Made Rebloggable upon Request
Anon:don’t you think there’s a difference between ignorance and not giving a crap? that Lady Gaga post bothered me only because it basically claimed she’s ill-intentioned and doesn’t care about her fans. playing with identity is something she does a lot, and it’s not an act unique to her; though i agree that what she’s done is problematic, everyone is making her out to be a bad person, and i definitely don’t think that’s so. also, the whole, “oh, here we go” thing is taken out of context.
Answer:I definitely don’t think she doesn’t care about her fans and I don’t really think that that’s what that post was claiming. What everyone has to remember is Lady Gaga is a trained performer. She is an ACTOR. The way she treats her personas is as such. She gets into character. The problem is that she dedicated this to trans people, and played it off as a move of solidarity when she has no clue what it’s like to be trans. When she plays Jo she gets to use male bathrooms and no one cares because she’s Lady Gaga. That’s not what it’s like for actual trans people. She puts herself on a pedestal for gay rights and equal rights in general but she doesn’t do any of the research that it takes to be a good leader. She is constantly doing problematic things, like use wheelchairs and other disability images as props without ever once addressing disability issues, even leaving that out of her song which is supposed to epitomize being awesome the way you are. Also in that song she uses several racial slurs, and leaves out a lot of minorities. Now, I have heard awesome stories about Lady Gaga on trans issues, the person she kisses in the telephone video is trans and identifies with male pronouns and she made a point to find this out and use it. That’s awesome. But in the same video she makes a point to point out that she doesn’t have a penis, and the way she addressed those rumors in general were really bad. She said “I am a real woman” as if trans women weren’t. I think we do need to always point out problematic things celebrities do, especially those that are supposedly “gay icons”. Just like when I talk about problematic things Dan Savage or Buck Angel says, or when I talk about Neil Patrick Harris using the word “Tranny” or Ru Paul saying that people who get offended at the word “tranny” are just oversensitive. These are people that supposedly fight for us, and yet they are doing these horrible alienating problematic things. We need to be critical of everything we consume in the media.
This. Always this.
