Jerry Springer is Dead. He Tried to Ruin Trans People

 

            Jerry Springer, the former mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio, host of The Jerry Springer Show and Judge Jerry Springer, and the man responsible for getting The Steve Wilkos Show its start has died today, April 27, 2023, and many trans individuals will be spending the rest of the day celebrating! During his time on television, Jerry Springer caused harm to trans people by using them as the punchline of many jokes and making many of his shows center around the idea that trans women are “traps” meaning people that are men who look like women in a way to trap a man into having “gay” sex with them. During my childhood, my father would often force me to watch The Jerry Springer Show after school and that was the only trans representation I had until I was an adult. Being a trans woman that didn’t start transitioning until age 26, I blame Springer for most of that and believe it is fine to speak ill of the dead in this case because of the amount of life he stole from me.

            For a long time, I thought being a trans person was terrible and would ruin my life because of the things I saw on Springer’s show during the 1990s and early 2000s. Trans women were always the but of jokes on the show, or they were shown as house ruining people, or people that could only live by working in sex work. This made it seem like life would be terrible if I did start being myself and because of this, I chose to remain closeted for a lot longer than I would have if I had not been exposed to this show. Nearly a decade of my life was stolen from me after realizing that I am a woman. There are some things in my life that will never be able to change because of how long I waited to start medical treatment, and of course many people enjoy that because they want to tell who is and isn’t what they define as a real woman. A real woman in their eyes is just one that was born a woman and still identifies as such.

            The audience would jeer the trans people, nearly always women, who appeared on the show because it made them happy to be bullying someone different from them. The Jerry Springer Show’s host Jerry Springer encouraged this behavior because it improved the ratings of the show. He did not care about the damage that he did to people by putting this on television. Today, I have seen many people talking about how the show was an important part of their life and this has bothered me because it is showing me that many people do not realize that media they may have enjoyed in the past is problematic.

            Jerry Springer died today, and I will not be mourning him. Instead, I will be mourning the years of my life that he and his show stole from me by making it seem like life as my authentic self would be worse than the hell I was in while pretending to be something I was not. I am sure that many other trans people feel the same as I do today.