Adam Carolla: "When Did We Start Giving A Sh** About [Transgender] People?"

This past weekend I went searching the blogosphere for Bert & Ernie related stories, and discovered Adam Carolla had done a podcast that mentioned not only trans people.

There's a particular segment that many be of interest to many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people where Adam Carolla, and his news partner Alison Rosen, discuss the Change.org petition asking the PBS consider Bert and Ernie's getting married. The segment is about 8-minutes long -- it has some very explicit language in it (begins at about the 1:19:00 mark in the audio):

If you're transgender-identified, this quote may interest you:

When did everybody get fucking lumped in with the gays? Really? What percentage is transgendered? When did we start giving a sh** about these people?

If you're a transsexual who doesn't identify as transsexual, you'll still likely find his comments about penises and surgery pretty offensive.

Maybe some will do the classic antitrans derail that trans community should be able to take a joke.

Well, Adam Carolla doesn't like you much either. If you're in the gay subcommunity LGBT community, you may not particularly like his take on gays and anal sex found in the audio.

And if you're identified with the LGBT community, you may not like that he says that the LGBT community should drop the acronym in favor of "YUCK." And if you listen to the tone of his remarks, this isn't from some scripted jokes, this is him saying what he believes in what he hopes is a funny manner. His audience is yucking it up in the background, so this stuff is funny to some folk, apparently.

Oh yeah, really funny stuff. That is, unless you're part of the trans community -- part of the human race -- that are among those people not worth "giving a shit about."

[More below the fold.]
Well, after listening to the audio, I contacted Jennifer Finney Boylan. She the transgender member of the GLAAD board of directors. She in turn contacted staff at GLAAD, and after their investigation they created a GLAAD entry on this incident entitled GLAAD Taking Action Against Adam Carolla's Anti-LGBT Remarks. Not a glaadBLOG, entry, but an entry on the main website.

From the GLAAD Entry:

GLAAD will be reaching out to its allies in the entertainment world to let them know about Adam Carolla's history of racist and homophobic remarks, following an incident last week.

On his podcast last Thursday, the former "Man Show" host spent several minutes of his show railing against, among other things, the idea of teaching people to respect the transgender community. In his rant, he also told LGBT people to "shut up" because by speaking out about equality, they are "ruining his life" and said that members of the LGBT community should stop using the letters "LGBT" to describe themselves, and should instead use "YUCK."

Carolla at one point asked: "When did we start giving a sh*t about these people?"

Wow, what a great joke.

....This is not the first time that GLAAD has taken issue with statements Carolla has made, and, as evidenced above, LGBT people are hardly the only community about which Carolla has made ignorant remarks. In the past, Carolla has called the people of Hawaii "dumb," "stupid," "in-bred," and "retarded" people who are among the "dumbest people we have." Last year, Carolla referred to a Filipino boxer as being illiterate, having brain damage, and someone who prays to chicken bones - and stated that this boxer was 'all the people of the Philippines have.'

Speaking about LGBT people, Carolla has said that 'all things being equal' - gay parents are 'not as good as' straight parents. This, despite virtually every credible authority on child health and social services (including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Child Welfare League of America) having determined that a parent's sexual orientation has nothing to do with the ability to be a good parent. Kids of gay parents are just as healthy and well-adjusted as other children. Carolla said himself after he insulted Filipino people, "I try to be provocative [and] funny but I crossed the line and I'm sorry." So it's clear that this type of ignorance is a part of his act, and maybe he thinks that homophobia and transphobia make him 'edgy.' Carolla should own up to the harms of his words and educate himself about the hardships and disrespect the transgender community faces every day. Unfortunately, based on his track record, that may be a lost cause.

Well, here's a partial list of entertainment and news related sites covering the story:

TV Guide





The Hollywood Reporter





Entertainment Weekly





Perez Hilton





TMZ





The Advocate





E! Online

Adam Carolla, according to E! Online, TMZ, and The Advocate has -- in E! Online's words -- "kinda apologized" for his comments:

"I'm sorry my comments were hurtful. That being said, I'm a comedian, not a politician."

I have two points.

The first is that I covered the Angie Zapata Hate Crime Murder Trial from the courtroom. People who no doubt still "giving a sh**" about Angie are her family members, her fiends, and her peers trans community. And, of course, there are many other trans people who've died at hateful hands who family, friends, and community peers care about.

And there are many who don't give a sh** about trans people who, like Adam Corolla, probably should care a bit more about trans people than he did.

The second point I'd like to make is that it didn't have to be me to send that email off to GLAAD. Anyone in community could have done the same thing, and had GLAAD respond exactly in the same if they were the one who contacted GLAAD instead of me.

I'm back to quoting Bayard Rustin:

"[T]he job of the gay community is not to deal with extremists who would castigate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us. The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That's our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment."

~Bayard Rustin; From Montgomery to Stonewall (1986)

And Roz Kaveney's Six Axioms Of Transgender Activism (emphasis added):

1.) Display solidarity with all our trans brothers and sisters.

2.) Build alliances by getting involved as ourselves in other areas of politics.

3.) Refuse to let journalistic and intellectual attacks on our community go unanswered - we can have and keep the moral high ground.

4.) Be creative, be smart, be ourselves, and don't let anybody tell us who we are and what we do.

5.) Refuse the pathological model - we are not sick, just different.

6.) Refuse those politics - heterosexism, body fascism - that work against all of the above, but especially #1.

We, in LGBT community, have the opportunity to control anti-LGBT sentiments -- if we make an effort to highlight anti-LGBT sentiments spoken by public figures. The benefit is that in holding people -- especially public figures -- to account for their anti-LGBT sentiments, we create the kind of America where legislatively, morally, and psychologically, even though some people continue to hate lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people, they will not be able to, without consequence, openly manifest their hate...their contempt.

And, any of us can that holding to account for anti-LGBT sentiments.