I recently read a satirical article on "The Federalist," a web magazine that aims to create articles to facilitate discussion on culture, politics and religion. The majority of the articles published on this site appear to be written from more right-leaning, conservative perspectives. I don't quite remember how I stumbled upon this piece, but ever since reading it, I've been thinking about it a lot, so good work to the author for holding my attention.
The article, "I Identify As Married To A Man Who Won’t Have Me, And It’s So Unfair," despite sticking in my head, falls flat, though, and is only still in my thoughts for all the wrong reasons.
This article was written jokingly from the perspective of a person who claims to be married to a man whom she isn't really married to. Despite not being legally wed, in her mind, they are married. Throughout the article, the author expresses how hard it is when people don't accept that she is married to this man just because she says she is, and the man whom she's obsessed with seems to be very disturbed by said person's persistence and stalking.
The way that it is written doesn't just make for a creepy story about one person who is infatuated with another and who decides that they will make the person they love love them back under any circumstances. Instead, this article draws obvious parallels between this fictional person's "struggle" and the very real struggle of transgender individuals without explicitly connecting the two ideas in writing.
In addition to using language that is strongly associated with the LGBTQA+ community like "in the closet" and "coming out," the following quotes from the article are show demonstrate how the author of the article mocks transgender individuals by comparing their lives to the life of a fictional stalker:
Looking back, I can see that ever since I was four or five years old I have been a married person trapped in a single person’s body...When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them I wanted to get married, but they would always press for more, giving me the silent message that “wife” was not a legitimate identity for me.
This author also attempts to make some roundabout comments on the issue of public restrooms in relation to transgender individuals:
Bathrooms cause me even more angst. Mr. X has repeatedly tried to harass me into using the bathroom in my own apartment instead of in his house. To him there is only the binary of “single” and “married,” rigidly distinguished by the words of a marriage rite. To me there is the need to be acknowledged for who I really am, regardless of social norms or mutual agreements. What he can never experience is how every time I shower by myself in my own bathroom, I feel like a fraud, acting out the script society has written for me.
The first, and more obvious reason that this article is, to put it plainly, a flop, is that it is insensitive. Taking a piece of a person's identity and using this piece of them as a springboard to make ridiculous jokes isn't a cool thing to do, and trying to delegitimize a group of people is pretty cruel.
The second issue that I have with this article is that the comedy is lazy and unoriginal. Yes, the article is meant to be a joke, and it is meant to be funny. I understand this. But it was difficult for me to get through both because I kept rolling my eyes so far back into my own head and because I was just so bored by it. I've heard it all before: people using the slippery slope fallacy, saying things like "well if they expect me to start calling 'em 'she' and 'her,' then 'she' better accept that I am now a Great Value brand jar of grape jelly because i said so heheh." blah blah blah. I've heard so many of these jokes made by people who are trying very hard to come across as either edgy or ignorant (not sure which) and I'm just tired of it at this point.
Please, I'm begging you, be a nice person.
Please, please, please, I'm begging you, take some time to yourself to think of something new or at least put an interesting spin on a preexisting joke.
Comedy is a really enjoyable creative outlet to explore, but comedy is most effective when it is original. Comedy is still fun when the jokes being made aren't using people as punchlines I truly believe that very few people actually deserve to be made fun of (although, don't get me wrong, there are some people who do deserve to get #dragged, but more on that later). Basically, comedy should be used to entertain and not to bring people down.
