 Jay Duplass, Judith Light, Amy Landecker and Jeffrey Tambor in “Transparent.” (Beth Dubber/Courtesy of Amazon Studios) My friend, the composer (and disproportionate source of the best parts of my taste in pop music) Alex Temple, has been writing a series of Facebook posts using the prompts from a project called 31 Days of Trans Visibility. The blogger who came up with the prompts, one for each day of March, is writing and asking others to write about questions ranging from “Talk about children. Do you have any? Do you want to be a parent? Do you face any challenges to your desire or lack of desire for children? How have you worked against those challenges?” to “Talk about something funny. Has anything humorous or ironic ever happened to you because you were trans? Have you used humor to help make people more comfortable with your being trans?” Reading the posts in response to these questions has taught me more about her experiences, even as a friend of hers. But it also made me think about the representation of transgender people specifically, and members of minority communities in general, in pop culture. The basic idea behind making pop culture more representative is a simple one: There are few stories about people from this community, and there should be more. Sometimes the second step we take in that argument is to say that it’s meaningful for people to see themselves represented on screen. Sometimes, we say that greater diversity makes pop culture more interesting. But as I read through these prompts and the responses to them, recognizing that I’ve seen very few stories about trans people dating in pop culture, and none about religious trans people, or trans people who don’t already have children but want to have them, the formulation slid into my head in a new way. When you have very few characters from a given community represented in all of pop culture, you end up telling only a tiny fraction of that community’s stories. “Transparent,” for example, is a great example of the sort of specific storytelling pop culture can do about members of a marginalized community. But it doesn’t meet the whole need for stories about that community; in fact, its specificity actually makes the need for works that have a similarly distinct sensibility about a whole other set of experiences even more acute. Proportional representation is one part of the fight. But once we’re there, and in fact even while we’re on the journey, variety in the stories pop culture tells about transgender people, or people with disabilities, or people of color, is an equally important fight. Pop culture is never going to be a one-to-one simulacrum of human experience. But there’s space between what we have, and what we’ve got now, to do better. |
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