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Corporal Klinger in MASH. Is he an offensive character to the transgender and cross dressing communities?


Mighty One Sam

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Mighty One Sam

I have been thinking and reading about this for some time. I just can't quite wrap my head around the topic. For you folks out there, what do you think of the Klinger character and his cross dressing as a means to get out of the army?

 

I'm sorry if this is a controversial topic. I'm really just trying to educate myself.

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DuranDuranfan

As far as I know, nobody has said a word about it since M*A*S*H had been in reruns since forever.

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Well, for the time the show took place and for the time the show was made, there wasn't nearly as much understanding and acknowledgement of transgender identity as there is now. And yet it was brought up in one episode. There's a visiting surgeon (female, and I believe Scandinavian of some kind) who informs Klinger that there are surgeries available for gender affirmation (or sex changes, as they were called) and Klinger firmly responded he wasn't a woman. Cross-dressing is different from gender identity, which I think is made clear in the show. The fact that Klinger is using it to convince the army he's mentally unfit to serve in the military is more or less making fun of the rules of what the military deems sane or insane, and the fact that it doesn't work is a statement that there's nothing wrong with cross-dressing to the point of someone not being able to perform duties. 

 

I think out of all pieces of culture and entertainment to accuse of transphobia, this is a lazy example that's not as problematic as some might initially assume. The show portrays Klinger sympathetically, and it's a criticism of the draft more than a mockery of cross-dressing. 

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Phantasmal Fingers

I remember watching that series back in the 70s. All those years ago...

 

I rewatched a couple of episodes a few years ago and couldn't believe how smug, self-satisfied and cruel the characters of Hawkeye and BJ were! 😲 I wonder what I ever saw in this programme because of this. It's virtually unwatchable now.

 

Anyway, as for Klinger, given the lack of visibility of anyone trans and the attitude to cross dressing in mainstream society back then, I can't imagine why anyone would now be retrospectively offended by this character's depiction. 

 

As Klinger only pretends to be mad - on mainstream society's terms - by cross-dressing, it's easier to see Klinger as a critique of the mainstream view than it is to suggest he supported it. 

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I think that it's not a good idea to project today's attitudes and ideals onto an era of the past.

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Clinger wasn't transgender, he's just trying to get the very homophobic army to kick him out.  The dresses were only one of his schemes to get the army mad enough at him to send him home.  

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Janus the Fox

It’s a bit offensive reading into the character, a character that cross dresses in an attempt it receive a psych diagnosis of insanity, just to be discharged from the army.  Quite offensive now, perhaps less so then with its attempt at humour.

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4 hours ago, Snaonderneath a Mistlecone said:

There's a visiting surgeon (female, and I believe Scandinavian of some kind) who informs Klinger that there are surgeries available for gender affirmation (or sex changes, as they were called) and Klinger firmly responded he wasn't a woman.

Yes, that was the Swedish doctor, Inga, played by Mariette Hartley. Part of that episode was also about her being a woman doctor and how that affected Hawkeye. I thought it was a good episode.

 

Back to the point of the thread, as you and others said Klinger wasn't portrayed as TG. He just represented the idea of guys trying to get out of the army on a section 8 discharge. Early on in the show it was played more for laughs (not always at his expense), but as the show went on and the characters developed there was more depth to it, like that Swedish doctor episode. He did tend to dress in women's clothing less often in later seasons, and engage in other dodges and schemes, while also being good at his job.

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Calligraphette_Coe

Yeah well, it was done for man-in-a-dress laughs and for me, being transgender was anything BUT a laughing matter. It was about as poignant as the Three Stooges in a Danielle Steele romance novel.

 

Even these days, more times than not, trans characters are played by cisgender actors. They say we are not 'professional's. Really? Who better than someone who passes and can draw from a looooong term memory of hurt and despair but can still manage a wan smile?

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Celyn: The Lutening
12 hours ago, Snaonderneath a Mistlecone said:

it's a criticism of the draft more than a mockery of cross-dressing. 

This. Of course, it was written with the knowledge that most of the audience would get a cheap laugh out of it, but MASH didn't encourage that to anywhere near the extent of other shows of the era (and other more recent shows as well).

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Phantasmal Fingers

You can read Klinger - and the army he's in - in different ways. There is more to this than first meets the eye... 

 

If Klinger habitually cross dresses should we accept his explanation that he's doing this because he's aware that the army will say he's mad and then kick him out and that this is what he wants? What if he actually thinks that the army will refuse to accept he's mad? The longer he cross dresses and is allowed to get away with it the more plausible this reading becomes. Does this then make him a cross dresser who cannot otherwise admit that cross dressing is actually what he wants to do? In other words, it's a double bluff! People in the army will tolerate his cross dressing if they think he's trying to get himself kicked out of the military but actually the army is the only institution that will (effectively) allow him to cross dress if he plays along with the idea that he cross dresses because he wants out. 

 

And what about Hoolahan (sp?) She is always depicted in trousers, never a skirt. Is she therefore a cross dresser the army hasn't noticed? Or does the army actually tolerate both because it no longer believes in its own regulations? 

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10 minutes ago, Moderne Jazzhanden said:

Hoolahan (sp?)

Houlihan, I think, though there might be a silent g in there somewhere. 

 

And she's always in uniform of some kind, whether formal or fatigues. I think nurses' formal uniforms had skirts but fatigues did not. She would never step out of line with military regulations...at least not until the 8th season or so. ;)

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Calligraphette_Coe
10 minutes ago, Moderne Jazzhanden said:

You can read Klinger - and the army he's in - in different ways. There is more to this than first meets the eye... 

 

If Klinger habitually cross dresses should we accept his explanation that he's doing this because he's aware that the army will say he's mad and then kick him out and that this is what he wants? What if he actually thinks that the army will refuse to accept he's mad? The longer he cross dresses and is allowed to get away with it the more plausible this reading becomes. Does this then make him a cross dresser who cannot otherwise admit that cross dressing is actually what he wants to do? In other words, it's a double bluff! People in the army will tolerate his cross dressing if they think he's trying to get himself kicked out of the military but actually the army is the only institution that will (effectively) allow him to cross dress if he plays along with the idea that he cross dresses because he wants out. 

Yeah, the classic Catch 22. But if Art imitates Life, does Corporate imitate Military? Both seem to have their moments of Thd Inane. Only the uniforms change. Corporate crossdresses as Military, only they don't have soldiers as much as they have Lawyers. ( PR handles the Catch 22 chores.)

 

 

10 minutes ago, Moderne Jazzhanden said:

 

And what about Hoolahan (sp?) She is always depicted in trousers, never a skirt. Is she therefore a cross dresser the army hasn't noticed? Or does the army actually tolerate both because it no longer believes in its own regulations? 

No, because try getting out of a Jeep in a skirt. But  I would question the term "Full Dress Uniform....."

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On 11/28/2019 at 12:00 PM, Moderne Jazzhanden said:

And what about Hoolahan (sp?) She is always depicted in trousers, never a skirt. Is she therefore a cross dresser the army hasn't noticed? Or does the army actually tolerate both because it no longer believes in its own regulations? 

Field uniforms for U.S. nurses in WWII and Korea included pants, and tons of documentary evidence that women in field hospitals wore pants is just a google away. The false parallel between pants and skirts as gendered clothing kinda bugs me, because pantsuits for women are about a century old and WWII really put the last nail in the coffin on that taboo as long as the pants in question are of an appropriate cut or the social situation is particularly pragmatic. That taboo still exists for AMAB people wearing skirts as a general rule, although people will snigger and make exceptions for kilts. I just had to deal with an ugly mess because I admitted to wearing  a skirt to a private event.

 

My memory is fuzzy, but Klinger might be a reference the double-bind of Catch-22 where one can leave the military if one is considered to be "insane," but wanting to get out of the military is considered to be peak sanity.  Two other factors are that almost everyone in the TV audience in the 1970s had lived through some form of military conscription (via friends and family, if not personally), and homosexuality was one of the few ways that one could get out of conscription. So on one level Klinger is a trickster trying to game the system to get out of it, while his pragmatic commanding officers are gaming the system to keep him in. On another level, "straight guys dress as women for pragmatic reasons" was a comedy trope of the time which usually relied on establishing the cross-dressing character as really straight and cis. There's probably a fair bit of analysis there behind the way that trope relies on throwing trans and GNC people under the bus to establish the character's heterosexuality.

 

I don't think that Klinger would work as a character who served in Afghanistan or Iraq, because the social context is just too different.

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It's been a while since I've seen MASH, but I never found Klinger offensive. He's a man, behaves like a man, is treated like a man, and never pretends to be a girl. It's a foolish attempt to get out of the army which says more about the army and how fragile some of their rules regarding who can serve and who can't are than it does about trans people. And I believe the length of the joke shows that it's not just a throwaway thing. 

 

I think it also says more about males assuming a feminine role and appearance. How he's not treated as insane despite his wearing women clothes, and that he's still a man while wearing them. Yes, it's a gag, but it's an older show. Wouldn't it be nice if we accepted men in dresses today, outside of drag shows? (No, I don't mean transwomen, I mean men in dresses. Like how women in pants used to be scandelous but now isn't.)

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  • 5 months later...

Offensive, maybe not, but as someone who grew up watching MASH from age 8 to age 19 and who always identified as trans and cross dressed and sought gender counseling all my life, the character made me fell ashamed.   I understand it was the times, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t affected, I was.

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Phantasmal Fingers
On 5/20/2020 at 4:29 AM, AAlyxx said:

Offensive, maybe not, but as someone who grew up watching MASH from age 8 to age 19 and who always identified as trans and cross dressed and sought gender counseling all my life, the character made me fell ashamed.   I understand it was the times, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t affected, I was.

Do you think that you reacted in the way you did because a humorous depiction of someone faking a persona which could be seen as trans (not all cross-dressers are trans as far as I know) had no prior positive role model with which it could be compared, and that this send-up thus came across to you as invalidating in a way it would not otherwise have done had there been an affirmative mainstream depiction you were already familiar with? 

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