Most people haven’t spent much time around transgender people (that they know of…). Varner’s been camping on the beach in minimal conditions with this guy for three weeks. He may have seen scars from top surgery that, even after they fade, are still distinctive, or (if there was no bottom surgery) may have noticed that there was something missing.
I’m going to go back and re-watch the episode, but before Tribal, there was a private conversation between Varner and Zeke which ended with Zeke saying “I’m going to tell you something…” Zeke may have just told him.
“reality TV” is an oxymoron. It should be called manufactured drama. It does deserve some credit. They’ve found a way to make a soap opera without paying a lot of money on writers and actors.
Summarizing:
-It happened 9 months ago.
-Zeke has been in on the drama the entire time.
-He didn’t object to any of it.
-Nothing bad happened during the 9 months of being outed.
-CBS, after 9 months of working with Zeke, makes the revelation.
-If Zeke didn’t object to the narrative than how does any of this qualify as being “outed”?
-This is 2017 where transgendered is the new orange. how is such a revelation anything but lots of positive free press, and a guest spot on Ellen?
CBS and Zeke spent 9 months carefully crafting moral outrage which their viewers translated into internet chatter. Not only have they found a way around paying for writers and actors they’ve tapped into free advertisement.
I think some people are missing the main source of outrage. Outing someone is not a great move, but by itself wasn’t the real issue. Outing him in order to get him kicked off because he was “deceptive” was. CBS didn’t do that.
I just wanted to comment that Survivor is a game show, and has to follow the US laws that govern game shows. This has been stated in articles many times over the 15+ years it’s been on the air. So while they can edit what they broadcast however they like, they absolutely cannot do anything during the filming that would influence the game itself. And since part of the game is the contestants voting each other out, telling them to change their behavior towards each other would certainly not be allowed. So there’s no way they could have told the rest of the players to never bring up the Varner/Zeke incident again, or written scripts for them to follow to re-record the Tribal Council, or anything like that.
The hell with facts. Facts are boring. We’ve got a perfect narrative about the liberal media propping up a transgender person so damn the facts and full speed ahead with the false narrative. You’ll get all kinds of people to spread the story, including the OP. who doesn’t even watch the show.
To anyone who watches the show, you know there are two and only two options: Show the incident or cancel the season right now. Regardless of whether they showed the scene or not, the toothpaste is out of the tube. Any attempt to cover up the incident would fail, and the show would lose all credibility, and the network would lose a 15 year franchise with predictable good ratings. Every executive at CBS would have to be an idiot to even attempt to cover this up.
The conservative plotline is wavering on this one. There are no handholds to grab onto, just air.
I just re-watched parts of the episode (the parts with Varner & Zeke), and there are three points to consider:
This is the time in the season (about three weeks in) where sleep-, food- and comfort-deprivation are hitting them all like a freight train, to the point that people are having trouble remembering that 6 is greater than 4. Varner was not thinking clearly at all.
He said in interviews during the episode that he was trying to get Ozzie voted out. Not Zeke.
When he outed Zeke, he prefaced it by saying “I know something that’s insignificant, it’s not important to the game at all.” Makes me think that for that brief moment of total brain-farting, he thought that outing Zeke, even only to a set full of people, was trivial and unimportant.
So, Varner’s an ass who doesn’t think clearly on his feet when he’s dead tired and mildly starving. He only brought up Zeke as transgender as a side comment, to get people thinking that some people are hiding other, more game-important secrets.
At this point, we don’t know how many more episodes Zeke is in before he’s eliminated, or if he even wins. Are they supposed to edit every mention of his trans status, which all the contestants now know about, out of the entire rest of the season?
Seems like that’d be an even bigger PR headache when (not if) the news broke.
Not totally. One of the women commented that “Zeke now has the perfect story for the final Tribal Council,” which is probably true. Which means he has probably been moved up on many of the other player’s “gotta get rid of” lists.
Yes, it’s a big factor in the game as your quote demonstrates. Considering he was almost voted out, there was obviously a lot of talk that didn’t make it on air. It looks like the editing started this week. There was no scene of the team returning to camp and having a post mortem after TC, which always happens.
Yeah, there was. It was just the next morning instead of at night (in black and white). Or, it could have been that they didn’t get out of the TC until daylight!
Yep. Former contestants have kept their best story secret until they made it to the finals, for the very reason that they were worried it would make them a target. Most recent was Jeremy Collins, who didn’t tell anyone his wife was pregnant until the final TC.