In June 2014, Time magazine featured Laverne Cox, star of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, on a cover that proclaimed America’s “Transgender Tipping Point”. Cox, a black transgender actor, was at the forefront of a wave of mainstream media depictions of transgender people, from the critically acclaimed Amazon series Transparent, to the bestselling memoir by Janet Mock, to fashion campaigns by the likes of Barneys featuring transgender models. In the six years since Cox’s Time cover, mainstream depictions of trans or non-conforming gender have proliferated – there’s Hunter Schafer in the HBO coming-of-age drama Euphoria, the non-binary character Taylor Mason on Showtime’s Billions and the Netflix show Pose, set in the ballroom scene of 1980s New York.
But while mainstream visibility is welcome and influential, especially for as historically marginalized a community as transgender people, one should be wary of celebrating representation in which “a few people are elevated and the majority of people are still struggling”, Cox says in Disclosure, a Netflix documentary she executive produced on the history of transgender representation in American media.
“My own life is such a profound example of what representation can do,” Cox told the Guardian, noting countless stories of trans people she’s met who transitioned, or came out to friends and family, or decided to stop living stealth, after seeing her character on Orange is the New Black. But in the same context, “trans people have experienced unprecedented levels of violence, and this legislative assault in state legislatures and on a federal level that is unprecedented”.
Disclosure outlines the often ghoulish, warped mirror of transgender representation in American film and TV, a history ridden with damaging stereotypes and double-edged swords. With a dearth of depictions, representation, often insidious or played for jokes, takes on outsize significance. According to a Glaad study, 84% of Americans don’t personally know someone who is transgender; most information and impressions about transgender people thus come from media, including for transgender people sorting through their own self-perception. More roles, higher visibility, means more and potentially better information; it can also mean swifter backlash for the roughly 1.5 million Americans who identify as trans.
This visibility paradox was on stark display during the week of Disclosure’s release, which kicked off with a Black Trans Lives Matter rally in New York attended by tens of thousands of people and 25,000 people in a Los Angeles march – an unprecedented public display of solidarity in the face of systemic violence against transgender people of color. The week prior, two black transgender women were killed within 24 hours — Dominique “Rem’Mie” Fells in Philadelphia, and Riah Milton in Liberty Township, Ohio.
The supreme court affirmed federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ citizens this week, preventing 26 states to still allow employers to fire trans employees for their gender – days after the Trump administration announced it would roll back healthcare protections for transgender people.
The seesaw of news tests the utility of visibility, as “we see time and time again that as marginalized communities get mainstream attention, backlash ensues”, Sam Feder, the director of Disclosure, told the Guardian. While the process of re-examining decades of trans representation in media for Disclosure was “really cathartic”, especially “seeing it in context that’s held and driven by trans people”, Feder said he “didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that visibility is not the goal, it’s just a means to an end”.
Still, in unspooling over a century of representation, Disclosure reveals how tropes, stereotypes and recognition thread and bake into the present, for better or for worse. With commentary from a bevy of transgender entertainment figures including Trace Lysette, Jazzmun, MJ Richardson, Candis Cayne and Tiq Milan, Disclosure revisits early Hollywood, when cross-dressing was illegal yet numerous silent films featured men dressing in women’s clothing. Misleading, dangerous or problematic depictions and stereotypes have existed just as long, such as the terrible trope of trans characters as psychopathic killers – from Murder! in 1930, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in 1970, and Psycho in 1960 to the serial killer Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs in 1991 – which primed audiences to respond to transgender people with fear.
That historical thread clearly runs into another headline in recent weeks: Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s essay of transphobic misinformation. Having already addressed Rowling’s comments as “deeply problematic” and the burden of representing a marginalized community in public – “The ‘divide and conquer’ method of pitting women’s rights against the rights of trans people has been a very effective tool for dividing marginalized people,” she told the Daily Beast – Cox declined to add more on the Rowling essay, other than to support actors from the Harry Potter franchise, including Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Eddie Redmayne, who have publicly refuted Rowling’s views.
“Go Emma, go Daniel, go Eddie,” Cox said.
Disclosure, as a film on the history on anti-trans or misleading depictions in popular culture, could “enlighten JK and folks who are like-minded to the roots of their patriarchal fantasies”, Feder added.
In numerous examples, the cumulative effect of which is devastating and damning, Disclosure reveals a minefield of depictions toggling between the extremes of tragic victim, butt of the joke or spectacle, but rarely grounded person. The tropes range from dangerous and destructive to well-meaning but clumsy, including: the transgender violence victim narrative in cop and medical shows; an obsessive focus on talk shows and news programs with surgery and body parts, and audience assumptions that any question, no matter how invasive is fair game; the assumption that disclosure – the reveal of oneself as transgender – must be a storyline, one accompanied by feelings of betrayal and mistrust; men reacting to trans women with visceral disgust; and cis actors playing trans characters to critical acclaim, such as Jared Leto winning the Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club, Chris Sarandon in Dog Day Afternoon and Redmayne’s Oscar-nominated turn in The Danish Girl.
What to do with this litany of problematic, often downright transphobic depictions? Feder and Cox called for context, not censorship, in light of the conversation recently reignited by HBO Max’s decision to temporarily remove Gone With the Wind from its streaming service, pending a note from black historians on the film’s racist depictions and glorification of the Confederacy. Problematic portrayals are “an educational opportunity”, said Cox. “I’m not a fan of chucking art to the side. I’m a fan of critically engaging with it and having conversations.”
Both said it’s important to understand the origins of ideology and stereotypes as a roadmap for fixing and dispelling them. “It’s so important for us to be clear about where this started,” said Cox. And looking to the future, Feder said, “what we need is more – the more we have, the less harmful these clumsy representations will be”.
“We need more trans folks working behind the scenes – directing, producing, below the line positions, just more,” Cox added. “And more representation in positions of power.”
Janet Mock’s multimillion-dollar Netflix deal, for example, is a step – “but it’s just one person. We need more of that.”
The size and visibility of recent protests give Cox a “tremendous amount of hope”, she said, “but it is about what comes next. It is about keeping this energy to change policy, to redirect our budgets and our cities away from policing and toward education, housing, employment opportunities for those who are most at the margins.”
Representation, said Cox, can “change some hearts and minds, it can inspire people, but it needs to be combined with efforts to shift ideology and institutions and public policy – and, again, the material conditions of people’s lives”.
Disclosure is available on Netflix now
