Ive Got Like Loose Thoughts About That Scene From White Lotus Last Night That R Kind Of Percolating In

ive got like loose thoughts about That scene from white lotus last night that r kind of percolating in a weird way mostly not about the scene itself but about the way its being received and what that speaks to...the whole monologue doesnt exist as its own object but exists so that you can see ricks reactions to it, he is the audience surrogate mutely horrified at this deviant he thought was a man but is actually a different, abject thing. and you know hes different and perverse and deserving of every derision bc he expresses the desire to be a trans woman . not just a woman, which is bad enough, but he finds transness itself to be desirable. the character himself never needs to be third-gendered for the show to communicate that he should be through nothing but silent shock at him saying it at all, he is expressing dangerous insanity and therefore he is dangerous and insane, he can and should no longer be classed as a normal (implicitly safe) man.

and idk the deep deep transmisogyny of that is like unavoidable right? this character is more or less the image summoned into the mind of transphobes when asked to picture a trans woman: a man who is more dangerous than a normal man through his perverse desires, who deserves to be shamed and looked at goggle-eyed and treated as a lesser thing, a person for whom there is not much left to do but laugh at and violently punish and maybe fuck. faggot-as-abject, right. i guess it shouldnt boggle me that the reception to this is largely in line with that, sharing ricks shocked face and adding very little, or else chocking it up to the entitlement and deviance of (white) men, or saying that the monologue was more insane and perverse than the incestuous kiss from later in the episode. the audience, encouraged to share ricks silent horror, treats the character as a horrifying object.

i guess what gets me is how uniformly on-board people seem with this as entirely deserved, the only possible and reasonable reaction. even people for whom id classify that as really weird, like, trans women. there is a notable contingent of responses to the scene that are transfems saying like 'yeah this is what every chaser sounds like 🙄' and sometimes explicitly sometimes implicitly agreeing with the premise that such a person is basically just a pervert who deserves at best public exposure and ridicule and at worst to be entirely discarded as worthless and unsalvageable. and like...thats you. you know when they say that theyre talking about you right? this is how they perceive you, theyre not drawing a distinction between you and that guy, youre agreeing with the very premise of the violence done against you, that its justified and necessary.

which just sends me off thinking about how a certain kind of transfem chaser is broadly received as an abject kind of person because theyre transfeminized. this was the whole premise of envy/desire, no? that the person youre into turns out not to be 'normal' but to be some sort of gross failure at both masculinity and femininity, a lesser third thing that doesnt understand it can never be taken seriously as a person much less a romantic object? i dunno. at the same time it feels callous to disregard the way chasers genuinely do deperson and use the trans women they chase, and similarly to disregard the way the character in the scene was entirely dependent on being able as a white man to instrumentalize asian femininity, leveraging racial domination and so on. but for this to take on the totality of the conversation--'chasers are only seen as bad bc they harm trans women' & 'the character is only seen as horrific for being racist towards asian women'--feels like its missing a huge chuck of whats actually going on.