Spoilers for the first two episodes of season 2 of Peacock’s The Traitors below.
I have been watching season two of The Traitors (U.S. version) because it has contestants from The Challenge (my favorite reality show/one of my special interests) and it has Peppermint from RuPaul’s Drag Race and it has recently out Survivor alum (and partner of Mae Martin) Parvati Shallow and it has Alan Cumming hosting in his best high-camp Scottish glam. I’m loving the show but the first cast member to be banished from the game is just not sitting right with me.
The show’s concept is a little bit like a game of Clue. A bunch of (mostly) reality stars gather in a Scottish castle, where several cast members are secretly designated “Traitors.” They have some level of input regarding whether or not they want to play the role of a Traitor, as some personalities are better suited for deception than others. Each night, the Traitors “murder” a member of “the Faithful,” eliminating them from the show. The next evening, the entire group gathers around a round table to “banish” someone from the house who they suspect to be a Traitor, thus eliminating that person from the show.
Essentially, the person murdered by the Traitors is a strategic gameplay choice, while the person banished from the house is an exercise in group dynamics, groupthink, and watching people turn on each other. Reality shows like this tend to expose some really troubling interpersonal and systemic dynamics among cast members—which is how, over the course of a single episode, Peppermint went from being voted the most popular person in the house to being voted out by the rest of her castmates. Not only that, but Trishelle’s targeting of Peppermint on The Traitors is not an isolated incident for her, and part of a larger pattern of how systemic oppression plays out on competition-based, survival reality shows.
“I… was thinking: Gosh, the optics here just don’t feel … something feels icky about this for some reason,” Peppermint told Vulture in a post-elimination interview. So what happened?
During the first night in the house, Peppermint is having a conversation with Trishelle Cannatella, an alum of The Real World and The Challenge. They are talking about fashion, the exchange is light-hearted, and Trishelle makes a joke that if she is murdered that night, she’ll know that Peppermint is a Traitor (for context, neither Trishelle nor Peppermint are Traitors, though neither knows that about the other at the time).
Peppermint reacts in what I thought was an appropriate way, making a shocked face and a slightly exaggerated backing-off motion—both of which read as playful to me, as someone familiar with queer culture and drag culture. But not to Trishelle. Trishelle—a white cis woman—immediately labeled Peppermint—a Black trans woman—as “suspicious” and her reaction as “disrespectful.” I looked at my partner and said, “This is a cultural clash—Trishelle does not have the context for Peppermint and is falling back on offensive stereotypes as a result.”
At Vulture, interviewer Jason P. Frank has the same thought: “What struck me about what Trishelle was perceiving was that, to me, it indicated a lack of previous interaction specifically with Black trans women or drag queens, and thus not knowing how [Peppermint] would talk, and so she felt like [Peppermint] reacting normally was this huge thing.”
Trishelle then spends the rest of the day telling everyone else in the house about this interaction. Peppermint is confronted about it by other cast members and she is surprised—she remembered the interaction as both friendly and minor—and in her attempts to defend herself, ends up talking her way into looking even more suspicious.
It’s important to note that Peppermint comes from a competition-based reality show, but not one with the same kind of survival strategy and deception required of shows like The Challenge, Survivor, and Big Brother. This is all new to her and she is quickly backed into a corner. By the time they reach the round table that night to vote someone out of the house, Trishelle’s focus on Peppermint has convinced the rest of the cast to focus there, too, and Peppermint is banished.
“I felt probably the worst I’ve ever felt in my life since being in high school, when I was picked on as a queer kid,” Peppermint told Vulture. “I felt like I went onto my favorite show to have an experience and meet some of the people who I watched on TV, and I ended up getting transported back to when I used to get beaten up.”
Watching a cis, white woman target a Black trans woman (the only trans person on the cast!), misconstrue her tone (a racist microaggression!), accuse her of being “deceptive” (a transphobic trope!), and rally the house to villainize and turn on her (throw some homophobia in there too!) was infuriating.
“The friends with whom I watched the show jumped out of our seats swearing transphobia when it became clear that Trishelle’s smear campaign against Peppermint was a success,” Amalie MacGowan said at them. “I’ll acknowledge that Peppermint made some rookie mistakes, but I just don’t believe she was the only one in the room to do so. The fact that her specific missteps were brought to the fore and her defenses dismissed made this episode especially difficult to watch.”
It was even more enraging because this is not Trishelle’s first time stepping into racist and homophobic dynamics on reality TV—which is something that none of the coverage that I’ve read so far has mentioned. It seems Trishelle now has a pattern of targeting (queer) Black women when she goes onto competition shows.
When Trishelle was on the “Rivals II” season of The Challenge in 2013, she quit the competition after getting into a fight with fellow contestant Aneesa Ferreira. Aneesa is Black, Jewish, and queer, three things she has always been open about since her original casting on The Real World: Chicago in 2002. During a scene where challengers are all hanging out, drinking, and talking, Aneesa is discussing her identity and the fact that she came out as queer without caring what anyone—including her family—would think. Trishelle describes Aneesa as being, “I’m here, and I’m here,” implying that Aneesa is all over the place in terms of her identity.1
A (visibly intoxicated) Trishelle says, “You're fucking Black, you're Jewish. What the fuck?” The fight gets physical and Trishelle does not return to The Challenge until 2021, for the first season of The Challenge: All-Stars.
She apologized to Aneesa, saying, “I know that it was a long time ago but I know that it hurt your feelings and I just wanted to personally apologize to you just face-to-face because it was racially insensitive and I never would want to say anything to hurt you.” Notably missing from the apology was the word “racist,” which is what Trishelle’s comments actually were.
Trishelle has aged and grown and the way those dynamics play out are more subtle now than they were when she was 34, but they haven’t changed. She still showed up on The Traitors and played the innocent, scared white woman card to perfection and scapegoated the Black, trans woman who came in with no strategic gameplay experience and no natural allies because she was the only player from the Drag Race franchise in the house.
“I went into the place as the only person from Drag Race and the only Black trans woman in the show,” Peppermint told Vulture. “Most people in the United States say that they don’t even personally know someone who’s transgender, so that’s an uphill battle. Most of the people who were in that castle said that they didn’t watch Drag Race.”
The unfortunate thing is that the victimized white woman role is working for her because she is still in the house and Peppermint is not. When Peppermint was banished from the house, she revealed herself to her castmates as a member of “the Faithful.” Nearly everyone at the table gasped, many seeming to register what had just happened, even if they lacked the cultural analysis to understand just how deep the oppressive dynamics they’d all just engaged in really were. For her part, Trishelle cried, as any good, victimized white woman would, making her own prejudices and bad behavior about herself and her feelings of guilt.
“I felt like I was spot-on,” Trishelle told The Daily Beast regarding her hunch that Peppermint was being deceptive. “I felt she looked like a Traitor, the way she was carrying herself—so confident, almost like, ‘I’m untouchable.’ So I was shocked when I found out she wasn’t.”
Peppermint revealed in an interview with Paper Magazine that, in a moment that didn’t make it to air, she put her elimination in perspective for the rest of the cast, telling them they’d been victims of mob mentality and explaining how what just happened on a micro level in that room reflected larger, macro cultural dynamics.
“Given the outside world and knowing how much the outside world affects our everyday lives; what’s going on in the outside world with regards to how LGBTQ+ people are viewed; and the literal campaign that’s happening, throwing trans people and queer people under the bus, saying that we’re groomers and we’re perpetrators … I didn’t want to go into that house electing to be a perpetrator,” Peppermint told Vulture about why she asked to be one of the Faithful.
Her castmates quickly turned her into a villain anyway and if that doesn’t say a lot about the way this world views trans people, trans women, and specifically Black trans women, I don’t know what does. Trishelle’s response and ability to be accountable for her behavior says a lot, too. While Peppermint noted that several castmates had reached out to her prior to the show airing, Trishelle conspicuously had not.
“I thought about reaching out,” Trishelle told The Daily Beast. “But I was like, maybe it’s still too fresh.”
One castmate, however, did have a very intense reaction to Peppermint’s elimination that felt quite notable. Deontay Wilder, a professional boxer, quietly breaks down in tears after Peppermint leaves, calling her “a beautiful person” (Wilder withdrew himself from the competition following the next banishment, saying that the dynamics of the competition were touching on childhood trauma for him).
“Deontay’s reaction to her axing was one of the most quietly powerful moments of reality television I may have ever seen,” Samantha Allen said at them. “It’s clear he was affected by her assumed guilt in ways that resonated deeply with him. To see a cis pro boxer feeling so deeply for a trans actress is the kind of thing I couldn’t have imagined being on TV when I came out over a decade ago.”
That’s true, and that kind of compassion is something I hope we can see more of from cis men as a whole. Deontay’s vulnerability is particularly affecting, as it’s not something that men—and Black men, in particular—have been given the space to express, especially in public.2
Peppermint told Paper that some other cast members had reached out to her after the show, including The Challenge’s Johnny Bananas, Parvati, Tamra Judge from the Real Housewives of Orange County, Sandra Diaz-Twine from Survivor, and host Cumming, who she had a pre-existing relationship with.
Going forward, I’d love to see all the cis people on these shows fighting harder for trans people while they’re still there, rather than after they’re gone (which echoes my feelings about Trans Day of Remembrance tbh). Mourn us when we’re gone, yes, but fight like hell for us while we’re still here. Justice for Peppermint.
In her departure post on Instagram, she also shared the following message for reality television producers to hopefully mitigate some of the social dynamics playing out the way they so often do: “LET the networks know casting ONE token person on a show is no longer acceptable and that you want them to TRY and create tv that more closely reflects & resembles diverse communities in this country on your tv screen.”