A Trans-Led Shakedown in the Arts

By Noah Rothman

Friday, April 14, 2023

 

 “The stakes have never been higher for trans people in the United States.” That’s the arguable but typically overwrought way in which the Washington Post’s Anne Branigin describes the conditions faced by transgender Americans working in the arts. It’s arguable only insofar as trans issues are today front and center for those in control of America’s commanding cultural heights. It is overwrought because, as the author admits in that same paragraph, the stakes are not, in fact, all that high:

 

Trans rights are being rolled back around the country, and some trans creators are facing fervent backlash against their work. At the same time, trans artists, writers and performers have more opportunities, and audiences are connecting with more nuanced portrayals of trans people than ever before. Trans filmmakers are showing their movies at Sundance, trans musicians are winning Grammys, and trans writers are best-selling authors. Popular video games such as “The Sims 4” allow players to create trans characters.

 

All this “visibility,” which Branigin concedes could be reasonably interpreted as “a reflection of increasing acceptance and understanding,” is a double-edged sword because it has been accompanied by “increased vulnerability.” After a grind through paragraph after paragraph expounding the indignities imposed on the trans community by the “cis” creatives who depict them, we finally learn what one of those vulnerabilities is: “timidity.”

 

“Yes, Richards and other trans writers in Hollywood are getting work,” Branigin wrote of performer, writer, and trans-identifying individual Jen Richards. Indeed, Branigin marshals convincing evidence that trans-identifying Americans are increasingly accepted — even preferred, in some cases — as equals in creative professions. They increasingly perform on stage and screen, write and direct, and live public lives with the full support of their friends and families. Richards “has even sold and developed a couple shows,” Branigin confirms. “But none of these shows have made it to air.”

 

Is that the standard now? The true measure of inclusivity is whether creatives identifying as trans secure lucrative development deals? If so, this isn’t about inclusivity anymore; it’s a shakedown.

 

Branigin does little to dispel that impression when she notes that transgender creatives “still have to rely on cis people to fund, produce and distribute their work.” Yeah, well, that’s what you get when the vast majority of the population identifies with the gender of their birth. The source of “vulnerability” here isn’t the sentiments that prevail in this industry but its demographic makeup. We can, therefore, assume that what must change is that makeup. Again: a shakedown.

 

It is eventually revealed that trans creatives, in fact, resent much of the content they were supposedly grateful for earlier in Branigin’s piece. So much of that content focuses on the existential agonies associated with the decision to transition and the well-documented psychological torment endured by those who experience their own “trans story.” That has “increasingly frustrated” some who believe that it suggests “there is nothing more interesting to say about being a trans person.”

 

We’re now asked to go to war alongside trans creatives with one of the four primary conflicts in all storytelling: man vs. himself.

Even the creatives who reject these political imperatives and tell stories for the sake of storytelling concede that their works are “‘impotent’ without the right people in power.” That’s a welcome admission. Indeed, “power,” not art, is all we’re talking about.

 

Branigin leaves us with a portrait of a narrow demographic cohort that deploys the language of harm, exposure, susceptibility, and frailty to strong-arm the arts industry — one that is, by this account, uniquely deferential to its extortionists. It culminates in an attack on creativity itself, with its subjects asserting that their stories should be “affirming” rather than challenging or enlightening or even just entertaining.

 

Were these recommendations followed to the letter, we’d be left with soulless art that “affirms” the trans experience in much the same way that socialist realism affirmed the state. And all this so that a particular demographic might have access to sinecures in a chosen field. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about this piece is that the Post seems to believe that it reflects well on its subjects.