I logged on to Facebook the other day to see this status on my news feed:
“Why are so many people mean to Justin Bieber? People really just need to leave her alone.” This status was then liked by 12 other people, including a few people I really expected better from. One person commented, “You mean leave it alone.”
The amount of “lol Justin Bieber is a girl” references really, really bother me. So I’m going to attempt to deconstruct them.
The first thing that I find “interesting” about the phenomenon is that it doesn’t seem to be a girl=gay case. A lot of the time, calling a man a girl is meant to implicate gayness, like being a queen. Although there are people who mean that, I don’t think it’s the majority, as aside from his “girly” appearance and voice, his most recognizable feature is boatloads of adoring female fans. The fact that he’s young probably also affects this; though kids wouldn’t care about implying someone his age is gay, in the minds of most people Justin Bieber falls in the pre-sexual, prepubescent category.
It might be that it’s a case of people devaluing male femininity (and by extension, femininity in general) as frivolous, weak, and lesser. That’s almost certainly part of it, with many people trying to undermine him by writing him off as girly and not masculine enough.
But there’s another part of the Justin Bieber jokes that fall solidly into the category of transphobic: the jokes aren’t just saying “He’s feminine.” They’re saying, “He is actually a girl,” by which they mean having a vagina/high-pitched voice/estrogen/etc. And that because he has a high voice and a female-looking appearance, he is not a boy. What makes me think this is transphobia is the fact that you get whole comment threads of people using female pronouns, or even more egregiously, “it” for him. It’s like using “he” and “it” to refer to Ann Coulter to delegitimize her as a woman by implying that being trans is Very Bad.
I don’t particularly like Justin Bieber’s music, either. But seriously, if you think his music is immature, call it that, instead of making it a comment that implies being a feminine man or a trans man is terrible.
Nothing to add, but agree strongly.
I think it’s a bit like throwing out “ugly” to insult any woman you don’t like/agree with (no matter what the entire rest of the world feels about her aesthetics). You don’t have anything better to attack so you just try to “hit them where it hurts” even if it makes you look incredibly childish and ignorant. And incredibly bigoted.
And it’s also offensive to trans women. It’s saying that girl/woman/her are acceptable insults to any maab person, completely ignoring (or purposefully attacking) trans women for whom those are accurate, devaluing their gender.
Yes, exactly. It’s just offensive in so many ways, I boggled at how to tackle it all. And yet those kind of insults are just so normal to most people. I hadn’t thought of the way that using girl/woman for maab people intersects with trans women for whom that’s accurate, but that’s a really good and interesting point.
I just find it odd that if the media weren’t going for the “female” image, they have made it so easy for this jab to work. A good PR can pretty much make you look like whatever they want with a photographer, props and Photoshop, but every image I see portrays Bieber as long-lashed, blushing, etcetera… All of the “lady-like” traits the sexist entertainment industry brands its female performers with (bad word choice, ech).
[*Trigger Warning* for cissexism, gay-bashing, anti-intersex bigotry, and binarism]
I just came across someone calling Bieber a lesbian. Which complicates things even more, because of the intersection of the “lesbians are mannish” meme with the “transmen are really women” meme.
And it gets worse. There are also rumors that he is intersex — although that’s often not the word they use — where “intersex” is seen as shorthand for “he has a vagina and is therefore partly a girl”. So anti-intersex bigotry and binarism, too.
This is a great post, BTW. May I link to it when I tell off the person who posted the “Bieber is a lesbian” joke?
Ugh, that’s disgusting. You certainly may link to this! I hope the person sees the offensiveness of what they said.