So we’ve had decades and decades of jokes where trans people are the butt of the “joke”. This has extended to children’s media, where stories about gender transgression of any kind, but especially boys dressed forcibly as girls, have propped up the gender hierarchy by making it seem legitimately punishable to transgress.
We’re in a new era. The trans community is full of humour. What makes a transgender joke funny? Let’s take a look at a few examples.
FUNNY BECAUSE IT MAKES FUN OF CIS PEOPLE DOING THEIR BEST
Common to anyone who requests trans or non-binary pronouns: People will mess them up. If you’re lucky, the vast majority of people mess them up even though they’re trying their darnedest.
Some cis people who are trying their darnedest mess them up in pretty funny ways:
- You change your pronouns from he to she, or from she to he and everyone insists on calling you ‘they’. But before you transitioned to binary pronouns, you required ‘they’ for a while, and hardly anyone called you ‘they’. Turns out they were able to do ‘they’ all along, but not until you requested a binary pronoun that goes against their own version of you.
- A cis person isn’t comfortable with your pronouns so instead of using any pronoun at all, they replace every single pronoun with your name.
Okay, so these super common experiences are irritating as hell, but if you don’t laugh, right? As Torrey Peters puts it, when you are visibly, legibly or known to be trans, you are “constantly bumping into people’s anxieties about how to address you”.
The joke about heshells is relatable because it’s a ridiculous extension of the exact kind of crap over-correcting cis folk pull all the time.
FUNNY BECAUSE IT ILLUMINATES A COMMON TRANS EXPERIENCE
This joke would be taken unironically in anti-trans circles, which makes this joke edgy as well as a little dangerous in our current climate of book-banning. In fact, stories about shapeshifting are as old as the hills and have long been hugely important to anyone who feels dissonance between body and self, for whatever reason, including but not limited to puberty, pregnancy, illness, disability and transgender.
Note: The author of the Animorphs series, Katherine Applegate, has a trans daughter herself and is considered “the anti-Rowling” in various trans communities.
Not funny: Dressing a boy up as a girl to humiliate him, and that’s the entire joke.
FUNNY BECAUSE IT SHOWS HOW GENDERQUEER PEOPLE HAVE BEEN HERE ALL ALONG
GOOD OLD WORDPLAY
Of course, all of the other categories of humour can apply to transgender humour, too.
