Transparent

A friend who read one of my  earlier blog posts about transgender novels recommended me Casey Plett’s excellent article about transgender fiction, The Rise of the Gender Novel in The Walrus.  Plett argues that transgender characters in contemporary fiction (such as Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab, Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy, and Kathleen Winter’s Annabel) are written like tortured heroes and lack the dynamics of full characters. Their transgender story takes over the novel at the risk of other elements. Plett clearly has issue with transgender stories written by cis-gender authors, and I get this. Can cis-gender people really understand the trans experience? I'm not sure. However, the books that I really loved from my original list of transgender reading were written by trans people: Ivan E Coyote and Rae Spoon’s Gender Failure and Kate Bornstein’s A Queer and Pleasant Danger.
 

So why am I thinking about this again? Well, a few years ago at a writing festival a student from the audience asked the panel I was hosting if any of the authors would write a transgender novel. The panel all agreed they felt ill-equipped to write a trans story, but I was intrigued. (My mind instantly went: Jewish trans person!) The student clearly had a desire to be represented in a book, and hadn’t yet had this experience. I started reading about the trans community with the thought or eventually writing a trans character.
 

All this was before Orange is the New Black and before Kaitlyn Jenner came out and before my own students started asking me questions about trans people. I’m hoping the trans community will fill the YA book world with diverse books about the trans experience the way they are filling the media world, and I can stick to things I know.     

In the mean time I’m become obsessed with the Amazon show Transparent. I don’t often binge-watch a series, but my brother recommended this show to me. He said, “You’re going to wish you wrote it.” And he’s right. Transparent is the stuff of my writing dreams: a show about a Jewish family delving into their queerness. Mort Pfefferman is the trans-parent who reveals himself to his children as Maura, a woman. Yet the show goes way beyond any YA coming-out tropes. All three adult Pfefferman children cope with their father becoming a mother (from Poppa to Moppa) differently, but it isn’t his queerness or gender

Jeffrey Tambour as Maura

transition they care about. The Pfeffermans are too selfish for that kind of questioning. Sarah Pfefferman discovers her father dressed as a woman while starting a lesbian affair in her father’s bedroom, and her own sexual journey will always be more important than her fathers. Similarly, the youngest Pfefferman, Allie, uses her father’s transition to continue her own sexual adventure where queerness isn’t an issue but a landscape to be explored. When Josh Pfefferman does mourn the loss of his father in the final episode of Season Two, (with a rescued duck floating in the bathtub behind him), his grief is so long in coming it feels fresh and unexpected.

 

Carrie Brownstein and Gaby Hoffman as Allie and Sid

Not only is Transgender beautifully written and filmed,  it portrays a Jewish family in a way I found irresistibly familiar and outrageously dysfunctional. These people are my people-they celebrate the same holidays, talk the way my relatives speak, intermarry the way my community does, and are shadowed by the Holocaust in a familiar way. At first I wasn’t sure about the Holocaust references, but I think the writers are saying something more interesting than the usual concentration camp history. Their linking of the suffering of transgender people by the Nazis with current transgender stories feels new and ususual. 

I can’t wait for Season Three. I'm hoping Angelica Houston will be in it, and Didi Conn (Frenchie from Grease) and Carrie Brownstein (from Sleater-Kinney and also Portlandia).  I hope Jeffrey Tambour as Maura will continue to be as compelling an actor and character, and I long for more scenes with Judith Light (from Who's the Boss) who plays the Pfefferman's mother, a character both meshugannah and familiar.