Boy Meets Girl: the BBC's trans sitcom is part of a quiet revolution
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Version 0 of 1. Well, look at this – the BBC is producing a groundbreaking sitcom about a transgender woman! Not only is the lead character of Boy Meets Girl trans, she is also played by Rebecca Root, a trans woman. About bloody time: as the lack of racial, religious and sexual diversity on television is being rightfully challenged, a quiet revolution is emerging in the way that trans people are portrayed on screen. Growing up, portrayals of trans people on telly utterly depressed me. In drama, trans women were invariably shown as prostitutes or serial killers (think Silence of the Lambs); in entertainment, you would maybe see a drag queen or hear some joke about “waking up with a ladyboy”; and in factual, the best you could hope for was some poor, miserable person sitting in a hospital bed waiting for a designer vagina. There was little to celebrate. Many trans people, myself included, have experienced horrendous street abuse, family rejection and job discrimination, so to see “your people” mocked, patronised or lied about on screen hurts all the more. Boy Meets Girl didn’t come about by chance. I work with All About Trans, a project that explores ways to improve representations of trans people in the media. It’s fairly simple. We take young trans people for friendly meetings with TV producers, editors and journalists. We don’t go in with an agenda other than to show that trans people are, well, people. The Trans Comedy award, the writing competition that spawned Boy Meets Girl, came about after we met BBC comedy bigwig Ian Critchley. The aim was to find a script that didn’t ridicule trans people. We wanted to watch something where trans people were in on the joke, and not just there as the punchline. Things are changing. US TV, as usual, is several steps ahead. Laverne Cox made history last year as the first trans woman to be nominated for an Emmy for her role as Sophia in Netflix’s comedy-drama Orange is the New Black. Jamie Clayton, meanwhile, was playing trans on the interactive web series Dirty Work; she will also be appearing on Netflix in its new show Sense8. It is directed by Lana Wachowski, the woman who brought us The Matrix and Cloud Atlas – and who also happens to be trans. Britain is catching up. Last autumn, Adèle Anderson, the first trans woman to play trans on British television, appeared in an episode of New Tricks. TV doesn’t get much more cosy and mainstream. And if you’ve been following the return of Russell T Davies with Channel 4’s Banana, Cucumber and Tofu, you’ve already been introduced to Bethany Black, the first trans woman to play trans in a recurring drama in the UK. It’s great to see trans folk bringing authenticity to roles, but casting is not the only route to better TV. Writers, directors and anyone producing shows about minorities have a duty to meet the people they wish to portray. Comedy is at its worst when it “punches down” and humiliates the vulnerable because they happen to be different. It is at its best when it helps us to understand a complex and often cruel world by laughing at our own, previously unexamined, prejudices. I haven’t seen Boy Meets Girl yet, but it has already put a smile on my face. |