Over recent years, the transgender community has gained a more prevalent representation in the media through their visibility on social media platforms including YouTube and on popular television shows including Transparent (2014) and Orange is the New Black (2013). Despite this recent exposure, there still exists transphobia within the mainstream media which only furthers the divide between the LGBTQ communities and the presumed audience of a cis-gender majority (Humphrey, 23). In this blog post, I will be comparing the media representation of the Transgender community with that of the missing women from the memoir Missing Sarah and will be arguing YouTube’s role in sharing the lives of these minority groups to normalize them into society.
After analyzing Maggie De Vries’ Missing Sarah, I developed a further interest in discovering how other minority groups in society are misrepresented in the media. Although De Vries’ memoir focuses on the misrepresentation of female sex workers and drug addicts in the media, the same concept could be taken upon the transgender community who like the missing women “are at the bottom of a complex hierarchy” (De Vries, 218). In recounting her experiences in sharing Sarah’s story with the media, De Vries mentions that many sources would tend to “make light of the disappearances” (232) by speaking of their cases with reference to fictional movies as well as referring to these women with labels that identified them as drug users and prostitutes rather than as the mothers, daughters, and sisters that they are.
This brings me to question whether media outlets including television and film are portraying the transgender community in a form that accurately represents their lives rather than feeding into their marginalization like it has done for sex workers and drug users in the Downtown Eastside. In his content analysis research article on popular YouTube creators who identified as transgender, Miller mentions that “some of the issues transgender individuals face may be due to a lack of education on the part of cisgender persons” (2) and that by sharing their unfiltered selves to the public eye, influencers on this major platform have the ability to educate their audience on both their lives and their communities (2). But what aspects of internet-based media allow for more conversation and understanding about minority communities than the more mainstream outlets including film and television. Possibly it’s YouTube’s more intimate and personable format that allows for a more human connection between viewer and vlogger or it’s the social quality of YouTube that invites users to comment and share the videos which deepens the conversation.
YouTube has the ability to give voices to those who are misunderstood by societal norms and so if by using internet media, transgender individuals are able to “self-identify in terms of gender, a right that is often not afforded to those who are gender-variant in the offline world” (Miller, 3) than the same could be done for sex workers and people dealing with drug addictions who would like to educate more people about their lives and further integrate themselves into society.
Works Cited
De Vries, Maggie. Missing Sarah: a Memoir of Loss. Penguin Books Canada, 2008.
Humphrey, Rhianna. “‘I think journalists sometimes forget that we’re just people’: Analysing the Effects of UK Trans Media Representation on Trans Audiences.” Transgender and the Media, 56 (2016): 23-43.
Miller, Brandon. “YouTube as Educator: A Content Analysis of Issues, Themes, and the Educational Value of Transgender-Created Online Videos.” Social Media and Society, 3.2 (2017): 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117716271
