The Juneau Empire recently ran on its editorial page a cartoon making transgender people the butt of an unfunny joke \u2013 not that it would have been any more appropriate had it been in some way funny.<\/p>\n
As a former member of the Juneau Empire newsroom, I was highly disappointed to see ink laid to paper for such an insensitive and inaccurate portrayal of a group of people, especially a group so marginalized. As a newspaper, the goal is to inform and aid people in understanding, but this cartoon used a powerful platform to mock and disparage. It is all the more embarrassing considering the Juneau Empire has a GLAAD Media Award attached to its name for a five-part series about LGBTQ community members in Juneau \u2013 a series meant to inform and invite understanding. I know. I wrote it.<\/p>\n
Since then, I have been able to write further articles relating to sexuality and gender identity and their intersection with public policy in Alaska. Most recently, I wrote about the Juneau School District\u2019s treatment of and obligation to protect the rights of transgender and gender-fluid students, and it is appalling to me that these young students will get the message that the Juneau Empire sees them as jokey cartoon cross-dressers and not as real people, simply because their gender and sex assigned at birth are not aligned. Even if this cartoon was chosen to share one among a diverse array of opinions, it is worth noting that some opinions aren\u2019t worth the ink.<\/p>\n
Melissa Griffiths,<\/strong><\/p>\n Juneau<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Juneau Empire recently ran on its editorial page a cartoon making transgender people the butt of an unfunny joke \u2013 not that it would have been any more appropriate had it been in some way funny. As a former member of the Juneau Empire newsroom, I was highly disappointed to see ink laid to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":14,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-3764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3764"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=3764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}