Beyond TV: they and their transparency
She Wants It
Ebury Press, £14.99 Reviewed by Alun David
SOME TIME in 2011, Dr Harry Soloway came out as trans, taking the new name, Carrie. This provided the inspiration for the pioneering Amazon series Transparent, created by Carrie’s daughter, Jill Soloway. The period from the inception of the series to the departure under a cloud of its star, Jeffrey Tambor, is the main subject of Jill Soloway’s salty and provocative memoir, She Wants It.
The father’s complex gender identity was one of many secrets in the Soloway household. Jill reports growing up with the sense that there was “another woman in the house”. Harry’s transition to Carrie helped not only to resolve that conundrum, but to set off a journey for Jill, culminating in their own coming out (“singular they” pronouns are the author’s preference): “I don’t really identify with the word ‘female,’ or ‘woman’, and I never have… I am starting to think of myself as nonbinary.”
Transparency is Soloway’s great theme: relinquishing secrecy promises great rewards. For example, the break-up of their marriage to Bruce Gilbert emerges as a happy liberation from ingrained patterns of dishonesty and manipulation, which in turn reflect the “artificial masculinist hierarchy”, the patriarchy that must be toppled.
Soloway’s enthusiasm for transparency is most effectively deployed regarding the matter of female desire. Growing within a lesbian milieu, they reconsider the conventional requirement for women to express sexuality only through oblique gestures, making heterosexual male desire a quest for consent: “this is why straight men are so confused”. Here, Soloway is in the feminist mainstream, persuasively insisting that “she wants it” should surprise no one.
Yet Soloway’s critique of the concealment of desire sits uneasily with their blind spot regarding what other people actually want. It’s shocking to some, for example, when trans people criticise the casting of Tambor, a cis male (one who was assigned male at birth), as a trans woman. Particularly troubling is Soloway’s behaviour towards trans actor Trace Lysette, who accuses Tambor of sexual harassment. A prominent #MeToo and #TimesUp supporter, Soloway nevertheless goes full victim. Weeping, they complain to Lysette: “Maura [Tambor’s character] became this beautiful symbol of transness and now you’re laying this imagery out there of her being a predator.”
Why is it that, time and again, Soloway depicts themself as so uncommonly naive, self-involved, and prone to virtue-signalling? A charitable interpretation might see it all as a brutally honest portrait of a “hot-mess” creative persona, or perhaps a self-parodic illustration of the imperative to check your privilege, however “woke” you might consider yourself to be.
There are hints of irony, as when Soloway randomly encounters a bunch of conspicuously decent Republican guys — how weird is that?
Ultimately, readers must decide for themselves whether Soloway is admirable or absurd. It’s a tough call. Good luck!
Alun David is a freelance reviewer