Off the top of my head, SpongeBob SquarePants, Danny Phantom, Fairly Oddparents, The Big Bang Theory and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia all have jokes, if not the main plot point of the episode, that are just mocking the existence of LGBTQ people.

  • PermaculturalMarxist [they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    It's especially bad with trans stuff where characters cross-dressing or getting gender-bent is played for laughs at best or portrayed grotesquely at worst. Have to condition that fear response to anything that isn't cis early on.

    • star_wraith [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It's the 90s, not the 00s... but Ace Ventura Pet Detective is such transphobic garbage. And just as bad, at the time it came out no one batted an eye or called it out. Afaik Jim Carrey has never come out and apologized or even acknowledged it was bad.

        • zeal0telite [he/him,they/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          The character is supposed to be bad? Along with every other character in the scene who also vomits at the idea of a transwoman? Lol, what a shit excuse.

          That scene made me uncomfortable as a kid. I didn't really know what transpeople were so all I saw was a guy exposing someone's genitals to a large group of people and I was super weirded out by it.

    • Ryan_Holman [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      One of the examples I mentioned was It's Always Sunny. I was referring to the transgender girlfriend Mac has in the first two seasons, which is portrays this as something that, at a minimum, is abnormal. While this was not horrible for the mid-to-late 2000s, it is definitely bad looking back.

      Of course, the show does have the character return and makes the people who think poorly of her look bad.

      • Tofu_Lewis [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Hmmm, I could be wrong, but wasn't the joke that Mac was in complete denial about it?

        • Wojackhorseman2 [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          A bit but there was some mis gendering and other relatively problematic stuff going on, i think the crew said it’s like the one thing they wish they could go back and change or didn’t feel like they handled as well as they could.

      • shitstorm [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Definitely agree. How they handled the pilot episode was much better, it was all about CIS-male fragility. I think the creators regret how they treated that character though.

    • SimAnt [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I find Lindsay Ellis a little questionable these days, but her new video on Pop-Culture Transphobia is illuminating. I never realized how omnipresent the vomiting-at-trans-people ""gag"" was

    • VernetheJules [they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      On the one hand, jokes on them for validating my feelings about wanting to be a girl

      On the other hand, it would've been a lot easier to come to terms with if people were portrayed as being accepting instead!

      In this case, I'm going to go with "the other hand" as being much better than "the one hand"