Stop me if you think that you've
heard this one before
"What's Victoria's Secret?" he asked.
Nobody answered.
"She used to be Victor!"
I heard this joke this morning in my Design class. It was very upsetting right off the bat, and I found myself reacting, instead of, as I prefer, responding.
As the collective groans went up, I said, over the top of them, "oh, wow, great, transgender jokes. Hilarious." The room went dead silent. We locked eyes, the student who told the joke and me. He started to stammer.
"Oh, I didn't mean anything offensive by it," he managed to spit out.
"Yeah, but it was offensive. It's really gross, actually."
"Okay, but I didn't mean to offend anyone with —"
"Usually, when people offend someone else, they will —"
"I apologize."
"Thank you."
Class resumed. We had assignments due this morning, so we had all put our projects up on the back wall and were preparing to talk about lines and continuity and contrast and emphasis. When the instructor handed me a jack-o-lantern bucket to put my grading sheet in, I didn't understand that I was supposed to fold my paper into quarters, and then also pass the bucket around.
"I'm sorry," I said to the teacher, after he'd explained it directly to me a second time. "I'm a bit distracted."
"Yeah," he lamented. "Sorry about that."
"Oh, I'll be fine," I answered, passing the bucket along.
"This is how we can tell you never went to church," my friend Erica quipped, trying to cheer me up.
"Is that the giveaway?" I smiled back at her.
Critiques went on, but I kept mulling over this problem in my head. I knew the joke was offensive, and even the guy who told it knew. He'd let it slip before considering the audience. I've done that millions of times. I have a lot of room to forgive that construct on its own merits, because I know it so well. I also usually have a lot of room to forgive ignorance. After all, a year ago, I might've made the same joke, because I had the same ignorance. (Remind me to tell you some time about how my Ok Cupid dating profile, right up until I realized I was a girl and shut it down, contained the term "she-male.")
I'm sure that the guy who told the joke thought it was a harmless play on names. And many trans women do adapt their birth names into a feminine form. In a space like this, where I felt empowered to speak up because we were at a school with "Safe Zone" and "Trans Safe Space" stickers everywhere, where I felt like there was institutional readiness to defend me, where I was not afraid of repercussions, I was able to challenge the joke. But I wasn't able to quite explain why it was offensive, only that it was. And that's what made it a reaction and not a response.
I had more reactive thoughts, but I was able to recognize them for what they were pretty quickly, and, after biting this guy's face off, I was able to reject these thoughts, to refuse to act on them. I'd remembered how, for example, at The Art Institute of Seattle, I was told to go directly to the Dean of Student Affairs if anyone gave me any abuse for being trans, because the school had a zero-tolerance policy on that kind of behavior. Which means that, had this been a class there, I would've been within my rights to have this guy removed from the program, removed from the school entirely, for not realizing that the joke he was about to tell was offensive before he told it, and then not ever actually telling it.
And I feel like that's a bit extreme. It's like when we have a passenger plane shot down by an RPG in the Middle East, and three Americans and a Canadian die, so we send in The Whole Fucking Army and bomb the shit out of the village the RPG was fired from, and then install a new mayor there, bring our soldiers home, and promptly ignore their PTSD and missing limbs. It's not an appropriate, proportional response. It's a reaction, a gross overreaction, and it makes everything so, so, so much worse. While critiques were in progress, I sussed this all out. And now, I have my response.
This joke isn't just offensive because it mocks and then erases Victoria's own narrative, whatever it may be. It's offensive because it gets people killed.
This same joke, told in a different setting, say, a bar, about a woman who is actually at the bar, can also be meant to be harmless and inoffensive. Maybe the one telling it has the sense that it's cruel on some level, so they make sure that the woman at the bar can't hear. Maybe someone who does hear it is a drunk guy who had been trying to work up the courage to go ask her if she comes here often.
Now, while his judgment is impaired, he is challenged with things he was not prepared to be challenged with. "If she 'used to be Victor,' then she was born a man!" he might think. "Does this make me gay?" he might think, which is usually not happily followed with, "oooo, I should figure that out for myself," but rather, "I'm no faggot." With fear and loathing. "Maybe instead of one of us, I'm... one of them."
Maybe Victoria only feels the mood in the bar shift out of her favor. Maybe she only notices that all the friendly, interested glances have turned to confused and angry ones. Maybe someone blocks her way when she tries to go to the bathroom, and insists she use the "right one," the men's room, instead. Maybe she ends up not going to the bathroom at all. Maybe she goes home, safe on the outside, and kills herself. Or maybe she's dragged into the men's room and forced to go. Or maybe she gets beaten up. Maybe she gets raped. Maybe she gets murdered.
That's a lot of maybes. But not the imaginary maybes of trans-women-are-men-who-want-to-attack-our-daughters-in-bathrooms. It's the maybes that are very plausible backstory to the kinds of killings that keep on happening. Whether some guy at the bar actually destroys Victoria, or whether she learns to hate herself so thoroughly that, in the end, she destroys herself, these jokes, these mock narratives, are often key elements of the setting. Sometimes they move from the background to the foreground, and become catalysts.
And if that happened in any state but California, the murderer's defense attorney would be able to legally argue in a court of law that Victoria was to blame for her own murder. That the defendant was "so shocked to learn that their victim was gay or trans that they had no other recourse besides violence." That Victoria shouldn't have been out in public as herself. That because she didn't hide who she was, she was more or less asking for it.
Who said I lied, because I never, I never
Who said I lied, because I never
When critiques ended, we were put on a short break. I went up to the guy who'd told the joke in the first place, and gave him one of my cards.
Nothing's changed
I still love you, oh I still love you
"I hope you know, I don't have any prejudice against anyone," he said. His body language said he didn't want my card. That he didn't need it because he didn't hate anyone.
Only slightly, only slightly less
Than I used to
"Yeah, but we sometimes still say shitty things because we don't understand. I'm inviting you to get to know me," I said. "I blog about stuff like what happened in here earlier," I continued, as he took the card grudgingly. "Because I think it's important. I'm going to write about it soon."
And now I have.
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