#but it's so frustrating to see the amount of trans and queer in general erasure

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I’m doing my English final on media’s representation of the LGBT+ community, or lack thereof, and was wondering if you could provide me with your opinion on this topic? Thank you so much!

Hey anon!

While I don’t pretend to be an expert on this subject, I definitely think media’s representation of the LGBT+ community is underwhelming at best (and down right discriminatory a lot of the time if I’m being more accurate), and I don’t think I’d be wrong is assuming most LGBT+ people would agree with me on this. Before I start, I just want to say that there’s nothing wrong with real people being any of the things I mention that do actually get some kind of representation, it just gets a little frustrating for the rest of us when they’re the only ones being represented in media.

Not only do we have to fight tooth and nail for even the tiniest amount of representation, when we do actually get that representation it’s often negative (Did anyone say queer coding every villain until it gets old and then some?) or tokenised with one white, middle class, able bodied, neurotypical, cis gay man bearing the weight of representing the whole community. A task he is definitely not up to doing, to the disappointment of all of us who don’t fit that exact mould and even to some who do.

The media completely disregard intersectionality and a majority of the LGBT+ community, and they rarely, if ever, use their token gay character to talk about actual LGBT+ issues.The also seriously lack originality with few of their LGBT+ characters straying beyond the two polarised ends of their stereotypical pole. They are always either the flamboyant gay that usually ends up being the brunt of the jokes of the exact opposite so the media can toot their horn about how forward thinking they are, revelling that the character no one could’ve thought was gay (because they displayed absolutely no homosexual tendencies), is actually gay! Usually, conveniently for them, at the end of the whole thing so they don’t actually have to address it. While this can be taken as a positive, because it forces people to make a judgement on the character rather than their sexuality, it’s pretty convenient for media companies that this means they don’t actually have to follow through with representing that sexuality within the character.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! It’s also painfully obvious that most lesbian representation we see in media is put there for a male audience with two conventionally attractive, feminine women who usually have a loud, revelling sex scene that’s generally inaccurate to actual lesbian sex. But it sure looks good if you’re trying to get off to it and don’t know what two women having sex really looks like. This could (almost) be forgiven, however, if it weren’t for the trope of killing off at least one of the women involved, usually just when it seems like things could be getting better, at least for the LGBT+ viewer looking for representation. Anyone else remembering The 100 right now? It’s like queerbaiting’s (which, don’t even get me started on) older, more soul-destroying cousin. Just when we think our voices are finally being heard, they’re finally giving us a fraction of the representation we deserve, it’s ripped away from us, kicking us while we’re down with the remaining character’s sorrow. A sorrow that will often, in the case of movies, last until the end of story because a happy ending for wlw is just too much to ask, right?

Then there’s the out and out refusal of the media to use the word bisexual. I think I’ve heard of one show (serious props to Grey’s Anatomy) that has a character explicitly state that they are bisexual, instead of someone who “doesn’t like to use labels”. Which again, is fine and a totally valid way for people to identify, but it’s obviously a cop-out for media companies, one they use so they don’t have to use the world bisexual. Or pansexual or polysexual for that matter but I think pigs will fly before media companies acknowledge even the BT in a meaningful, positive way (more than once every ten years), nevermind any of us who fall under the +.

And let’s not forget their trend of having cis men play trans women. There are plenty of trans women out there they could cast in these roles, and yet they’re still being given to cis men. Cis men who know nothing about trans people, or even the LGBT+ in general. Not only does it completely defeat the purpose of telling trans people’s stories to have a cis person play a trans character, it’s a real slap in the face for trans women to have their stories told by male actors. Here we are trying to tell people that trans women are women and media companies are out there validating the arguments of bigots saying that trans women are just men in dress. It’s transphobic, insulting, and downright infuriating. But you know what else is infuriating? The absolute lack of trans men in mainstream media. Unless you go digging in the far reaches of the internet, you’re not gonna find representation for trans men and if you do, it’ll probably be just as inaccurate and insulting as the limited amount of representation for trans women we’re treated to by these companies.

Finally (because this is getting a bit long and I could go on for a while), we get situations like the one with Jughead at the minute, where mainstream media take a canon LGBT+ character from another form of media and erase their gender/sexuality in the process of making their own ‘version’ of this piece of media. In this case, we have aroace Jughead turned straight, despite the already seriously limited representation we get in any kind of media. This erasure of LGBT+ identities is yet another slap in the face for the community and it’s made worse by the insistence that their changes are just their interpretation of the material, which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that other than the erasure, everything is pretty canon compliant. This makes it pretty obvious that the only ‘alternative interpretations’ they have are ones that make it easier to swallow for bigots. Because why stay true to a character and give LGBT+ people representation when you can avoid the wrath of anti-LGBT+ activists, who have more of an impact on the opinions of the straight, white, middle class majority than we ever could?

Sorry this got so long and passive aggressive (or just aggressive), I have a lot of feelings about this.

I hope this answers your question, feel free to message me so we can talk more about this or anything else. ^.^