Off the top of my head, SpongeBob SquarePants, Danny Phantom, Fairly Oddparents, The Big Bang Theory and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia all have jokes, if not the main plot point of the episode, that are just mocking the existence of LGBTQ people.
Oh yeah, 90s-2000s were pretty LBGTQ-insensitive times. I remember that people- very often and very causally- used to say"that's pretty gay," as an expression for things they didn't like. It was a real prevalent thing.
The 2006 future documentary "Idiocracy" is a great time capsule for how common and acceptable "f****t" was not too long ago.
That was definitely the intent -- "this is what the lowest form of humor looks like." In the mid-00s, though, that lowest form of humor was dudes calling each other slurs like that.
I went to a very right-wing school in northern Indiana (I estimate that about 70 percent of the voting-eligible staff and students voted for Donald Trump in 2016) and people saying "gay" to mean bad, along with frequent uses of slurs, continued to be prevalent until about 2012. After that, there wasn't much until about 2016, when blatant was transphobia was the dominant viewpoint.
At the graduation in 2017, there was a transgender woman who graduated as part of my grade who was forced to wear the male graduation uniform.
At the graduation in 2017, there was a transgender woman who graduated as part of my grade who was forced to wear the male graduation uniform.
:gui-trans:
It's especially bad with trans stuff where characters cross-dressing or getting gender-bent is played for laughs at best or portrayed grotesquely at worst. Have to condition that fear response to anything that isn't cis early on.
It's the 90s, not the 00s... but Ace Ventura Pet Detective is such transphobic garbage. And just as bad, at the time it came out no one batted an eye or called it out. Afaik Jim Carrey has never come out and apologized or even acknowledged it was bad.
The character is supposed to be bad? Along with every other character in the scene who also vomits at the idea of a transwoman? Lol, what a shit excuse.
That scene made me uncomfortable as a kid. I didn't really know what transpeople were so all I saw was a guy exposing someone's genitals to a large group of people and I was super weirded out by it.
One of the examples I mentioned was It's Always Sunny. I was referring to the transgender girlfriend Mac has in the first two seasons, which is portrays this as something that, at a minimum, is abnormal. While this was not horrible for the mid-to-late 2000s, it is definitely bad looking back.
Of course, the show does have the character return and makes the people who think poorly of her look bad.
Definitely agree. How they handled the pilot episode was much better, it was all about CIS-male fragility. I think the creators regret how they treated that character though.
Hmmm, I could be wrong, but wasn't the joke that Mac was in complete denial about it?
A bit but there was some mis gendering and other relatively problematic stuff going on, i think the crew said it’s like the one thing they wish they could go back and change or didn’t feel like they handled as well as they could.
I find Lindsay Ellis a little questionable these days, but her new video on Pop-Culture Transphobia is illuminating. I never realized how omnipresent the vomiting-at-trans-people ""gag"" was
On the one hand, jokes on them for validating my feelings about wanting to be a girl
On the other hand, it would've been a lot easier to come to terms with if people were portrayed as being accepting instead!
In this case, I'm going to go with "the other hand" as being much better than "the one hand"
Closely related, I was just reminiscing when that one Dave Chappelle special came out where he talks about upsetting the "alphabet people". I got so excited because I thought he was gonna go off about ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, etc. Instead it was shit about trans people being funny.
I thought he was going to talk shit about the FBI and the CIA :deeper-sadness:
Alphabet Agencies :geordi-no:
Alphabet People :geordi-yes:
Probably the funniest instance of this is South Park doing something horribly transphobic, realizing it years later, retconning it, then undoing any progress made by doing something else horribly transphobic.
god there's at least 10 extraordinarily transphobic episodes of South Park and each one is a little bit worse than the one before
It really does get worse. You start with Cartmans mom, where its just a throwaway joke. Still transphobic, but its not the point of the episode and probably not something they thought much about. Then you got Mr to Mrs Garrison, where they make a whole character out of it, but there's usually more going on in her episodes than just making fun of trans people. And then you get to the recent trans athlete episode, which just has no other jokes and is just 22 minutes of whining about trans athletes.
that was the worst one I remember
even when I was a dipshit edgelord teenager who had no clue about trans issues that episode felt unusually cruel and mean spirited, even for south park
The trans Athelete things is really really bad but the garrison one really pisses me off bc they obviously went out of their way to have garrison say:
transphobic bs
“so I’m just a man with a tit job and mutilated penis” and the doctor respond “yup”
Warning your friends about "that one episode" any time you recommend a TV series that's more than 1 year old.
They were good in the way that none of the characters seemed to care that much about the genders of people's partners. I also like how Randy and Lahey were totally unlike stereotypical gay clichés.
But I can see why the depiction of trans people was really not that great. Today you wouldn't make dumb jokes about straight men being "tricked" to have sex with trans women.
That episode where timmy wished he was a girl tho made me wish I was a girl
I've actually thought about that episode a decent amount since it came out and I still have no idea if it was (positively) transgressive, if it just reified gender norms, or some weird combination of the two.
Because, like, to some degree they make it about "women be crazy" kind of shit. But there's also that running throughline of people feeling like they can't do things that aren't "for" their gender and how shitty that is
“How I met your mother” is particularly transphobic. Granted it’s essentially “toxic masculinity: the show.”
I watched some of that during its original run, where did the transphobia come up? I’m sure I was just an idiot back then and didn’t notice
Friends is so fucking bad with this if you've rewatched it even remotely recently. Ross's ex wife and Chandler's parents are handled terribly and they're constantly brought up.
or the number of times they make fun of chandler for being "gay" because he's... a toxic loser? and that makes him gay somehow?
I distinctly remember media here being upset about the clam episode PROMOTING homosexuality.
Even with the first two you mentioned, I don't think the joke was that something that was gender non-conforming or homosexual was done.
Mr. Krabs gave a disingenuous response to SpongeBob asking if he looked pretty, and the mail deliverer gave him a look of disrespect for doing that, while SpongeBob and Patrick raising the clam as the mother and father is portrayed as being a bad thing.
SpongeBob and Patrick raising the clam as the mother and father is portrayed as being a bad thing.
Wait, what did Spongebob do?
Looks like he has some explaining to do :ancom-pat:What I was thinking of is when Patrick has to pretend that he is a woman to avoid somebody he thinks is trying to kill him.
He gets a job at the Krusty Krab and Mr. Krabs and Squidward are attracted to him. Eventually, after realizing the man did not want to kill him, Patrick reveals his true identity, much to repulsion of Mr. Krabs and Squidward. Their reaction is not really portrayed in a critical way.
It was not the worst example I listed, but I felt it was worth mentioning.
Looks like this happened after season 3, so it all checks out. Just more evidence that Hillenburg was right in wanting to end the series after the first film released.
After season 3 SpongeBob, just like Toy Story 4, never happened, and you can't change my mind
Toy Story 4 was just unnecessary, it wasn't actively bad the way that post-S3 Spongebob was
The ending of Toy Story 4 was absolutely terrible though. The rest of the film was fine, but the ending was actively bad, at least for me.
I honestly don't remember the ending super well, what did you dislike about it?
spoiler
Woody just leaves everyone to become a nomad with Bo Peep if my memory is correct. It's the complete opposite of his character throughout the first 3 films, like there's no way Woody would do that.
Well, I mean, if the running metaphor for the whole series up to that point was parenthood, it seems like that was a message about not just giving up on life once your kids leave the house. And I mean, granted, I was in a class about lifespan development at the point I saw that movie, but it made me think a lot about Generativity vs Stagnation
There's some pretty vile transphobia in the first Iron Man movie that I'm embarrassed to say I didn't even notice the first time I saw it.
Tony Stark makes fun of Colonel Rhodes for hooking up with a trans woman on spring break.
To be fair, Tony Stark is a piece of shit so it's not exactly out of character. Shouldn't have that shit in movies though
Me neither but I remember it mocking toxic masculinity. Which means it was very on the nose because when I watched it I had no idea what toxic masculinity was.
They have multiple episodes where Charlie discovers the LTV and in Flowers for Charlie, they have the researcher studying him say "your understanding of the value of your labor aligns almost perfectly with the findings of Karl Marx"
Also the episode where they sabotage the Chinese fish factory and say that all the shit they did was evidence that it was unsafe even though the factory continually showed that it was actually incredibly safe because Dee was saved by safety measures every time.
The first episode where they drop the N-word like 4 times was kinda cringe though. Also the whole Mac and the "T-slur" bit. They definitely tried to make up for it later though with all the characters expressing pretty clearly that being trans is good. The bathroom episode that was lampooning the bathroom panic was great. The conclusion was to just call both bathrooms "Animal Shithouse" and be done with it.
The show can be kinda all over the place though. Most of the time you're supposed to take whatever the characters say/believe and flip it to get the moral. Occasionally, they have the caracters do good things though. I wonder if they realized that a lot of people weren't getting that you aren't supposed to side with the gang and started just having them be more blatant about some issues.
I would say that the early episodes had the idea that a male person identifying as a woman was ridiculous.
The actors have always been pretty trans positive IRL. They also are pretty aware of the fact that neo-nazis really like them because they're morons who don't understand sarcasm and love the fact that they're all white. Which I think is why they did so many "we should kill Nazis" episodes.
I am referring to the episode where Danny and Tucker are sleeping next to each other and they end up rolling onto each other, so Sam takes a picture for blackmail material.
It was probably the least bad example of what I listed, but it would definitely not fly today.
Pretty sure Tina Fey is a terf. She just has such strong terf energy I can't get past it. I have nothing to back this claim up
