It surely surprises no one that the New Yorker magazine is tripping over itself, along with every other corporate institution, to promote and please the transgenderists.
In the September 26, 2016 issue, it published a profile of "Hari Nef, Model Citizen." I suppose the title is a play on words, in that Nef is a model - "the first openly transgender woman to receive a worldwide modelling contract" - and is modeling transgenderism. I found it an annoying article to read, but I did, curious about how the writer would portray Nef and the represented issue of transgenderism. Annoying because Nef was "she", annoying because the writer perpetuated transgenderist myths:
Forty-one per cent of transgender Americans have attempted suicide, compared with five per cent of the general population.
annoying because Nef speaks in that defiant, disinterested, cutting way common among his generation:
Nef’s contract with IMG made international news, but even before that she had honed her persona as an alt-glam queer scenester. “I’m not a Girl, not yet an It-Girl,” she wrote in an online diary for Dazed. A Chloë Sevigny devotee, she mastered the art of the gnomic fashion-mag Q. & A. The decade that defines her personal style? “The fourteen-thirties.” Her favorite color? “The color of my face when I cry.” Her introspective gender fluidity dovetailed with an “it” girl’s practiced mystique: in a 2013 essay for the trans magazine Original Plumbing, she described her body as “a raincheck, a cliffhanger, an IOU.” On Dunham’s podcast, Women of the Hour, she discussed her dating challenges: “People, like, they want to be sexy and go along with it, but, like, sometimes they just freak out. It’s a fascinating negotiation. But not talking about it worked pretty well last night.”
and annoying because why is the New Yorker spending so many of its pages lately on promoting entertainers who are famous partly for how incomprehensibly rich they are?
It is impossible to know Hari Nef, or anyone, from a profile, undoubtedly written through the writer's own biases, and certainly a profile written with the subject providing a performance to be profiled. I don't want to put much energy into analyzing what this article or Nef himself has to say about the state of transgenderism, except that the article does make clear that the modelling industry's acceptance of Nef is about the money he can bring in:
Nef e-mailed Bart at IMG to tell him about the TV offer and ask for some contract advice. He telephoned right away to say, “We’re going to sign you.”
to which the transgender community responds with its own quid pro quo:
I asked Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, if she thought the fashion industry was using trans people to some extent. “Sure,” she said. “But that’s fine—we’ll use the fashion industry.”
The TV offer above refers to a role Nef was offered by Jill Soloway to be on Transparent. This is what Jill is quoted as saying about Nef:
Jill Soloway told me, “Replace Chanel shift dresses with Hood by Air, Claire Waldoff with Mykki Blanco or Big Freedia, and this is where you’d meet Hari today—in the thick of it.” She went on, “Gittel was a vibrant member of a youth culture fuelled by a hybrid of possibility and nihilism that very much mirrors kids these days.”
What does that even mean?
This, probably meant to provoke sympathy for Nef, was refreshing:
Right before the H&M show, the woman dressing Nef had given her a long look and said, “Are you a model? You’re a little uglier and fatter than the other girls.”
This almost made me like Nef, because whether it is factually true, it is transgenderingly true:
“Billionaire Les Wexner is here,” Baldwin said, pointing out the C.E.O. of Victoria’s Secret. “I don’t know what Victoria’s actual secret is—”
Nef leaned over to me and whispered, “She’s trans.”
The most telling statement in the article is this:
It was around this time that Nef realized that she felt more comfortable performing as a woman than she ever had felt living life as a man.
Indeed, being a woman is, for transgenderists, a performance.
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