One of the biggest myths around is the myth of 'the liberal media.' Eric Alterman has persuasively debunked this hoary myth in his book, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (Basic) ( excerpted in The Nation)

The mainstream media are (note 'media' is the plural for 'medium') not really liberal; rather, mainstream media in the United States are corporate, which means that they often reflect the worst of market-based imperatives, above all, the need to generate a profit for owners and investors.

Nowhere is this un-liberal profit motive more in evidence than in media coverage of transgender issues. Consider an article in the New York Daily News from January 25. In "Welcome to the drag race! Gender benders are crossing over, into your living room," Joe Neumaier writes,

"Sure, 'Brokeback Mountain' is riding atop solid box office (even in red states) and is lassoing every award in sight. But the real sex story du jour in American pop culture? Try transgender people: Women identifying as men, and men as women. In movies, at the bookstore and on TV, people are passing for the opposite sex. In many performance spaces, drag queens and drag kings reign supreme. And the very human stories they're telling are dragging people in."

"TransAmerica" is a road movie with a twist, a kind of psycho-sexual picaresque about sexuality and gender identity in the early twenty-first century United States.

I must admit I was a bit skeptical of the idea of a female playing a transsexual woman, particularly Felicity Huffman, who I think is a very good actor, but when I heard she was playing the lead role, I wondered if they picked her because of the "Desperate Housewives" fame -- and oddly enough, her character in the film is named 'Bree' (though not surnamed 'Vandekamp'), even though of course she plays Lynette in "Housewives".

But I was really impressed by this film, written and directed by Duncan Tucker. Huffman is really convincing (if that's the right word here) as a male-to-female transsexual (MTF TS). My only reservation is that the film is a little too 'medical model of transsexuality' for me -- with an implicit GID (Gender Identity Disorder) pathologizing of the "I feel like a woman trapped in a man's body" kind. Having said that, "TransAmerica" is, in my view, one of the best feature films I've seen with a transgender theme; perhaps not quite as powerful as "Boys Don't Cry", but unlike that film, the central character is not a victim, but rather an ordinary transgendered woman feeling her way toward self-empowerment.