Thursday, April 13, 2017
Survivor Player Outed as Transgender
Tonight on the tv show Survivor, one of the players (Zeke) was outed by another player as being transgender. Essentially, the other player told the tribe that Zeke was not trustworthy because he did not tell everybody that he was transgender, which led to an interesting discussion on the show. Here is an interview with Zeke, and here is a link showing just a small part of what happened on the episode.
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Wow. That's intense and hard to watch. It's impressive how well Zeke handled it. Interesting that Varner, the guy who outed him, is himself gay--shows that being part of the larger community doesn't necessarily preclude being transphobic and so on. I'm troubled and conflicted by Varner's handling of the situation after people reacted negatively. On one hand, he apologized and said he was wrong to do what he did--but on the other hand, he wouldn't stop defending himself and trying to minimize or deny the meaning of what he'd done, focusing on what he felt, insisting that his self-conception as a good person and a trans supporter somehow overrode his actual actions and meant people shouldn't condemn what he did as transphobic or incorporate that behavior into their image of him. I looked at another interview with him after the fact, too. In general, it felt like he regretted it because the tactic had backfired and the others had reacted negatively toward him, rather than because what he did was wrong, harmful, and transphobic. And like the effect on him was his main concern. Like, we all do wrong things sometimes, and we all have some self-interest in our motives, and it's hard to react just right in a high-adrenaline situation like that, and apologies are hard...I don't think he's a monster, but still. Maybe other people got a different impression, but I found the way he dealt with the situation somewhat disturbing all the same.
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