Olympian Caitlyn Jenner was honored at the EPSYs this week with the Arthur Ashe Courage Award for her eloquence and advocacy on behalf of the transgender community. Her speech was a passionate, sometimes self-effacing rallying cry on behalf of young trans people everywhere, as she thanked her family for supporting her through her public transition and implored everyone watching to treat trans people with respect.
In the room, Jenner was met only with applause. But on the internet, not so much: Friday Night Lights executive producer Peter Berg was apparently disgusted by the selection of Jenner for the award. He posted a transphobic meme on Instagram comparing Jenner to double amputee veteran Gregory D. Gadson that alleged the former was just a “Man” who “made the cover of Vanity Fair.” Gadson “traded 2 legs for the freedom of the other to trade 2 balls for 2 boobs.”
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Berg’s post is sickening, for obvious reasons, not the least of which being that he reduces the nuanced, complicated, psychological experience of being trans to one physical change, described callously — a set of surgeries any trans individual may or may not choose, or be able, to undergo. He also misgenders Jenner — one assumes he is doing this on purpose; it does not seem like respecting Jenner is something Berg is interested in doing — and, in the grand tradition of trolls everywhere, capitalizes “Man” for no reason.
That Berg, the man who brought us one of the most sensitive, progressive, beautifully-written television shows of all time, would also be the kind of person who would say something like this about Jenner is more than a little baffling. To add to the cognitive dissonance here, Berg is cousins with Buzz Bissinger, who not only wrote the non-fiction book upon which Friday Night Lights is based but also wrote the very Vanity Fair profile to which Berg refers in his Instagram post.
In response to Berg’s post, Bissinger told the Hollywood Reporter, “I love Pete. I am not in the business of censoring his comments nor he mine. He said what he believes, rare to begin with and unheard of in Hollywood where disingenuous discourse is the universal traffic.”
Late Thursday night, once the backlash presumably reached Berg’s ears, he recanted, sort of, with another Instagram post, writing, in part, “I have the utmost respect for Caitlyn Jenner and I am a strong supporter of equality and the rights of trans people everywhere. I also believe that we don’t give enough attention to our courageous returning war veterans.”
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He still has not apologized for his first post, nor has he removed it from his Instagram.
Honors like the Arthur Ashe Award are, by their nature, subjective and competitive. Subjective because “courage” is not, like so many other elements of athleticism, quantifiable. There is no objective metric by which courage can be measured — like pornography, you just know it when you see it — and in our personal determinations of what constitutes courage, we will bring our entire lives to that deliberation, our innate and learned biases about what is and is not inspirational, what does and does not require bravery, and so on.
It is competitive because, believe it or not, there is not just one courageous person in a single year, high above the cowardly masses. You will always be able to make the case for an individual who didn’t get this award; courage, thankfully, is not in a finite supply. Pitting extraordinary people against each other — in this particularly egregious case, by declaring one type of courage is more important or worthy of celebration than another — serves absolutely no one: not whoever you think “should” have won, not the person who did, not even you. (Not to mention that this award is totally symbolic; symbols matter a great deal but we’re not talking about, say, a million dollars to the charity of your choice or a seat on a board or anything but the honor itself, plus the time and televised real estate in which to give a speech.)
The selection of Jenner is a statement about the nature of courage: namely, that there is more than one way to be courageous, that one does not have to necessarily fit into our classic understanding of that word (by, say, enlisting in the military, running into a burning building, or completing some similar feat) to be courageous. You can be courageous by being exactly who you are in a culture where you will be punished, mocked, injured, and hated for that.
It does, in fact, take a great deal of courage to accept who you are when who you are is part of a population that experiences bullying, discrimination, unemployment, homelessness, sexual assault and abuse, and murder at significantly higher rates than the general population. To be willing — to be eager — to be on stage at the most vulnerable time in your life because you know that there are so many others who are more vulnerable than you are who will find strength from your example, as Jenner is, is courageous.
It takes courage to be one of the few public faces of the transgender community when you know you’ll get responses like this careless, juvenile one from Berg. To keep with the sports theme, Berg’s words sound like dumb-jock locker room banter — which is especially shameful, considering the grace with which Jenner’s speech was accepted in a room full of professional athletes who had, it seemed, risen above that insulting stereotype to applaud Jenner’s words.
Some of the criticism embedded in Berg’s writing, and from others, stems from this idea that the ESPYs chose Jenner to get higher ratings. Well, so what? If we wait for every powerful corporation to do the right thing, whatever that thing may be, until they feel compelled to do so out of the goodness of their hearts, right things will never be done. Who cares if Jenner is good for publicity? Is she only allowed to be good for one thing? Something can be both good for publicity and good, period. These are not mutually exclusive states; they often overlap.
Capitalizing on a big cultural moment is not, in and of itself, a bad thing — if no one ever did it, we might never even have big cultural moments, as these waves only happen when enough separate-but-thematically-linked things are happening at once. Jenner’s masterfully handled PR (the Diane Sawyer interview, the aforementioned VF cover, the red carpet appearances, the ESPYs speech) is just one piece occurring in concert with so many others. The shift is pop cultural and political: the rising profiles of Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, the critical adoration for Emmy-nominated Transparent and Orange is the New Black, the Pentagon’s announcement this Monday that it would lift the ban against transgender people serving in the military. At the same time as Jenner was giving her speech, I Am Jazz, a new reality show about a transgender teen, premiered on TLC.
Did Jenner’s appearance result in a ratings jump? Well, the 2015 ESPYs netted 7.7 million viewers. That’s a 250 percent increase over last year, which drew 2.2 million viewers. Between the first and last hour, viewership leapt from 6.6 million to 8.5 million. It was the most-watched, highest-rated ESPYs in the show’s history.