Jerry Springer’s legacy of discovery and disgust

The first time I ever saw a woman like me was in 1993, on daytime television in the early afternoon. There she was, sitting tearfully on a couch while she struggled to tell the man sitting next to her—her boyfriend—something that clearly felt fraught. The show’s host, a middle-aged man, coaxed the words out.

“I was born a man,” she said. Immediately, the once-quiet TV studio erupted into jeers and taunts while the woman’s boyfriend exploded into barely controlled rage. He shouted and lunged at her before security intervened.

I sat there transfixed. I was about 10 years old, home sick from school. I had stumbled upon The Jerry Springer show by accident, but I couldn’t bring myself to change the channel. The episode was traumatizing—by then, I’d already experienced my first painful pangs of gender dysphoria. 

I thought about that first exposure to transness late last week when news broke that Springer had passed away.

My story is not unique. Over the years, a great many of my trans friends and acquaintances on social media have spoken about how their first exposure to trans people came from daytime shows like Jerry Springer or its contemporaries, The Maury Povich Show or Ricki Lake.

Trans people weren’t constant guests on these shows, but they appeared onscreen every so often. Nearly every trans person was shown as an anomaly, as grist for the shock-television content mill.

LA Times writer Nardine Saad described Springer as the millennials’ babysitter, because of the daytime timeslot his show occupied. It was easy for kids who were home from school to tune in to waste away the day in an age before video games, smartphones or tablets.

For me, Springer’s shows became my only outlet to catch glimpses of my future as a trans woman. I used to have a recurring nightmare that if I tried to transition, I’d be met with braying, angry Springer crowds every time I tried to step out my front door. It’s no wonder then that I tried to suppress my trans identity for another 20 years.

The harmful framing and language is still fresh in my head: I can recall the “shemale or female” competitions where glamorous women were paraded out on stage before the crowd was allowed to judge whether they’d been assigned male or female at birth. Then, later, it would be revealed which was which, to the shock and raw reaction of the audience.

There were also the coming-out episodes, where trans people, both women and men, would open up to parents. And of course, the dangerous episodes where tearful trans women would come out to their boyfriends. Once the disclosure was over, and the crowd had settled down, the man in the relationship would be quizzed on whether he had any idea his partner was trans, or grilled about how the couple could have had sex without him knowing.

Each of these episodes were singularly focused on reactions to the trans person. Reactions from the crowd, reactions from the significant other, reactions from the family.

Trans people, in Springer’s world, were there simply to shock and awe TV audiences. Springer taught me to be deeply ashamed of my trans self. He taught me that coming out would be a scary or even dangerous process for me, that I would be met with anger or disgust. Why take the chance to transition, I used to think, if it only ends up in me being a source of universal derision?

While his show stopped airing in 2018, Springer’s legacy has been a topic of wide discussion since his death last week. Many of Springer’s fans have argued, both before and after his passing, that he cared deeply about equality for all. I don’t buy it. He exploited those poor trans people, offering them only a small stipend for travel and accommodations for appearing on the show while he raked in millions for his work.

He was responsible for me learning some of the basic language I now use to describe myself—but his show also heavily used terms like “tr*nny,” “shemale” and “transsexual,” which we consider harmful or at least outdated today, but which were commonly used to refer to trans women at the time. As with everything in life, Jerry Springer was a shade of gray.

Springer was indeed, as Saad wrote, a babysitter for America’s millennials. He taught ’90s kids things they would never see in school. In the case of trans people, he taught us that we were exploitable for fame and fortune, that we were near universal sources of public derision. To him, we were TV-ready spectacles that appealed to the basest of Boomer disgust.

Studies and surveys have shown that most people still don’t know a trans person. While it’s much easier to find positive representations of trans people in media today, these more nuanced depictions are, for the most part, recent. Is it any wonder we’re now gripped by a major moral panic over trans existence nowadays? Look where we came from.

In the days since his death, some people have mourned and memorialized Springer, while others have celebrated. I’m not sad Springer himself is dead, nor am I happy. I just wish he had treated my trans elders with human dignity.