Seventeen Magazine Stirs Up Transphobia

They might not be Twilight vampires, but transgender youth – a recent Seventeen magazine article insinuated – are just as predatory.

In the column, "True Life: My Boyfriend Turned Out to be a Girl," Jessica Press recounted 18-year-old Sheri's tale about getting involved with a boy that bandaged his chest from a "baseball injury" and had a falsetto voice. Surely enough, Sheri eventually discovered the "big-time secret" that her "liar" boyfriend kept.

The editors at Seventeen then decided to follow-up Sheri's story with a sidebar entitled "Total Betrayal." In it, three Seventeen readers related to Sheri's episode by comparing her transgender boyfriend to the total "pervs" and "druggies" they previously dated.

"[T]he Seventeen editor for this story chose to portray female-to-male trans youth as really girls — and by extension male-to-female trans youth are really boys," wrote Autumn Sandeen, a transgender blogger. "In the way the story was presented, it portrayed all trans people as being deceptive liars … What the sensationalizing of this Seventeen story does is a recipe for teaching intolerance to trans youth based on gender identity and expression, and [the article] is a recipe for fueling violence against trans people."

Since publishing the column, Seventeen Editor-in-Chief Ann Shoket has met with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to convey her regrets.