"Chris Hemsworth is TRANS!" Using Broadcast Media to Decolonise Gender.

I'm getting back on my BS.

Sometimes I wonder why anyone would allow me on a mass media platform like radio. Last week I got on air (and back on my bullshit) and claimed a list of beloved Australian celebrities were trans. There’s even video of it »LINK.

Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Margot Robbie the entire Hemsworth clan… all trans.

Broadcasting out of Brisbane, 4zzz has one of the only radio shows in the country dedicated to platforming the voices of trans and non-binary folks. It’s frankly an honour to be on Tranzmission, even when I use it for my obnoxious commentary.

I’d long been thinking about how “death of the author” relates to my community. We spend so much time longing for representation in media that when we do get it we’re just so damned grateful to have something, anything at all, we swallow the overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly binary, overwhelmingly thin and conventionally pretty representation. It would be the equivalent of cisgendered women being satisfied with carbon copies of Keira Knightley or Scarlet Johansson cast in every film and TV role and saying, “thank you for representing us”.

When I said I wanted trans representation I didn’t mean I wanted gorgeously feminine trans women and exquisite hyper-masculine trans men. I meant I wanted trash-fire fuckups like me. Messy, out of shape, wild-haired, awkward, full-bodied imperfect souls. I adore Hunter Schafer but goddammit I think I get more dysphoria from looking at her than I do looking at Emily Ratajkowski.

So, I got on radio, and I got on my bullshit.

I played Flame Trees by beloved pub-rock band Cold Chisel on radio and claimed it for my community. Claimed, in my own “death of the author” interpretation, that the song reads as a story of a trans man going back to his hometown and finding it haunted by the ghost of the woman he was forced to be from childhood. Claimed that the song absolutely screams of the trans coding and the common lived experience of “the only way to be yourself is to leave town’.

You should go have a listen and tell me if I’m full of shit. »LINK

Just like all the other media about loss, isolation, being trapped by conformity, it reads to me as trans. I went on to tell the thousands of 4zzz listeners that if I didn’t start seeing better, more diverse representation of trans and non-binary folks I was gonna start taking the cisgender celebrities and publicly claiming them as ours. The media cisgendered folks love? The shows? The films? The songs? Trans. All of it. I’m taking every single scrap and decolonising it for the gender-non-conforming folk.

Sometimes you gotta use the oppressor’s tactics against them.

Of course, none of those celebrities are actually trans. No doubt someone’s going to cry out “YoU aRe JuSt DoInG WhAt OuR oPpReSsOrS dO tO uS!” by making this sort of joke, by using this sort of language…

Yep, but I’m allowed.

Because it isn’t the words that are an issue. It is the application of power than makes something oppressive. Just how white folk are not systemically oppressed by black people, a transgender woman on a community radio show in “the Florida of Australia” can’t oppress the beloved multimillionaire actors who are quite literally the faces of our cultural exports.

And it’s not like any of these celebrities would give a damn.

They are clear allies and have already been claimed by the queers. That gif of Cate Blanche doing the limp wrist thing? When she misunderstood an interviewer asking about “the gaze” and not “the gays”? The photos of Chris Hemsworth towering over the young lesbian couple at a convention? Proudly holding aloft their flag because they told him they call him “the protector of lesbians”? Are you telling me that these people, these beloved icons of Australian culture wouldn’t leap at the chance to champion our community?

Picture it, Cate Blanchet and a coven of towering witchy transfemmes striding, bare-legged and smoky-eyed through a gala night crowd? Shirtless Chris Hemsworth and a squad transmascs, top surgery scars and breast tape in full view, super-setting curls and overhead press, oiled and glistening in the Bryon Bay sunshine?

Y’all would eat. it. UP!

Obnoxious bullshit aside, mainstream ally-ship is vital. The empowering of straight celebrities to exist as queer advocates is part of that. It isn’t the whole picture, sure, but we have so little visibility we’ll die of starvation if we subsist on only the crumbs of trans representation that the media allows.

We’ve been tricked into viewing media as being “owned” by various subsets of the community. It goes beyond “that’s a TV for girls” and “that’s a movie for boys”. The pervasive sentiment that something is a gendered property is an arbitrary prison, and your own wants are the key to unlocking the cage.

You are the audience. Your interpretation belongs to YOU!

Gender non-conforming folk have been excluded, told again and again that they don’t belong. Fuck. That. Honey, if you don’t see yourself in the world, start finding yourself in it. The world is yours as much as it belongs to the cisgendered, straight, white, conservatives. Frankly I don’t give a shit if “the author” intended for me to see myself in their work or not. I’m doing it anyway and there’s nothing they can do to stop me.

Just you wait, I’m gonna start interpreting Ben Shapiro as a darkly hilarious long-form method acting performance art piece about the transience of identity in weak-willed men who are desperate to seek approval. It’s gonna be hilarious.

–S