Big Brother 19: What Cody Nickson’s AFP win, despite anti-transgender comments, say about voting

We’ll start off this Big Brother 19 article with a disclaimer — we know that a lot of people on the show this season said terrible things. Paul and Josh acted like bullies, Jason said an inexcusable thing towards Kevin’s family, and Raven had about three thousand diseases and problems over the course of the season. We’re not advocating here at CarterMatt for anyone to win America’s Favorite Houseguest.

Yet, here we are looking back at Cody Nickson’s AFP win, wondering why in the world voters out there decided that this was their jockey to give the $25,000 to. Here’s the reasoning for it for many people out there: He hated Paul. Because of this, he therefore became a vessel for other people to hate Paul. Jessica Graf campaigned for her showmance partner outside the house, and because of his blank stares and his above-it-all attitude, somehow people seemed to forget all of the terrible things that he did in the game. This includes his comments about Ferguson, and also a number of transphobic comments that he refused to apologize for even after the fact. Despite Jessica saying that Cody may just be ignorant due to his lack of experience around trans people, he said the following to BuzzFeed News in the aftermath of the finale last night:

“People are going to love me or hate me and it doesn’t matter; I can’t do anything about it … I have a very close-knit group of people in my life that I love and I need to get close to after this. Beyond that, I’m not out to appease anybody or say anything to give anybody hugs out there. If anybody wants some hugs they can find it somewhere else.”

Cody also reportedly smiled when being told about President Trump’s potential transgender military ban, saying “you can’t even have an arched foot and get in the military. You can’t have psoriasis and get in the military. So to change your entire genetic makeup and try and be in the military…I don’t know how they would get in and somebody with an arched foot can’t get in.”

For the record, Jason did apologize for his comments after the fact, claiming ignorance and promising to learn from his mistakes. It would’ve been easy for Cody to just say he regretted the comments before moving on, but instead, he doubled down and further fueled the fire.

Maybe some people thought that Cody would change his mind about his viewers or get educated. Instead, he remained who we thought that he was during the game and after the fact.

Does Cody have freedom of speech?

Absolutely, just as people have the freedom to support him. Yet, that doesn’t make some of the things that he says okay; him making transgender people feel marginalized is incredibly dangerous, given that he’s an influential figure. Therefore, his comments lead to others accepting his beliefs as fact or adopting them without doing research to the contrary. This is why it becomes more about beliefs; some of his could potentially hurt a large group of people and set society back.

We wish there was an adequate way for CBS to fix the AFP voting process, especially since many of these voters may not have had live feeds or did so on a recommendation from someone else without actually seeing the show. We realize that there weren’t many options, but endorsing this man seems to be worse than voting for no one at all. (For the record, CarterMatt endorsed Mark — he had a temper problem, but at his core seemed to be a really good, caring person. Also, Mark didn’t like Paul either so don’t act like Cody was the only option to send that message.)

We reported earlier that Cody and Jessica are going to be on the next Amazing Race, and we get that given that the show edited Cody at times as the “normal” one who was surrounded by lunatics and had to fight to stay alive. Unfortunately, that presentation was just a sliver to who he was as a whole in the house. This win shows that either CBS has a major problem with the way voting is handled, or we as voters need to stop develop tunnel vision and actually pay attention to what people say as opposed to what they represent. Clearly, that’s gotten us into trouble in multiple ways over the past year.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this subject below. (Photo: CBS.)