and it was family viewing I think on at about 6pm.Wow we were exposed to a lot of drag in the 1970s.

I don't think sketch comedy where the comics play cross sex roles is drag.

Let's not get into all that again if that's ok!

Been a million threads on 70s 80s TV lol.

The people I mentioned upthread were nothing to do with that though.

But tbh I don't think the 70s 80s can be mapped to modern gender identity.

Given trans now includes any sort of gender non conformity then well. Trans artists were visible on mainstream tv for sure.

But this is a labelling system that is new.

And tbh. Can't those who were brilliant/talented/broke the rules etc in whatever area just be appreciated without application of the current politics etc? I mean it was decades ago.

Men don't attack trans women because of misogyny. That is impossible. Trans women are men. They attack trans women because of homophobia. Often internalized homophobia. One common reason is called the gay panic defense. This has long been recognized in law and psychology. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense

I'd argue that homophobia is rooted in misogyny personally.

But no. For vast majority of attacks it's because of homophobia. Obv.

And massively predominantly by men. Also obv.

Going after women as the root of all problems really just shows that the problem is something other than claimed. If it was street attacks etc then it's men they need to be targeting.

This is really "men are afraid they'll be mocked, women are afraid they'll be killed" over again, isn't it?

The vast majority of the examples mentioned in this thread is not "violence" at all. Yes, men have mocked effeminate men for a long time. Men have murdered both effeminate and masculine men, and I'd bet money that masculine men are murdered more often than effeminate men (no actual rates of trans murders show that MTFs are murdered at a higher rate than other men, usually much lower).

But men view ego bruising as death-equivalent, and are coddled in this. Oh no, someone might think it's SILLY for someone to dress in a certain way. Stop the presses! Lord knows women have never been told they're silly or stupid or not worth listening to if they dress in certain ways. Must be some special oppression.

Sorry don't agree.

Numbers wise there's much fewer gay men and those who go about in feminine garb (and not obviously a stag bloke etc) have always been s target for abusive violent thugs.

I think to play down the impact on essentially any man or men who are seen by the large number of blokey men as 'different' is an unhelpful thing to do.

You may not remember the bombing of the admiral Duncan pub. That was horrific- look it up if interested.

The fact is that the baddie is somehow women. Which is just ludicrous. If the main orgs cared they'd be working to change attitudes in male population.

Pose on Netflix has a loyof trans characters, most of whom engage in prostitution to make ends meet.

Women are either lovely, adoring helpmeets, bigoted mothers or 'Karens' who fail to recognise the specialness of transwomen.

I enjoyed the first two series (there's some fantastic acting) but third series is all about how transwomen are all lovely so women should shut up.

The solution to historic transphobic violence and hatred from men should not be to pretend transwomen ARE women. It should be to end male violence and the structures that perpetuate it.

Here here @EishetChayil

@LobsterNapkin

Dick Emery used to do drag as well and it was family viewing I think on at about 6pm.Wow we were exposed to a lot of drag in the 1970s.

I don't think sketch comedy where the comics play cross sex roles is drag.

At the time that Emery, Corbett, Barker, Dawson et al were doing it, that's exactly how they would have termed it.

“But men view ego bruising as death-equivalent, and are coddled in this”

Yes. Men are taught there are lines it would be death-equivalent to cross.

The thing with 70s-style comedy drag though, which you get in Python as well as Les Dawson, Ronnie Two Ronnies etc as well as Edna Everage, is that the joke is kind of on the men for being such terrible women. Les Dawson as the gossipy neighbour is funny because what you're seeing is a man who knows he doesn't make a convincing woman. Even down to his unrealistic, not properly attached boobs. Pantomime dames are similar. The whole point is that it's a man and that is what you are enjoying - his failure to really look like or be a woman and he is on board with that.

Older-style drag was often similar - lots of ribald gay jokes referring to penises etc. It wasn't about being female in any way, it seemed more like an OTT expression of male gay "femininity".

I don't think that's is the same thing at all as film and TV portrayals of transwomen who take themselves seriously as "women" - whether positive or negative. Sitcom/sketch show comedy drag also IIRC didn't make the "man in women's clothes" a target for being that. He/she was just a comic creation. Whether or not that's considered problematic in some way I don't know.

You get similar in reverse when sitcom or sketch show characters are women pretending to be men. It's funny because it's not convincing, eg "Bob" in Blackadder.

@MrsMadderRose

The thing with 70s-style comedy drag though, which you get in Python as well as Les Dawson, Ronnie Two Ronnies etc as well as Edna Everage, is that the joke is kind of on the men for being such terrible women. Les Dawson as the gossipy neighbour is funny because what you're seeing is a man who knows he doesn't make a convincing woman. Even down to his unrealistic, not properly attached boobs. Pantomime dames are similar. The whole point is that it's a man and that is what you are enjoying - his failure to really look like or be a woman and he is on board with that.

Older-style drag was often similar - lots of ribald gay jokes referring to penises etc. It wasn't about being female in any way, it seemed more like an OTT expression of male gay "femininity".

I don't think that's is the same thing at all as film and TV portrayals of transwomen who take themselves seriously as "women" - whether positive or negative. Sitcom/sketch show comedy drag also IIRC didn't make the "man in women's clothes" a target for being that. He/she was just a comic creation. Whether or not that's considered problematic in some way I don't know.

You get similar in reverse when sitcom or sketch show characters are women pretending to be men. It's funny because it's not convincing, eg "Bob" in Blackadder.

That kind of old fashioned comedy drag (two Ronnies, Monty Python) isn’t just making play / fun with how they aren’t women, though. It’s also making fun of women as well, full stop. When make comics dressed up as women it was as caricatures of the older women of the time - polyester dress, lumpy figure, headscarf - the whole thing was a nasty stereotype of the ugly old fat harridan woman with a headscarf and rolling pin who’s so unsexy you can barely tell her from a man anyway.

That’s why those shows inevitably had a few Carry-On type smiling Seventies girls in scanty outfits hanging around as well, just to make it clear that the male comics were lampooning older fat women who weren’t the young sexy ones. The drag sketches are full of misogyny, just as the contrast with the young “fruity” women is as well.

We’ve all watched enough of this stuff in our childhoods to know how it all works! Comedy drag was not some kind of brave gender boundary breaking subversion. It was always thoroughly conformist and designed to be unflattering mocking of older women in particular (cf the recent massive popularity of the execrable “Mrs Brown”).

Comedy drag was not some kind of brave gender boundary breaking subversion.

God no, I wasn't suggesting that.

Just that it was different from being about men somehow actually "being" women.

I agree that what you're talking about definitely happened a lot. But it wasn't always all the same. The Life of Brian "Loretta" sketch pasted on this thread was much more subtle. I'd argue Edna Everage isn't anti-woman or stereotyped, she's a megastar with incredibly sharp wit who subversively punctures all kinds of expectations.

Re stereotyped "man-like" women, I accept that but then how could someone like Les Dawson do anything else? I suppose he just shouldn't have done it at all really. But I still find myself a bit on the fence because I think comedy cross-dressing is a tradition in both directions that sometimes has a place...

None of this is to say I thought it was all wonderful, but I do think it's a common simplification to think that back then all attitudes were the same - they weren't.

I’m going to out myself as a trashy TV viewer here but Jerry Springer. I’ve watched some old episodes lately and one of the staples of his early shows involved transexuals coming onto the show to reveal to their male partners that they’re really a man. The duped partner’s reactions are split. Half the time they react with pure disgust, and the other half immediately try to physically attack the trans person. I only saw one episode where the partner was shocked but then accepting.

Also, Maury used to do shows where they’d bring on a load of people dressed like pageant contestants and the audience would have to guess who was a man. The audience would be brutal in their comments but it was laughed off.

There was either a book or an article I read once, mostly about Les Dawson but about this generation of comics. Most performed in men's clubs, most served in WW2 or national service. There's the army concert party style to it, where the joke is to do it without a slur on the performing man's masculinity. If you watch 'It ain't half hot mum' (written by men who were in performing in war concert parties) Gloria as a camp gay man is treated and seen differently to the other blokes when they cross dress for a song or sketch. It's men performing to other men.

The book or article also referenced the non stop 'mother in law' reference common to Dawson and others of his time and the heavy weight on older, unattractive, harridan women as the well known butt of the joke. It linked it to the history that when these young men came out of the army at the end of the war and went back to wives or were newly married, bombing had destroyed a lot of people's homes and there was a housing shortage, and many young couples were forced to live with one or the other of their parents. The experience of living in constant friction and under the parental control of your wife's mother, and of resenting this, was a common one among men at the time.

As I child in the 70s I always wondered what was meant to be so bad about mothers-in-law! But in my experience as an adult I'd say women are more likely to have MILs who treat them badly, than men are.

"I’ve watched some old episodes lately and one of the staples of his early shows involved transexuals coming onto the show to reveal to their male partners that they’re really a man. The duped partner’s reactions are split. Half the time they react with pure disgust, and the other half immediately try to physically attack the trans person."

You would think these disgusted/violent men would be the object of today's ire but they are not - women are.

I keep thinking I've figured it out but I haven't.

I think a huge chronology is in order with special attention the (probably undocumented) behaviours of women around trasnsexuals in art pre GRA. That would surely yield clues.

Just to muddy the waters, where does this stuff fit in ? Who would typically be in the audience?

www.ladyboysofbangkok.co.uk/fantasy-ladyboys-2021-fantasy-tour-the-showgirls-return-with-a-uk-tour/

How is this different (lol) from the Chippendales in the 90's which was mainly something (some) women would pay to see?
Wow they still exist.....
www.ents24.com/uk/tour-dates/the-chippendales