Host Mel Woods continues their conversation with Zeke Smith, and looks at the state of trans visibility on reality TV.
Overview
In this episode, we delve into the evolution of trans representation in reality TV, starting with an exploration of the 2005 docuseries Trans Generation, showcasing the authentic experiences of four college students transitioning, in sharp contrast with earlier portrayal of trans subjectsin There's Something About Miriam. The discussion then shifts to Zeke Smith, a prominent trans contestant from Survivor, who shares insights on navigating the pressures of production while maintaining control over his narrative and strategy. The episode further examines the emotional and psychological ramifications of reality TV on trans visibility, addressing the backlash against increased representation and highlighting the critical need for authentic portrayals to advance trans equality, ultimately underscoring the importance of seeing trans people in everyday life through the lens of media.
Notes
Introduction to Trans Representation in Reality TV (00:00 - 08:59)
️Zeke Smith's Survivor Experience (08:59 - 18:51)
Impact of Reality TV on Trans Representation (18:51 - 29:49)
Guests
Zeke Smith (he/him) is a writer and comedian living in Los Angeles. His writing has been featured on The Blacklist and in The Hollywood Reporter. Zeke is well-known for his queer and trans advocacy stemming from two seasons on Survivor. He serves on the board of directors for GLAAD.
00:00
Mel Woods
This is TJ.
00:02
Voiceover
That’s Tamar.
00:03
Mel Woods
“That’s Tamar,” TJ says, deadnaming himself, pointing at his old passport picture.
00:08
Voiceover
The person looking back at me in those pictures looks like they’re looking at me and wanting something from me. Like they’re saying, “Where did you go? Why did you leave me?” Because I did. I left her.
00:19
Mel Woods
And so begins TransGeneration, a Sundance Channel/Logo/World of Wonder collaboration from 2005. The cheeky YouTube description of the eight-part docuseries is quote, “Four college students switching more than their majors.” That moment that we just heard takes place before the credits. TJ, deadnaming himself, looking and sounding wistful, maybe guilty, maybe even a little regretful. One can’t help but feel uncomfortable for TJ, feel his discomfort and a little uncomfortable about the show itself. Is this trans regret? This is where we’re starting? But later we meet TJ again. We learn he came from Cyprus on a Fulbright Scholarship to Michigan State, where his transition began. At the time of filming, he hasn’t talked to his mother back home in some time. She’s against the transition. In this clip, he introduces us to his best friend, Jordan.
01:13
Voiceover
Jordan is my best friend. He is my family. He’s just the family that I’ve discovered later in life. Jordan is also trans-identified. He’s also female-born. I know we had really silly arguments about who was butch-er, but I think for us it was very kind of like, I need this title. I need to have this title over you specifically.
01:38
Mel Woods
A few minutes later, TJ and Jordan are on the floor wrestling, tussling more than wrestling, laughing more than anything. Jordan pretty much gets the best of the smaller TJ right off the bat. Soon, Jordan has TJ pinned.
01:51
Voiceover
Two, three. Done.
01:54
Voiceover
Jackass.
01:57
Mel Woods
“Listen, jackass,” TJ says, a little embarrassed, laughing mostly. And we’ve just witnessed this simple, playful moment between two friends, two brothers, just a normal couple of weirdos goofing it up for the camera. And what do I mean by “normal”? Maybe casual. And what do I mean by “weirdo”? Well, you should know. You’re listening to a podcast about queer reality TV. This is Get Queer and I’m Mel Woods. This season we’re looking at reality TV and its effect on queer identity in the community, in the world and in the mirror. This is episode four, “Trans TV.”
02:39
Mel Woods
It’s 2005. In the movies, Brokeback Mountain is about to win three Oscars. In politics, Canada has just legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. In music, Sleater-Kinney is topping the year’s best-of charts, and on TV, Will & Grace is about to go into its final season of 11. There was a good deal of queerness going on, but not much representation for trans folks. And still an inclination, as there is even today, to turn our existence into “a very special moment.” Into this ecosystem comes TransGeneration. The series probably has more in common with an American family over The Real World. More true-documentary, fly-on-the-wall, strictly-on-location commentary from the participants, more narration than confessional, no high drama. It first ran on the Sundance Channel in the fall of 2005 and then on Logo in early 2006. Other than riling up the usual suspects, Republicans and Florida in general, reaction was positive and ranged from claims of groundbreaking to dismissals of “ho-hum.”
03:44
Mel Woods
And in fact, what probably made it groundbreaking is that “ho-hum,” in that it wasn’t sensational. For trans people navigating families, school and social life, the queerness, the transness, specifically, it was more than implied. It was intentional, if tentative. And in some ways, in the simple, mundane moments, it was indeed casual. Now, one of my very first introductions to casual transness was in 2016 when I saw Zeke Smith on Millennials vs. Gen X. I mean, I didn’t know I was being introduced to casual transness because Zeke hadn’t been outed as trans yet. That wouldn’t happen until the next year when Zeke was back on Survivor for an all-star season and was outed on mainstream network TV. It was an experience Zeke wrote about beautifully and effectively in the Hollywood Reporter that same year, in which we spoke about to him in episode one. Here’s some more of that chat.
04:38
Mel Woods
One of my favourite things about being trans, transness in general is the, you know, the self-determination of it, all, right? Like you get to say, like, “I would like to have a flat chest” and then you can make that happen. Modern medicine says that you want to grow a beard, maybe it’ll be a shitty little beard, but you can make that happen. And you write in that Hollywood Reporter piece about wanting to kind of be a Survivor player and the self-determination of saying, like, “I’m gonna become a Survivor person” and choosing that and building that for yourself. And I’m curious how those two things kind of interplayed for you. The character that you kind of created to be on there and how that is a reflection of who you actually are, and who you want to perform and all that. I’m curious about your thoughts on that kind of interplay there.
05:20
Zeke Smith
Right. So I think, you know, the vision that we ascertain as trans people is that we see a vision of ourselves. We sort of see this idea of who we want to be but are not at present, but we see the pathway, right? Because, you know, at least for me, trans-guyYouTube was in its nascent stages, but it was all that there was. This is what we can be excited about. The appointment where we get the testosterone and then we can inject it at home by ourselves, and then, you know, kind of being able to mark these milestones, you know, a month, six months, whatever, down the line. And I think there was a similar thing with seeing myself as a Survivor player is that I saw myself as a Survivor player I wanted to be. I was like, well, I know …
06:08
Zeke Smith
You know, I don’t just want to go and do it. I want to be remembered. Like, in my first season, the most important thing was making enough of a splash in order to be asked back. It wasn’t necessarily winning. So you have to think about the story you’re telling, because ultimately, people who get asked back, regardless of how good they are, is, can they tell a story and can they get along with people enough to stick around for enough time? And I think I excelled at both of those things. I did not necessarily excel at playing Survivor well, even though I was really into it, and I thought I was. I think I would be a much better Survivor player now, but I would also never do Survivor now. And I think that’s the wisdom that comes along with it.
06:59
Mel Woods
I’m curious because, you know, you were saying you felt that pressure from production to story-ize your transness and then make it part of this, and you said you very much did not want that to be the case. What was your kind of understanding at that time of … there were not a lot of trans people in reality TV? You know, again, like, we have Chaz Bono and Caitlyn Jenner, you know?
07:24
Zeke Smith
Right And I, I will say I’ve … Chaz and I, we used to work together mentoring young little transmascs. And he’s, he’s a great dude, I really like Chaz. And he’s someone, you know, but … you can say with both Chaz and Caitlyn is that they, you know, they came from celebrity families. They had an understanding of what celebrity was before they transitioned, and they had all this media-team help. And that really transformed the way that trans people were talked about and portrayed in the media because they had media training and very good publicists behind them. And for me, there was a woman who did Big Brother the summer before I applied, and what I really paid attention to was, how is CBS handling everything? And then how is … god bless Rob Cesternino …
08:24
Zeke Smith
And Rob has a podcast and that empire of reality television podcasts, which I used to listen to religiously. I was really curious to see how he and the other podcasters were going to talk about a trans person, especially a trans person who was struggling during a significant portion of it. And you know, what I saw from CBS was just this real desire to make the transness front and centre because, like, a lot of, like, every year Big Brother sort of has a cast member who is sort of ripped from the headlines. And then she … this was the post-Caitlyn Jenner, we have a trans woman ripped from the headlines. And you know, I didn’t love that. And I was also like, you know, the way to control the narrative is just to not talk about being trans.
09:06
Zeke Smith
But also there was a concern to talk about trans people in a good way, both from CBS and from like, you know, this little reality fan world I was a part of. And that felt very reassuring of, like, I feel like having the media savvy that I have, I feel like I can understand the power I also have with Survivor. And I did have to wield it once, which was, “Look, if we aren’t going to play by my rules, I’m smart enough to know I can go tell everybody.” Right? Like, I can use the media in a way to make you look really bad. And we’re in a moment where you would look really bad and people would care. You know, 10 years ago, maybe not, but now people will listen to me and, you know, I’m not a dumb guy. So I did feel like I had more power over the story than I think most people would feel like they do.
10:00
Mel Woods
Yeah, I think more and more kind of queer and trans folks realize today than maybe before that it is like, oh, yeah, a lot of these big organizations, yes, they’re invested in our well-being, but they also are invested in not looking like garbage.
10:15
Zeke Smith
And, and I also thought going into Survivor, if you understand the psychology of the person who runs Survivor, who is Jeff Probst, he doesn’t want to look bad, specifically. And he is the alpha and the mega. He runs everything. All the decisions run through him. He is in charge of casting, he is in charge of everything. And it’s his life’s work. There’s also a desire from Jeff to sort of be on the cutting edge of social issues. The way I sort of like thought I understood how he was gonna react to things is exactly how he reacted to things, and which worked out really well, for the both of us, so that’s good.
10:59
Mel Woods
Leading towards that, what was it like actually being there and realizing these kind of dreams and getting it kind of all working out how you had planned for it to work out?
11:08
Zeke Smith
I mean, yeah, Survivor was a big deal. Not having any sense of what was going to happen and truly how much it was gonna change my life. Going on Survivor was a big deal because I decided to make it a big deal. Right. I decided it was going to be life-changing not knowing anything. And part of that was also, like, shaping my mindset about like, this is the adventure of a lifetime. This is exciting. Be open and absorb everything. Try to find a way for everything to be fun. You know, I was a huge Survivor fan. I was getting to live my dream and just every part of it was incredible. And especially when I started, I had all these hopes about being able to make the fire and stuff. And then I actually did it.
11:56
Zeke Smith
I mean, there was a true surprise of like, oh, I made these goals, I set my mind to them, I worked very hard and I’m out here achieving them. And it was … I was also out there with great people. A lot of people I was out there with or just … we were just having a good time. We were also the cast after the Cambodia cast and where there was lots of, like, bullying and aggressive, misogynistic men, and, you know, really sort of unsavoury behaviour that made you feel kind of icky watching the show. So I’m … and we were the reaction to that, which means I think we were sort of, like, the overly nice and sweet and non-dramatic cast, solving puzzles, winning challenges, sleeping in the dirt. It was just all so much fun.
12:42
Zeke Smith
And I knew there was an all-star season coming that was filming directly after ours. So when I would go to do my interviews, I would be like, “You know, if there’s anything I need to do to get cast on the next season, I’m here for the long run. I’m planning on being here in Fiji for a while.” And they started kind of dropping hints. Like, it started to be a two-way conversation about staying. And then I also started thinking, could I do this again? Like, especially because I went pretty, I went, you know, deep in that season and I was like, do I have it in myself to go do this again? And there was part of me on the island that was like, no, if they ask you to come back, you need to say no. I didn’t.
13:23
Zeke Smith
You know, I got voted out, and you know, the tribe has spoken, whoosh. I walk out of Tribal Council, I give my little aw-shucks speech to camera and then I feel a tap on my shoulder and I look over and it’s Probst. And he’s like, “Come here.” And I’m like, I thought I was in trouble because he was just very gruff. “Come here.” And so I walk off with him and Matt Van Wagenen, who’s the other executive producer. And they’re like, “We’re doing an all-star season in two weeks and we want you back.” And I think they expected me to say yes right there, and I said, “Ladies, I need a burger and a margarita and a change of underpants before I can make this decision.”
13:56
Zeke Smith
And they were kind of, like, not that happy to hear it, but I was like, “Look, you gotta let me wipe my ass before I agree to sign up and do this again.” And I did, pretty quickly agreed to do it again. It was an interesting experience because everybody else was sort of winding down and thinking about going home. And I’m still thinking about “I have to go play Survivor again.” But it was great, you know, again, that was the goal. Invited back for Game Changers, and then I had achieved this goal. I was on the highest of highs, which is, you know, not being disappointed in yourself, being very proud of yourself unequivocally [laughs]. It’s a very good high. Especially because, you know, reality television producers, they just want to make you feel special all the time.
14:42
Zeke Smith
And I really love being made to feel special. And they, you know, they’ve got that full psychological profile of you, and they’ve figured out enough of you and they do, they know how to make you feel special and it’s a good thing, but oh man, that high is dangerous. It’s this narcotic feeling of “I am everything I think I am.” You know, I am seen, I am believed, and whoo. That’s how they get you to do things, you know, is there. They really make you feel seen and believed and like everything that you say matters and oh man. Well, you know, clearly, they get a lot of people to do a lot of things, including me.
15:23
Mel Woods
And Zeke on Survivor is the high-functioning end of trans reality TV. Zeke couldn’t control being out, but he had an opportunity to navigate control of his own trans story as to what happened next. Then there’s the low end where the participant has absolutely no control.
15:42
Voiceover
Tonight, the most explosive dating experience of a lifetime.
15:46
Voiceover
I feel bad because one of you have to leave.
15:49
Voiceover
Six red-blooded bachelors looking for love retreat to a luxury villa in the sun with one stunning babe, Miriam. But this is no ordinary dating show because Miriam is no ordinary woman.
16:07
Mel Woods
After the break, there’s something about Miriam.
16:14
Voiceover
I tried to be honest with you all.
16:16
Voiceover
Of you when she first come out of it. I just thought to myself, this must be fake. This can’t be real. There’s something about Miriam and it’s a bombshell about to explode.
16:26
Voiceover
I try to be honest in everything I say, but there is a secret that the guys don’t know.
16:40
Mel Woods
It’s 2003, two years before TransGeneration. The next year, a trans woman, Nadia Almada, would win Big Brother UK to much celebration. But this year, a U.K.-based reality program and its broadcaster and producers represented trans woman Miriam Rivera and her story in a way that could only be called, to quote Michael Hogan, writing in The Guardian, “shameful.” The show was originally going to be called Find Me a Man, but producers changed it to There’s Something About Miriam to capitalize on the popularity of the Cameron Diaz/Ben Stiller high-grossing rom-com, There’s Something About Mary. Not a particularly inspired decision, given that the reference was already five years old at that point, and nothing the producers did encouraged any hope of positive representation for trans people.
17:27
Mel Woods
The show and its premise were sensational in all the worst ways. It was exploitative and some believe that the experience led to Miriam’s tragic death in 2019 at the age of 38. In 2022, TransLash Media first told Miriam’s story in their six-part podcast Harsh Reality, which was hosted by Trace Lysette. And in 2024, the U.K.’s Channel 4 presented the three-part series Miriam: Death of a Reality Star that further details Miriam’s appalling treatment by producers, by the media and by the public, and also by some of her castmates, though not necessarily all of them. A few appear in the Channel 4 series and one of them, Aron Lane, recalls how at the end of the shoot, when the reveal was made, chaos ensued. One contestant raged violently, quote, “cameramen were crying.”
18:14
Mel Woods
He goes on to describe how Miriam was whisked away by the producers, never to be seen by her castmates again.
18:20
Mel Woods
“I would have liked a conversation about what she might have been going through,” he said, and so would Miriam, I’m sure. The original show is a low point not only for trans TV, but for reality TV and TV in general. And it’s only notable for showing us just how far trans TV has come in the time between Miriam and Zeke.
18:39
Zeke Smith
I forget if it was the morning of or if it was the morning before, but I woke up and it was a beautiful day in Fiji. I remember the waters are … they are so blue or so turquoise, like, whatever colour they are, they are the platonic ideal of that colour, and they are clear, and you can see the bottom, and, you know, when the sun reflects off of it, it’s just, it was really magical. And I remember this peace came over me because I knew the merge was gonna happen soon, and I knew I was gonna make the merge. And I was like, you know, you have made the merge in your second consecutive season of Survivor. I think the time has come that you need to have a plan to talk about being trans, maybe not necessarily with the other contestants, but with the with the audience. And I was like, you know, if I get to, like, top five, I think I’m gonna, I’m gonna talk about it with the audience. I think I’m like, we’re ready to go there. But, you know, it was, it was like the moment that I was ready—it happened.
19:37
Mel Woods
How did … you know, walking through that Tribal Council, can you talk through kind of how you felt what that journey was like with the silence and the realization that, “Oh, this is happening now, and it’s—”
19:52
Zeke Smith
Right. And I was trying my best to seem like I was fine, even though I was very much not fine. You know, was there a hand on the scale with regards to my outing? To some degree. But here’s the thing that gets me, is that I had been talking to these producers for four months at this point. I was clearly spiralling out of control. I was clearly in a very bad mental state. And the way that, you know, I wasn’t gonna quit and the way that they, you know, but I was not running at the same speed that I was before. And the way they chose to motivate me was very cruel. The narrative, they were like, “Well, when things get hard, you don’t really seem to rise up to the challenge, do you?”
20:40
Zeke Smith
Or like, “Man, when it gets this deep into the game, you really seem to lose a lot of steam.” Sort of this challenge to my masculinity, this sort of acting disappointed in me. It really fed the spiralling. I think positive reinforcement could have been much more effective and much less damaging to my mental health in the long run because it did take a couple years of therapy to get out of that. Get out of hearing those producers’ voices and how I was not good at Survivor, and I was disappointing them, and I didn’t, you know, I didn’t rise to the occasion when things got hard, which is abundantly and evidently not true [laughs]. But, yeah, I think somebody should have done something to get me voted out earlier than I was or what have you. But, you know, leaving me out there to fester with a bunch of [clears throat] reality alumni was not … was probably not the decision most medical professionals would have made about my mental state at the time.
21:48
Mel Woods
Yeah, not just reality people, but people who had done it before and knew all of the little machinations and, you know, the ruthless, the true—
21:56
Zeke Smith
No, there is. Right. No, then there is, there is a ruthlessness with returning players because they, you know, they have been through the process of hearing what people say about you on the internet and on podcasts, and, you know, they understand the production level of it in a new way, and they understand, you know, where the hands are on the scale are, and, you know, it means a lot more to people the second time, especially people who feel like they’re like, “If I want to be a reality career person, I have to come and bring it in a new way.
22:32
Zeke Smith
“And I know that if there is someone who is a production darling, evidently, you know, evidently a production darling on the island, that it’s gonna be good for them in the edit, and that what I need to do is to make sure they’re gone so that I can become the next production darling.” And I think that’s. That’s one of my biggest … that’s … that is my biggest issue with sort of the reality competition world is it takes ordinary people, it puts them into celebrity status overnight, and then just as overnight, it takes away that celebrity status and it goes away very quickly. I was very happy for it to go away very quickly, but I’d also had a larger dose of it. And so when it’s taken away, it’s like a drug, right?
23:14
Zeke Smith
Like, people go through withdrawals, and all they want is the next fix. And it …it does, like, people who were fine, they had good jobs and marriages, people who were just doing well enough in life, sometimes they go do Survivor, and it really f**ks them up. And the thing is that the show watches this. They are very aware of what it does to people, and there’s no impetus to help them. I got a year of very, very good therapy and all the access to support in the world, and that’s how I got through it. But nobody else gets that unless, you know, there’s something really significant happens to you, right? But you don’t want that to happen to you.
23:59
Mel Woods
That is a lot to go through for anybody, and it can be too much for some people. But when it doesn’t end tragically, when there is support, those stories can change lives. You know, speaking very personally, Zeke appeared at a time when there were not a lot of visible transmasc folks out there. It was really impactful for me to see a normal person who I, as a viewer, had built this connection to over a season and a half and had been like, “Wow, my favourite. He’s so funny. Love the fun shirts.” And then to be like, “Oh, wait, perhaps that feeling of connection or relatability that I feel is actually something a lot deeper.” It was a big impetus for my own trans journey or whatever. Zeke and my experience of him on Survivor is something I’ve gone back to.
24:46
Mel Woods
And revisited a lot over the years since, through phases and processes in my own transition. I’m a good example of somebody that Zeke was impactful for. Reality TV like Survivor is one of the few places where middle America, you know, middle of Canada, those folks in Edmond, Oklahoma, or Red Deer, Alberta, wherever those nine million CBS viewers are, can tune into an episode and for maybe the first time, see a normal-dude trans person and know that everybody interacts with trans people in their lives, and we don’t always realize it. For some people, it can just be casual, and to see that can be really impactful.
25:25
Zeke Smith
You know, I feel like even in this, where we’re starting to see this new wave of trans representation, still the significant thing about every trans person is that they’re trans. My experience is coloured with all sorts of privilege, of being, you know, white and a dude and all of that stuff, but I remember I did an interview for a documentary called Disclosure, which is all about trans representation in film and television. And the last question with the director, Sam, who is a brilliant documentarian, and the documentary, which can be found on Netflix, is fantastic, and if you have any interest in the subjects we’ve been talking about, you should watch it. But one of the last things that Sam asked me about was, “Do you fear a backlash? Do you feel that this increase in representation will lead to social, political, cultural backlash?”
26:16
Zeke Smith
And this was maybe like 2017 at the time. So I’m really flying high on “No, I have changed the world. I have brought cis people into the fold. You know, like, I know how to do it.” And so I pooh-poohed that idea. And how very wrong I was. Because, you know, the increase in trans visibility came in the moments after marriage equality was no longer the cause célèbre of the LGBTQ community. And there was a push to finally prioritize trans lives in the community, which prior to that had not been something that was on the major organizations’ radar. So now there was this sort of like, quiet push to have advocacy organizations doing quiet trans work. And one thing that was very, well, that the CEO of GLAAD has said, is that we were not doing our opposition research at the time.
27:20
Zeke Smith
And then we as a movement were caught off guard with trans people becoming the new villains of conservative fundraising. It was like, well, gay marriage is the law of the land, and most people are pretty okay with that. You know, overturning gay marriage was not something that was going to be politically viable. But saving seven-year-olds from mutilating their genitals—that, we can raise money on. I think the right was able to see, like, trans people, it was this niche thing, and now they’re everywhere and they’re spreading the virus of transness all around us. And they were able to really weaponize the increase invisibility as evidence of some, you know, larger malicious scheme. But I think that I do believe that continued authentic visibility is still the path forward.
28:16
Zeke Smith
Because if you look at the statistics of people who are opposed to trans equality or who are motivated to vote by concerns that trans people are coming to your schools to trans your children, most of them do not know a trans person. And you know, the way that a lot of people meet us for the first time is through our television screen. It’s so important to see ourselves reflected in the world, especially those of us from bumf**k, wherever, right? Where it’s not, you know, it’s not like we get to see those people walking around in the world. And reality television allows us to see those people walking around in the world.
29:02
Voiceover
I know we had really silly arguments about who was butch-er.
29:05
Mel Woods
T.J. and Jordan from TransGeneration. Two friends, two brothers, just a normal couple of weirdos goofing it up for the camera. I’m Mel Woods and you’ve been listening to Get Queer. Thanks for getting here.
29:21
Voiceover
One, two, three.
29:23
Voiceover
Done.
29:25
Voiceover
I guess.
29:31
Mel Woods
Thanks to my guest, Zeke Smith, GLAAD board member and writer and comedian living in L.A. This episode was produced by Daniel MacIvor and edited by Jamie Foulds. Get Queer was mixed at Sound Park Studios in Nova Scotia and produced by Pink Triangle Press in Toronto. In Vancouver, I’m Mel Woods. Thanks for listening.