So there’s a really horrific murder that’s been widely reported in the Oz media in the last couple of days. The reports of the murder are in fact so graphic that tabloid ambulance chasers around the world have picked it up with glee. In short it’s a particularly gruesome case of domestic violence, specifically intimate partner violence: about one woman is murdered every week in Australia by her intimate partner.
But no. The “great story” to come out of this is that the murdered woman was transgender. She was a woman of colour from Indonesia. She was working in the sex industry and was using her earnings to support her family in Indonesia, allowing her siblings to get educations. How do you think that aspect of the story was portrayed?
The answer, where the tabloid gutter press is concerned, was to deliberately choose a bikini glamour shot and splash that, along with a disgusting transphobic slur, across the front page of a major newspaper as though it was Page 3 of The Sun. The woman’s body was subjected to extreme indignity post mortem, but that gross offence to her person has been willingly continued by the sensationalist news media refusing to treat her like a human being worthy of basic respect in death.
There’s a time to talk about violence against women. There’s a time to talk about racial violence against people of non-Anglo appearance. There’s a time to talk about sexual violence against sex workers. There’s even a time to talk about violence against transgender people and in the particular case of female transgender sex workers, one can point out that transphobic terms found in the porn and sex industries are more for the ready consumption of the johns than for the self-determination and dignity of transgender people, if you really must go there.
But that is all beside the point. There is a sick culture that is happy to ignore an act of extreme violence by a man against a woman who happens to be his partner, and to substitute sordid speculation that reduces the deceased woman to her genitals, or what she did with them. That, too, is a form of extreme violence against women like Mayang Prasetyo.
What can you do?
• Sign this petition on change·org
• Write a complaint to the Press Council of Australia protesting gross transphobia that contravenes the newspapers’ own journalistic standards on the reporting of deceased people.
What shouldn’t you do?
• Join in a harassment campaign of the journalists. Their editors and sub-editors are responsible for the sick culture that not merely tolerates but merrily encourages gutter journalism like this – harassing the individuals who wrote the article won’t fix the toxic, abusive culture.
Further reading by responsible journalists:
• Clementine Ford in Daily Life: Mayang Prasetyo’s murder and the problem with domestic violence reporting
• Amy Gray in The Guardian: Neither job nor gender identity killed Mayang Prasetyo. She died because of a man who felt entitled to her
• Kate Doak in The Hoopla: Words Can Be Deadly — note that Kate is a trans woman and a journalist, which gives her condemnation of the transphobic reporting additional passion.
• Elise Brooks in The Conversation: How media reports affect trans people, and what should be done — I strongly presume that Elise, like Kate, is also a trans woman.
The source of the most transphobic reporting (widely syndicated through Australia) belatedly issued a flimsy unsatisfactory apology – a not-pology – which you can see being dismantled as a gutless craven fake here. The not-pology extended only as far as Mayang’s family and friends, and didn’t extend to anyone who might have suffered splash damage from being targeted by transphobia or whorephobia, or the general erasure of women affected by domestic violence.
