Cover of Psycho (Collector's Edition)

One reoccurring aspect of an oppressed people is their inability to control their own image. African Americans during slavery, Jews during the Holocaust, Native Americans during American colonization all were victims of propaganda. How transgendered people are shown in the media plays a big part is why they are not taking seriously. In the media, transgenders are depicted as comic relief. Comedians like, Martin Lawrence, Jim Carey, Jamie Foxx, Benny Hill, have made people laugh at their cross-dressing antics for years. To Wong Foo, a movie that show three super masculine male actors cast as drag queens on a comical cross country trip in which the drag queens’ car breaks down in a hick town. The drag queens turn this small town upside-down in a colorful gender-bending way. This perpetuated the idea that transsexual are playing dress up; therefore should not be taking seriously. The media commonly depicts transgendered as crazed lunatic. There are many movies made with this image. The Norman Bates character, in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho, made his way into pop culture as a gray wig-wearing, knife-wielding slasher. The character, Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, skins his female victims so he can don a suit sewn from their skins to become a woman. In another film, Sleepway Camp, the plot is: the girl in a boy/girl set of fraternal twins died in a boat accident, so the parents raise the boy twin as a girl, Angela. Angela terrorizes a campground with a killing spree induced by sex crazed boys and taunting teenaged girls. More propaganda that solidifies the idea that transgender are mentally-ill. Like most minorities, the transgendered community is a slave to how the majority shows who they are in the media. So the importance of telling our stories should be at the forefront of our motivations

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