TV has a long way to go telling transgender tales
Though 2015 has seen an uptick in trans roles, most are still ‘defamatory, stereotypical’
During the fourth season of The Jeffersons, the series Norman Lear created as the black spinoff of All in the Family, Sherman Hemsley’s character, George, is excited about reconnecting with an old navy buddy.
Knocking on his friend Eddie’s hotelroom door, George prepares himself for a trip down memory lane. But opening the door is not Eddie. It’s Edie. George’s wartime mate is now a transgender woman. Though George initially couldn’t wrap his head around his old friend’s new identity, by the end of the episode, which first aired in October 1977, the two embraced as they had years ago.
Earlier that same year, Lear had written the first transgender character to be featured as a series regular in All That Glitters, with Linda Gray as a transgender model. But as groundbreaking as these roles were, they did not mark an immediate sea change. It would be decades before Orange Is the New Black’s Laverne Cox was nominated for a 2014 Emmy, followed by Jeffrey Tambor and the Amazon Prime show he leads, Transparent, taking home several Emmys this year.
Despite the current wave in TV of positive stories featuring transgender characters, Hollywood has a long way to go.
“There’s a perception that we are awash in trans characters on television right now,” says Nick Adams, transgender media spokesman for the advocacy group GLAAD. “But as far as I can tell, I only know of about 10 trans characters who’ve been series regulars ever.” Reality and perceptions Reality TV has seen the greatest proliferation of transgender images in the last year, led by former Olympian and Kardashian parent Caitlyn Jenner’s I Am Cait. According to Adams and a GLAAD report titled “Where We Are on TV,” reality TV represents the transgender experience more broadly than scripted shows.
As for scripted shows, GLAAD’s latest report notes that of the 271 regular and recurring LGBT characters on scripted broadcast, cable and streaming programming, only seven (2.6 per cent) are transgender. What’s worse is that nearly half of characters evaluated through 2014 by GLAAD have been “defamatory, stereotypical and can only be described as inaccurate and offensive,” Adams says, with around 35 per cent as “barely acceptable.”
Most of these roles have been one-off story lines on cop or medical dramas in which the transgender person is either an unnamed dead victim or a sex worker.
“We need a bandwagon of trans characters to even begin to undo much of the damage that has been done by the way trans people have been presented in the past,” Adams says.
That bandwagon is on its way with nearly 10 reality shows featuring at least one transgender person this year eligible for recognition from GLAAD. A sampling of their casts, which includes TLC’s I Am Jazz and Oxygen’s The Prancing Elites Project, reveals trans people from varying backgrounds, races and social status.
The picture is dimmer in scripted television. There is only one trans character regularly featured on a broadcast series: The Bold and the Beautiful’s Maya Avant played by Karla Mosley.
As is often the case, however, streaming services are both disrupting and improving images normally associated with TV screens, even if ever so slightly. Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black was followed by Transparent and another Netflix property, Sense8. All three shows feature transgender storylines and trans actors.
Improving the representations of trans people, in number and content, is the next frontier of this early shift taking place in Hollywood. Authentic stories Transgender people are calling for more authenticity in the telling of their stories. Though one would assume reality TV would provide the best portrayals, Angelica Ross, a trans actress and activist, sees scripted television as the genre with more authentic trans stories because of reality TV’s reliance on ratings and “the need to create drama to meet the demand,” she says.
Authenticity is the key to Transparent, many critics and members of the trans community have said. According to Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, transgender creatives who served as consultants for Transparent creator Jill Soloway and now are producers on the project, their show’s character traits and storylines come from having transgender (and gender nonconforming) people at virtually every level of the show’s production.
By allowing transgender people to have voices in the creative process, Soloway and Transparent have become the industry prototype for supporting trans people holistically, not just telling their stories. Sidney Poitier phase As for which genre will be most responsible for pushing the country forward, Ernst bets on scripted television because it takes “so much more of an investment in talent and money,” a true demonstration of a person’s commitment to authentic storytelling. Much as when the gay community began to create products that showcased their experiences when mainstream Hollywood did not, transgender people are beginning to do the same through the Internet. Transgender actresses Jen Richards and Ross, for example, co-star in a web series called Her Story that focuses on a subject of trans life not yet fully explored on television: dating.
Looking forward, Richards sums up what’s needed to improve and round out transgender representations in the media with one word.
“More,” she says. “We just need more, more of everything. Right now we’re in the Sidney Poitier phase of trans representation, where the few that we have have to be so unassailable so that we can open doors. But what’s next is we need our hot messes, our rebels, our sexpots and drama queens. We need representation across the board.”