How Mass Media Created the Transgender Movement Part 5: The Bending of Genders
How acting and roleplaying became the way everything is viewed.
This series has been looking at how the rise of mass media dramatically changed the way people learn about what it means to be a man or a woman and thus led to the rise of transgenderism. The first post looked at the world before mass media, when what it meant to be a man or a woman was learned firsthand from family and neighbors. The second post looked at how the shakeup of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of advertising and prosperity in the Victorian Era changed where people looked for examples of women and men. The third part looked at how Hollywood accelerated this process. The last part evaluated how mass media in the 20th Century kept changing gender ideals.
Playing a role
A commonly overlooked but subtly powerful way that mass media undermined sexual roles was the very fact that everyone knew it was acting or posed. On the one hand, the depictions were clearly intended to inform the viewers as to what the ideal man or woman was like. On the other hand, everyone knew that these situations were contrived. For instance, many today laugh at how television in the 1960s depicted married couples as sleeping in separate beds. Everyone knew that this was not actually how husbands and wives slept, so there was a depiction of celibacy that was not real.
This led some, most notably some philosophers, to extend this out to say that all sexual roles are actually just roles that a person acts, like an actor. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir created a distinction between sex and gender. For de Beauvoir, sex is one’s biological identity and gender is the social role that one plays.[1] In essence, de Beauvoir realized that society, largely through media, was telling, particularly women, the role that they should play and that one essentially acted out that role in life. This concept was later picked up by other feminist thinkers, most notably Judith Butler who argued that gender is really a performance.[2]
Now within Postmodernism, everything is seen as a role. Everyone just plays roles in the same way an actor does, albeit without prescribed lines. Behind this, the prevalence of media in virtually every aspect of life has led many people to view life in terms of media. Everyone knows that the same actor plays different roles and what they are seeing is just roleplaying. This is now extended and applied to all of life, so that one assumes that everyone is just playing different roles in different areas of life. Therefore, one can become something different merely by playing a different role much like how in different movies Dennis Quaid has been Doc Holliday, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Clinton and now Ronald Reagan. So, the thinking goes, I can become someone different just by dressing and acting differently, and this has eventually been applied even to one’s sex.
Challenging Norms
Throughout most of the 20th Century, mass media depicted men and women largely according to their natural sexes, even though the ideals kept shifting. The shifting ideals, however, opened the way for more flexibility in men and women. In the 1970s, television started to flirt with depicting homosexual characters starting with All in the Family. However, it was in the 1990s that homosexuality started to be mainstreamed.[3] Now it seems a TV ad cannot be aired without including a gay or lesbian couple.
Of course, a key turning point was the news show 20/20 with its 2015 interview of Bruce Jenner, who used that interview to come out publicly as transgendered.[4] From this point, we have seen a rapid rise in the celebration of transgenderism in the mass media. One could also note that some programs have also started to challenge other sexual norms, such as the show Sister Wives which depicts polygamy as a viable option.
All of this has been done intentionally in order to normalize these divergent views of sexuality. Throughout history, everyone understood that normal sexuality revolved around heterosexuality. Sure, there were those who practiced homosexuality, but that was always for personal power and pleasure; these same individuals were also married to a member of the opposite sex. Now, however, the prevalence of these “alternate lifestyles” has created the illusion that these are normal. Take, for instance, the fact that the best studies show that between 1-2% of the population are homosexual, but if you watch much television, you will assume that it is far more common than that.
Putting it All Together
Where has all these trends gotten us? First, the more we look to media to tell us about the world, the more we are susceptible to illusions. What has happened is that we become detached from both nature and what is natural and start to think that what is depicted on the screen is real.
As this has gone on, the ideal of a man and a woman has changed and narrowed. For a while, the more sensitive and/or creative man or the man whose voice is higher than average has been made to feel like he is not fully a man. Likewise, the woman who is not as curvy or is more of a tomboy is made to feel like she is not fully a woman.
From here, media started to offer alternative identities that these people who have been left out could take up. The first of these is the homosexual or lesbian. The message has been that if you are not as masculine a man, you must be gay, or if you are not as feminine a woman, you must be a lesbian.
Now with the celebration of transgenderism, the message is that if you do not think you fit the category of man, then become a woman, or vice versa. What is fascinating is how clear it is that those who are drawn to transgenderism are clearly playing a role. Just pay attention to a “trans-woman.” You will find that this individual wears heavy makeup – more than most women do and is more limp-wristed than most women. If you look carefully at it, you realize that this genetic man is trying to be a media ideal of a pin-up girl and not actually trying to be like a normal woman. Even the medical interventions are aimed at making the individual look very feminine, as if having a large bust is what defines a woman.
In short, the message is that there is a narrow way that a man or woman looks and acts and if you do not fit one, then you can change to the other.
[1] Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020), 257–58.
[2] Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody, First Edition. (Durham, NC: Pitschstone, 2020), chap. 2.
[3] “Photos from Remember These LGBTQ Firsts on TV?,” E! Online, n.d., https://www.eonline.com/photos/14090/remember-these-lgbtq-firsts-on-tv.
[4] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 350.