At Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony, Amazon series Transparent took two awards: best comedy or musical series, and best actor in a comedy series (Jeffrey Tambor). The world promptly took to the internet to celebrate: at last, a show about trans people being recognised by a prestigious awards committee! This tide is turning! Finally, transgender people have entered the mainstream, and the “transgender tipping point,” as Time put it last year, has been tipped.
Except that not everyone feels that way. Even as some trans people and cis people alike hail the show as some sort of second coming and the wins as evidence that Transparent represents progress and positive movement for the trans community, others, rightly, condemn it. Because no matter what people say, Transparent is still a pile of bigoted, transphobic crap and Amazon, its creators, and the people who love it should be ashamed of themselves for lapping up such pablum without even thinking about its implications.
The famous Time cover was revolutionary for a reason: it featured a transgender woman of colour staring boldly and assertively out at the reader. Laverne Cox dominated that cover and at the same time, she gave a giant finger to Hollywood and the establishment. That cover mattered because it celebrated trans women as women, and highlighted the growing prominence of trans women in Hollywood, playing themselves, working in trans roles, challenging social attitudes and norms. Transparent features a cis man playing a trans woman. It features a man in drag in the role of a woman. It features an actor in a role that could have been very easily, deftly, and beautifully portrayed by an actress — but apparently the producers felt perfectly okay casting a man in a woman’s role.
Jeffrey Tambor as Maura in Transparent isn’t revolutionary or something to be excited about. It’s the same old, same old, tired stereotypes, repetitive and awful and hateful notions about trans women as pretenders, men in dresses, secret men, and all else that goes with it; stereotypes and attitudes that are dangerous and sometimes even fatal to transgender women. To be revolutionary, a show about a transgender woman, about the trans experience in general, must actually be revolutionary. Casting a trans woman in a trans role shouldn’t be revolutionary, but it is — and as illustrated by Transparent, people are perfectly happy to settle for a tragic hashup rather than push for true representation for trans people in Hollywood.
Tambor and creator Jill Soloway even had the gall to ‘thank’ the trans community for all our inspiration and courage; as though taking people’s stories, repackaging them for cis audiences, ladling schlock all over them, and appropriating lived experiences was something we should be honoured to get a ‘thanks’ for, as though we should be grateful to see a Golden Globe dedicated to the memory of Leelah Alcorn when those same people should have kept her alive in the first place. It felt almost sarcastic and biting to see people who had profited from the hardships and social stigma that trans women experience sneering at them from the stage, raising their Hollywood awards high and basking in the praise of a mostly cis audience — even some trans women appeared on social media to congratulate the show on its win, apparently so desperate for any representation that they’ll settle for a show that fundamentally misses the mark by insisting that a cis man in a trans role is acceptable.
Soloway appears to think that she’s some sort of expert on the trans experience because her mother is transgender and she’s even had the temerity to lecture people on how to represent trans characters — oddly, nowhere in that advice does she include the suggestion that maybe cis people should step aside and let trans people tell our own stories. Nowhere has she suggested that people with social power and influence, like herself, promote works by trans women and centre their projects in Hollywood, giving them the prominence they need to get picked up by Amazon, Netflix, and other content producers and distributors. Nowhere does she suggest that maybe, as the daughter of a trans woman, she’s not actually the best person to tell the stories of the transgender community.
Instead, she assures us, lots of transgender people work ‘behind the scenes’ on Transparent, because obviously, being handed a consolation prize ought to be enough — this is not to discount the vital role played by crew throughout production, but I suspect that women would rightly cry bloody murder if they were reduced to backstage actors and television programmes were acted entirely by men, so why should trans women accept it? Likewise, trans women are in the cast, but they’re primarily in background roles, used as literal set dressing in a show that’s supposed to be oh-so-progressive when it comes to depictions of the trans community. It’s an insult to trans women and to those actresses to use them that way, and it’s even more of an insult to know that the show is in fact physically capable of casting trans women and the producers chose not to select a trans actress for the lead role.
Only now, with the second season approaching, has Transparent agreed to take on a transgender writer, which is a telling illustration of the contempt with which the producers view the trans community. Evidently, it’s perfectly all right for cis people to appropriate and tell trans stories, to the point that a show can win a ‘best in show’ award without having a single trans person on its writing staff — arguably one of the most important components of the production team, as writers determine who is depicted, when, and how. Writers break and create stories, writers shape characters, writers work closely with actors and producers to build a well-crafted series. The fact that not a single trans writer was recruited from the start is a telling testimony to the fact that Soloway, like so many others, doesn’t really think that trans voices are important, for all that she lectures people to ‘listen’ and ‘research’ if they want to represent trans people properly.
We’re supposed to be grateful for this kind of representation? We’re supposed to find it innovative and progressive? We’re supposed to slobber all over ourselves thanking cis people like Tambor and Soloway for telling our stories for themselves? This is what it’s come to? In a Hollywood where trans women are telling trans stories, where women like Janet Mock are hosting their own television shows, regressive bigotry like Transparent is viewed as ‘a step forward’?