How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM)

How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) is an American sitcom on CBS that follows Ted Mosby’s trials and errors in the search of true love. He’s accompanied on his journey by his small group of friends as they navigate their late twenties and early thirties as working professionals in New York City. The show aired from September 19, 2005 through March 31, 2014, and is now available on Netflix, as well as other digital streaming platforms. HIMYM is famous for its progressive portrayal and support of gay rights and families, and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Individual Episode. Unfortunately, while it claims to support LGBTQ+ rights, HIMYM continually fails transgender women. The casual transphobia in HIMYM results from the usage
The term also works to address the problems specifically created when two or more forms of prejudice exist simultaneously, making neither one seem as valid or overarching. It rejects the “single axis framework” (Nash) used by race or gender specific scholars, favoring a multidimensional approach. Intersectionality can also be applied in order to analyze the multitude of factors that contribute to the transphobia and relative acceptance thereof in How I Met Your
In Season 2, Episode 9, Ted’s dating a girl named Cathy. None of his friends like her, but they refuse to tell him why. He has a brief series of day dreams about what Cathy’s flaw is. In the first one, he imagines that she lied about having sex with her High School English teacher and got him arrested, in the second one, he imagines that she volunteers at the animal shelter, kills the puppies, and makes bracelets out of the collars, and in the third one, Ted leaves to use the restroom and overhears Cathy say “I bet he's going to the urinal. Yeah, I remember when I had a penis,” after this last one, Ted gasps as the laugh track plays in the background. Both Cathy’s comment and Ted’s reaction are deeply problematic. Cathy’s reminiscence about her former male genitalia reinforces the idea that sex and gender are synonymous, while the scene makes light of the efforts by many trans-women to “prove their womanhood,” (Koyama). Cathy is already inherently disadvantaged as a person whose body is read as female, but that intersects queer-discrimination, when her sex at birth is discovered. Her queerness horrifies Ted because it means that he— a cishetero man— has been attracted to and “tricked” by a person who he now perceives as male, despite her own assertion of gender. This is exemplified by his moral equation of puppy killing to being a trans-woman on a date with a cishetero man.