Riki Wilchins, Transsexual Menace
Over the next nine months, Assigned Media will feature nine interviews of people involved in pushing back against the spread of false, distorted narratives about the trans community in the press. And we’ve tapped an old school transgender activist to do this, Riki Wilchins. To introduce this monthly feature, Evan Urquhart interviewed Riki Wilchins for Assigned. Their conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
by Evan Urquhart
AM: Assigned Media is known for our criticism of the New York Times’ reporting on transgender issues, but you literally wrote the book on the NYT’s coverage of all things trans. What did you find out in your research for Bad Ink?
It was really interesting. I went back to 1952 with Christine Jorgensen, and back then their coverage was about transsexuals, transgender hadn’t been invented yet.
At first they just didn’t know what to do with us and it was covered as basically a medical story. And then it kinda became more of a social story, and then of course we get into the modern era where we’ve become a plaything for them to sell clicks and subscriptions by pandering to the right.
In the 1990s, the New York Times was, I think, the first major publication in the US to acknowledge the growing transgender rights movement which was starting up, to recognize it, and to write about it. And they also did some really good coverage on transgender people. They also did some horrendous coverage, but eventually there was a really nice honeymoon period, starting around 2005 for about 10 years, where they stopped misgendering us and deadnaming us and also stopped writing nasty articles about Black street queens, which is something they did repeatedly on the local desk, and just treated us like news.
And then, suddenly, around 2015, when Sulzberger starts his rise through management to become publisher, you see these articles coming out that, as you know, are basically laundering white Christian nationalist views for the mainstream audience.
AM: One of the things that intrigued me the most when I was reading Bad Ink was the part about you personally being profiled by the NYT back in the 1990s for your work with Transsexual Menace, which I’ve read was the first direct action group to have fought for trans rights. Tell me more about that early advocacy work.
Well, let me just back up. The first street action group was Transgender Nation, founded by Anne Ogborn in the Bay Area. Anne was a brilliant software programmer who used to walk around San Francisco in a T-shirt that said “Sex Change / Ask Me How.” She was way ahead of her time, and I thought she had a great idea, so that’s how I ended up starting the Transsexual Menace, which was really a take-off of the Lavender Menace, which were the lesbians that got kicked out of the 1969 NOW conference.
Betty Friedan referred to these lesbians as a lavender menace that would sink American feminism, so the group came back wearing these T-shirts that said Lavender Menace, demanding to be taken seriously as women and as feminists. I thought that Transsexual Menace had a nice note of both humor and paranoia about it. We had these blood dripping, Rocky Horror Picture Show style red letters for the shirts.
The trans community at that time was just finally ready to come out. When I started going to trans events in the early 1990s it was all about self acceptance and how to dress and where to find a doctor, and by ‘94 or ‘95 people were starting to realize that this is not just a personal issue, it’s a civil rights issue.
AM: You’ve seen, and been part of, huge strides forward for our community, but now we’re in this moment where it feels like so much of the progress could be lost. What do you make of it, and what do you want younger people getting started in activism to know?
Well, I wrote a book called When Texas Came for Our Kids about this whole backlash against trans people and particularly against trans youth and one of the things I tried to answer, one of the questions, was how was it, in 1995 trans people were considered so unusual and so off beat that we could even buy earned media. We used to try to brainstorm, how could we get the right to attack us? Because at least that way we’d get some media coverage. The right just did not care.
And the question was, how did we get from there to the two main candidates for the Republican presidential nominee, at the time, how did we get to them both denouncing trans people as part of their presidential platform. How did we become a centerpiece of Republican politics? How did that happen?
I think that trans bodies challenge the binary and challenge gender roles and norms in ways that are very deep and profound, and people are upset about it when they start to think about it, people who didn’t think about it for years.
There’s an arc to these things. So, first nobody noticed us at all, and then in 2016 when we basically forced out the governor of North Carolina over a trans bathroom ban, and Loretta Lynch, the first African-American woman to serve as US Attorney General said “we see you” I thought oh, we’ve won, it’s over.
And then, within three years, hundreds of bills were being introduced, criminalizing every aspect of trans people’s lives. So these things go through an arc, and I think what’s actually happening now is a delayed reaction. It’s not just that the right has chosen to attack us, which it has, but that people are actually grappling with the reality of trans lives and trans bodies. And, it’s not just the right, even the left is not sure what to think about medical care for trans kids, and we’re finally having to deal with it. And it’s obviously being dealt with in the most horrendous way possible on the right, but even on the left people are having to grapple with this.
And… I think it’s an overdue reaction. There’s two things. One is, this is the worst it’s gonna get, this is the bottom, this is the darkness before the dawn, and second, anything that we win now, they’re never gonna get back from us. Because time is not on their side. This is a social panic, and everybody’s hysterical now with trans kids, but time doesn’t wear well with panics. People get tired, and they move on. And eventually the facts catch up with the panic and start to leech some of the air out of the balloon.
We are gonna win this. It’s just gonna take a while, it’s gonna make a lot of people miserable and hurt a lot of kids, unfortunately, but anything we win now, they’re never going to get back.
I’m cautiously optimistic, and miserable at the same time. My daughter and their friends are all nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and I think we are going to attack the binary in ways the homonormative movement never did.
AM: I love it. I’m a huge admirer of your work, and I’m so excited that you’ll be doing a monthly interview column for Assigned over the next 9 months. Can you tell us what sorts of people you’re hoping to interview and help our readers get a sense of who they might expect to read your conversations with in coming months?
Well, I don’t want to get over my skis, but I have had a yes from Florence Ashley who has done just incredible work academically in pushing back against all these spectacularly vile right-wing canards about how dangerous hormones and blockers and all this stuff is and every time someone does something like that Flo Ashley writes a widely cited and wonderfully footnoted paper that just tears the thing apart. They’ve also done wonderful work around the Cass Report and I’m just a big admirer of their work.
And, I’ve also had, as a tentative yes from Dr. Jack Turban. Jack has been great at pushing back on this discourse that, you know, transgender care is unstudied or the evidence is low quality or we don’t really know if it helps and he’s just been wonderful on that front and we owe him a lot.
I’m hoping to have other people like that, I know you mentioned Erin Reed earlier, I’d love to interview Erin, there’s a whole bunch of people that are just doing phenomenal work.
I think what you’re seeing is that people like Ashley and Reed and Turban and others–I just saw a wonderful report out of Yale Law on the Cass Report–they’re finally filling in the blanks with real science and real facts and real evidence. And they’re starting to deflate these arguments that are being pushed by the right, and that the New York Times has chosen to platform. And I think finally we’re seeing both the media and academia do their jobs and start to fill in some of the blanks. So, these are the people I’m hoping to interview, the people doing that work.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.