Controversial Headlines, Sugar-Coated Language and the Pursuit of Attention.

The Art of "Schlock Value".

“More shock value hack and slash headlines”

“That title makes it sound so barbaric and butcher-y”

“It’s just going for shock value.”

Correct. All of these assessments of my schlocky, crass and attention-seeking (would have said “attention-whoring” but I’ve far too much respect for people in the sex industry to use that word as a pejorative) headlines ARE designed to shock.

That, my darlings, is called “drawing in your fucking audience”.

I recently published a piece headlined with the proclamation that "I paid to have my face cut off and reattached!" Read it »HERE if you like (warning, graphic content). After having so effectively channelled the spirit of a Murdoch-Press sub-editor I was both inundated with views (cause sadly that bullshit works) but also comments about how awful my headline was. I mean, first up, it’s factually accurate. I exchanged (a lot) of money for the service of having an expert carefully flay the flesh from my lower face and neck and then reattach it all in a new, more pleasing position for the purpose of making it look more feminine.

My headline gave people “the ick”… which was the point.

I didn’t sugar coat it, so the indictment of me and my writing practice is true. So, without coming down too hard on those who felt the need to not comment of the content of the piece but instead the headline I realised that there’s an excellent conversation to be had about when to be provocative and when to not. The best way to illustrate that is with one more example of a comment on the article.

“Transphobes never read past the title, so making it shock value is feeding them arguments.”

I love this. It’s so perfectly crystalized and I’ll be eternally grateful to the commenter for it. It sets up the most magnificent illustration that I can give you about how I view my writing, my artistic practice and the careful deliberate nature of the way I publicly talk about transness. Yes, I may seem like I’m verbally pinwheeling around like a chaotic rambling mess (okay, for real, sometimes I am), but MOST of the time I’m being deliberate.

Like most aspects of life in this crumbling, late-stage capitalistic hellscape, we start with a question about marketing: Who is your audience? Who is actually going to take the time to read screed after screed on the same topic? Read over and over with the only variance being a slightly different angle of attack, or landing on the fundamentally same, but subtly different territory?

Honestly, it’s the people who are already on your side.

The “easy sale”. The one who wants your “product”, and you just happen to be the vendor that’s closest/easiest/cheapest for them to access. If I was just “selling hats for people who had heads” then none of this is remotely controversial. It’s when you start peddling in opinions and discourse that it gets tricky. That’s when in the exact same circumstances people begin to decry that you are “shouting into the echo chamber”, or that you already have won “the converted”, so why would you continue to preach to them? Simple. Because despite the old idiom suggesting it’s a bad thing to “preach to the converted” in the real, tangible world, where discourse is more than a couple of pithy words, adding new and interesting ways to say the same thing pushes on the boundaries of understanding. It searches for gaps and flaws, because despite how our current political shit-show conflates stubbornness with steadfastness, opinions NEED to be continually tested.

Alright, I’ll give you a personal example.

Hands up any late-in-life-transitioners out there who spent decades not even knowing trans people existed in the world, let alone having the language to articulate what their feelings meant? [’m putting my hand up here by the way.]

Oh geeze, I wonder why I’d want to keep pushing the boundaries of understanding?

Your audience might like “what you’re selling”. But they might not know why they like it. That alone is worthy of treating them with the respect of taking the time to articulate because they may not have found the language to articulate how they feel. They may have only carried within themselves the lingering unease, the nagging doubt about their nature and sometimes all it takes is a string of words that give meaning to a feeling and suddenly the whole vista of understanding unfolds. That is but ONE audience.

There are others.

There’s the audience who knows their transness deep in their bones and they come here to experience someone else’s take on it. They may relish in the experience of the diversity of another’s thoughts and feelings, seeing the way that they intersect and the way that they do not. God damn, I love hearing other about other trans peoples experience and finding myself way off the path, stumbling in the dark with no idea what’s going on. That’s the moment I’m learning about my community. There can be genuine comfort in seeing that yours is not the only torch in the dark. Comfort in seeing a mote light far off in the distance being held in the hands of a wildly gesticulating trans woman revving herself up for an internet rant. It is a reminder that you are not alone. You too can be mad as hell and should be reminded that the unending gaslighting of the world is not some imagined attack but a real and tangible assault on your existence.

Then comes my favourite audience.

This is the audience I treasure the most: “The gently curious”.

The audience who doesn’t know anything about trans people. This is the audience who has never considered their own gender. They are not filled with hate or disgust, just… curiosity. No malice, no wonderment, just wanting to find “what it’s all about”.

Oh blessed, wonderful, curious audiences who come to sit by the fire and listen to the wisdom of trans elders they never knew existed in the tiny village of their world. I write for you most of all. I write about what this experience feels like deliberately to connect to YOUR experience of the world. That feeling that a cisgender woman has staring into the mirror, seeing the pull of gravity on a face that was once praised for it’s youthful firmness? The man who snakes his hands across his paunch and remembers when he could run a mile without breaking sweat? Chief among my descriptions of what it’s like to be trans is the yearning to be something different to what you are expected to be. I do this to find these avenues into the experience for YOU, the cisgendered person, because when you realise “we are not so different”, when the language of “othering is removed”, that’s when change can happen.

History tells us so.

There will always be a need of firebrands and figureheads. There will always be moments when firebombs are thrown and protests will become riots, but the moment when it all changes is when there are enough normal everyday people who say: “enough is enough”. Yes, there will be provocateurs and agitators that force the political dial up to 11 in order to have it negotiated back down to a 4. It might even be seen as a loss at the time… but not when you realise that political dial was stuck at 2 for decades.

The enduring change, the enshrining of the rights of minorities doesn’t come from the minorities asking alone, it comes from the people who have the veil lifted from their eyes and they can see themselves in the oppressed.

The quietly curious.

The person who doesn’t know any trasngender people.

The person who just wants to understand it a little better.

The person who can see that we, as human beings, have far more in common than not.

And those barbarians at the gates? The ones who won’t bother reading the article? sure, happy for them to take my schlocky headline and be misinformed. Fucking quote-tweet me and demonstrate that you “didn’t do the homework”. I would be over the moon if some online transphobe cried into the void that “some awful gender-monster on the internet said something mean!” God, I’m sorry that my headline was so controversial that it made your dick fall off, bro. Honestly, if I’d the power to do that I’d be slamming the “post” button so hard every second of the day.

I’m just trying to move the Overton Window here, folks.

An attempt to move the window of discourse inch by brutal, provocative inch to a place where people can see transgender people as worthy of dignity and agency and life. The same thing happened when women won the right to vote. Sure, sexism and misogyny weren’t eradicated, only held back just enough by those who can see themselves in the plight of those who suffer under it. I’m not asking for eradication (like they are asking of us) of their opinions. I’m only trying to move enough people from one side of a line to another, trying to build that bulwark of compassion to hold back the tide of hurt that is threatening every single person who has felt disconnected from the body they are forced to occupy.

So no, no transphobe will bother with this and that’s fine. It isn’t for them.

I’m not going to change the world with a silly little blog. I’m not going to single-handedly shift the tide. But if I can illuminate one person’s existence to the plight of people like me then I’ve done something marvellous in the world. I do not seek to have my bones laid in a crypt to be worshiped by supplicants. I seek no monuments or effigies. The legacy I wish to leave is a garden of kindness and compassion that I’ll never see bloom.

So, if I occasionally have to be fucking crass and gauche and schlocky to do that, then you’re god damn right I’m being attention seeking.

–S

P.S. I will leave you here with a selection of other comments on my articles for you to enjoy. My heart is fit to burst with the gratitude that people took the time to post.

“Trans women are tough. The cost of obtaining our dreams is more than most could stomach.”

“Blood for the Blood Gender god”

“This is the exact energy we need to have.”

“I'm [also] making my art with radical honesty and openness in a manner I feel unapproachable by transphobe criticism.”

“I've done what I've done to make this life worth living for myself. I'll state my case… and know it's up to the reader to try and understand it.”

“I know the transphobes can't handle any kind of radical openness and realness.”

“So many people get plastic surgery and alter parts of their face and body they don't like but suddenly its an outrageous idea if you are transgender.”

“That’s the point, there is so many people who go ‘you’re deforming your face’, or ‘your just cutting off your penis etc’ and its really not that dramatic.”

“The title really sounded like it was meant to be a horror story of something going wrong, but it's actually very calm and optimistic.”