Actor Jake Graf and army officer Hannah Winterbourne, both of whom identify as transgender, wed in London this past weekend in a wedding they described as being "like a Disney movie." To mark the occasion, they gave an interview to The Sun, and while the write-up was good, the headline was definitely not.
The Sun used the headline "Tran and wife" (siiiiiigh, why??) and also wrote, “Jake who used to be a woman weds Hannah who was a man.” That's not how being transgender works.
Graf tweeted, "Following such a lovely, positive article from @Emskibeat in today's @TheSun it's a real shame that it's been cheapened by such a sensationalised and misleading headline. @hannahw253 was never a man, as I was never a woman. #trans #fact."
Graf spoke to Gay Times about The Sun's reporting of their wedding and said, "While Hannah and I absolutely love the article, it has been somewhat marred by what can only be described as a sensationalist, clumsy and offensive headline." He continued, "Added to that the red lettering proclaiming that I ‘used to be a woman’, and ‘Hannah used to be a man’, not only categorically untrue but also a dangerous and dismissive grasp of what it means to be transgender, and I would call this a rather large error on the part of The Sun."
Graf told Gay Times that the couple had been approached by larger papers, but due to those papers' "terrible track record of transphobic 'reporting'," the couple said no.
They felt that The Sun would be the best choice to write a positive piece about them, given that the publication features trans writer Paris Lees, and that it has covered trans stories in a sensitive fashion.
Graf explained, “It was important to us to attempt to widen people’s understanding of trans lives and experiences and we felt that The Sun with its large readership would help to achieve that. Hopefully a tacky and ill advised headline hasn’t stopped that from being the case.”
Graf said that he's known since he was 3 years old that he was a man and that Winterbourne has always known that she was a woman. Their transitions were, in his words, "simply aligning our minds with our bodies."
People on Twitter also weighed in on The Sun's awful headline.
Much better.
