by: ellie june navidson
In October of this year, the Human Rights Campaign awarded Lana Wachowski with their “Visibility Award.” And as problematic as that organization, or even the name of that award is, i want to interrogate the media coverage of the event. On October 24th, the Huffington Post posted an article covering the event along with a video of Lana’s acceptance speech. Adorably, this was apparently her first public speech. Unfortunately, however, the article was titled “Lana Wachowski, Transgender ‘Cloud Atlas’ Director, Reveals Painful Adolescence, Suicide Attempt.”
Suicide doesn’t even get mentioned by Lana until the end of minute 22 in the video. Not only is it not the thrust of her narrative, this minor point also overshadows some really brilliant bits of perspective. She quips about the gender binary is “not comfortable,” and her “responsibility” to her community. She talks about “loving anonymity” as an artist, which is fairly profound and unique. She has interesting thoughts on the performativity of gender and visibility that are informed by her stellar work on identity. She talks about the materiality of language. And one of my favorite quotes, “The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequence of our words and deeds. The fundaments upon all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.” Goddamnit, why is the focus suicide here?
She’s no longer allowed to be the pseudo-mysterious, intelligent paint brush behind acclaimed films, no, now she’s relegated to the one parcel of her story that is already embedded into public consciousness. We, as society, do not have a template for fierce, brilliant, beautiful, successful, poignant trans* women, but we do know how to map depression and needing to be fixed onto the image of trans* people. The Huffington Post not only did a disservice to Lana’s story, they did a disservice to all trans* folks be reifying the link to this narrative. By singling out the one aspect of her story that has been heard before and ignoring all the beautiful variance within, they take part in minimizing trans* experience down to a narrow and pathetic stereotype. We’re cast as needing to be fixed and lifted up. i think we can do better.
Note: This piece was originally featured on the author’s Tumblr and was reposted with permission. You can find the original here.
ellie june navidson is a queer, gender non-conforming creature. She has a degree in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her activist experience is as varied as her identity, but currently, she is involved in queer/trans safe-space organizing and does written explorations of gender and normativity. Her personal blog can be found at invisiblyqueer.blogspot.com.
All of those words your wrote, I agree with them. Wonderful. Yup.
Someone I know was kinda angry about the whole thing where Lana actually goes on a tear in the speech about hating the word “transition” and how that mere word implies all kinds of things about the gender binary that she does not feel describe her personally… and then a whole bunch of news articles about the speech just flatly embedded the video with the header “Lana Wachowski discusses her transition”.
There really was a lot of striking stuff in that speech. For some reason one of the things that most stuck with me was… I don’t remember the exact wording but she had some comment about having supportive parents being like winning the lottery. And that really stood out to me because she managed to thread a very difficult needle there of finding a way to express that which managed to at once seem grateful and happy at having supportive parents while still really acknowledging the experience of those of us who were not so lucky.
Totally sharing this. I’m apparently not terribly good at pointing out how condecending even “supportive” people sometimes sound.,
Yeah I recall wondering why the piece was titled as it was because the actual speech was nothing like the title implied. To me, it was about a very bright, unique, creative vision of the world by a very funny, smart, and articulate woman. That she is trans and what she has experienced was only a part of her self and that was really evident in this speech and is evident in everything she has said and done. And that, really, is most people’s truth, isn’t it? I know it is mine. And, mcc, I also liked the “winning the lottery” line because that’s how I feel too, having had so much love and support when I see comrades who are coming from much more intolerant and difficult situations themselves.
Huffington Post (who specializes in popularity rise to top navigation) were probably capitalizing on a story the mass media has become mostly comfortable with – the “it gets better” campaign. I agree with everything you have said, but I am grateful that the link to her speech was very available so I could hear the nuances of her entire perspective. I think as many people as possible should see the entire speech and making the link to the “it gets better” campaign probably increased the popularity of the article, availability of video, exposure to an articulate discussion of one person’s personal experience. The approach to get more hits links her expression to depression and suicide related struggle – which is unfortunate if it overpowers the more nuanced aspects of her story.