About a year ago, I signed a change.org petition – despite growing up in a generation that knows you should always untick the ‘unsubscribe’ box, this time I didn’t. As a result, I sometimes turn my face heavenward and wonder why – like Job in the Old Testament – all the world’s ills are now visited upon me via my email inbox. Not a week goes by when my attention and signature isn’t demanded for a new issue (‘Older Drivers KILL’ was the email subject line this week). Frankly, I receive more emails from Pakistani Taliban-survivor and Nobel laureate Malala than I do from my own sister.

In this climate of ceaseless online activism, attempting to stir my outrage at every possible issue – it’s easy to feel a little jaded. Is this really that big a problem? Will anyone this petition is addressed to give a fuck? Why is everyone so outraged all the time? Oh, why don’t we just ban everything! Some issues will naturally concern me more than others – injustices I can relate to or those that affect people I know. So, when I heard there was a petition to boycott Zoolander 2, I was instantly intrigued as it appeared to appeal to a cause close to my heart. I’d presumed the petition was finally calling for a boycott of Ben Stiller, a darling of the kind of male-led, mainstream Hollywood puerile slapstick comedy that has always left me cold. ‘Justice at last!’ I thought.

As it turns out, the petition wasn’t trying to ban Stiller’s acting, but objected to a brief moment in the trailer for Zoolander 2, when a character played by Benedict Cumberbatch is introduced as the world’s most successful model. The character, named ‘All’, has an ambiguous gender identity – which is immediately seized upon by Stiller’s titular protagonist and his co-lead, played by Owen Wilson.

Zoolander asks if the model is “like a male model or a female model?” “All is all,” Cumberbatch’s character replies. Wilson’s character then says, “I think he’s asking if you have a hot dog or a bun.” The petition wasn’t protesting comedy that wasn’t to my taste – it was protesting comedy where I was, in effect, the punchline of the joke. That aside, perhaps an instant rallying cry for boycotting based on a trailer clip that’s less than ten seconds long was still a bit kneejerk. It doesn’t help that the wording of the petition itself, which objects to Cumberbatch, a cis actor, playing a trans character, is overzealous. For one thing, it draws a highly suspect analogy to blackface, which makes me uncomfortable (my debating coach at school once told me never to make comparisons with race or use Hitler as an example – it stuck, and has served me well).

Nevertheless, the petition has 12,000 signatures and counting. Its popularity isn’t purely performed offence. Cinema and television history is littered with jokes at the expense of trans people or ‘cross-dressers’, and we need to remember the average person didn’t know the differences between the two until recently. One classic trope is the feminine cross-dresser being ‘caught out’ using their penis to urinate, to everyone’s horror or amusement – or both. It’s there in Mrs Doubtfire, in Ace Ventura, even in the 2005 film Transamerica staring Felicity Huffman. Just ten years ago, when I was a teenager, British TV aired There’s Something About Miriam, a dating show where men unknowingly competed to date a trans woman, Miriam, who had not undergone sex reassignment surgery. In the final scene, the winner is announced – he’s thrilled. Then comes the announcement that Miriam is trans. The mood changes, as his fellow competitors begin collectively begin to howl with laughter at him and he looks cheated and disgusted by Miriam. Miriam is stood there, humiliated. Watching the clip ten years later actually makes me tremor with rage for all the trans people who grew up with this cruelty as their visibility.

So forgive trans and gender-variant people for being upset by Wilson’s ‘hot dog/bun’ joke – they’ve had years and years of this shit. If everyone else is bored by the sudden calls to ‘no platform’ Germaine Greer or boycott films, perhaps reflect on how bored trans people have been all this time. To people who dismiss this as online clicktivism, I can assure you pop culture representations directly reinforce and translate into actual experiences. I’ve had drunk people try and grab between my legs ‘for the lolz’ and death threats from men who’ve catcalled me on the street when they realise I may have a penis myself. Perhaps the full film will humanise Cumberbatch’s character, perhaps they’ll be sympathetic or even empowered. But the trailer edit, designed to showcase the film’s comedic highlights, trades on degrading gags which are as old as the hills.

There is, of course, another classic defence by those desperate to defend the Zoolander franchise – that it’s intended as a satire of the powerful, multi-million dollar fashion industry and its absurdity. Cumberbatch’s character is, naturally, a comment on the rise of trans models like Andreja Pejić and Hari Nef. Nef actually tweeted that the character may be an attempt to ‘drag’ her, in typically droll tone.

Let’s not be fooled by this argument, though. Yes, satire can mock powerful institutions like the fashion industry and make them cartoonishly absurd. There’s definitely a critique to be made of the fashion industry’s current fetish for trans/androgynous aesthetics, but all the signs here are is that these models themselves are the joke. Nef and Pejić aren’t trans for the sake of their fashion careers – if the fashion industry is using their identities to sell products, it’s not they who should be queried but the cisgender teams controlling their campaigns. Call me judgemental (and prejudiced against Ben Stiller), but I’m unconvinced Cumberbatch and the cis filmmakers at Paramount Pictures will have a grip on this distinction. If Pejić herself, or a non-binary actor, had played Cumberbatch’s role, would the writers’ genitals gag have made it in to the film so easily? It’s less likely – which also points to the petition’s wider point about the problems when cis actors play trans people.

Still think trans people are being over the top here? Let them have it. Zoolander 2 will no doubt attract millions of viewers and dollars anyway – no one is a transphobe purely because they don’t like boycotts or online petitions or even because they pay to see (even enjoy!) the movie, just as watching Game of Thrones doesn’t necessarily make you a racist or a rape apologist. The point is acknowledging downward-punching transphobia where it exists and agreeing that any comedy would be better off without it. It’s also acknowledging that trans people, denied a say for so long, have a right to have their voices heard and influence their representations in the mainstream media however they can. Online petitions are a conversation starter, used to raise consciousness at a grassroots level – some will be wrong, some will bore you to death – but, like the voices of trans people, they’re not going away and sometimes they deserve both your attention and your respect.