For my group project, I watched the Amazon original show “Transparent”, which revolves around (unsurprisingly), a trans parents who comes out to their children, and it is on this family that the show focuses. Amazon.com describes the show: “When the Pfefferman family patriarch makes a dramatic admission, the entire family’s secrets start to spill out, and each of them spin in a different direction as they begin to figure out who they are going to become.”

Even before the show leaves the gate, it is problematic, because the person cast to be the transgender parent is not transgender, but rather the cisgender Jeffrey Tambor. While the practice of casting cis actors for transgender roles in considered unproblematic by mainstream society, it is equally deplorable as casting white actors for people of color (poc) roles. The difference between the two is that transness is viewed as something adoptable, an appropriatable identity, unlike a poc identity, which is stereotypically visible. But transface, as it has been deemed, is just as bad as blackface or yellowface. Casting a cis actor for a non-cis role deliberately maintains the cisnormative society in which these narratives are constructed, centering the work in question around a cisview of transness and the trans experience.

Defenders of this practice argue that acting is all about adopting roles, and trying to work within and portray them accurately. While I do not contest that that is the goal of acting, there are certain limits and boundaries. It is problematic to have a person who constitutes a part of an oppressor class portraying one whom they oppress. Thus it is problematic for a white person to portray a black poc, but not problematic for a black poc to portray a white person. Thus it is problematic for a cis person to portray a trans person, but not problematic for a trans person to portray a cis person. This is because it is not permissible for an oppressor to appropriate the identity of the oppressed. Nor is it appropriate for them to appropriate the narratives of the oppressed and make them their own.

This problem is not resolved as the show unfolds. The coming out of Maura (the titular transgender parents) serves not as the focal point of the show, but merely a mechanic for moving the plot forward, and it is instead her children’s reactions to her coming out and her children’s lives that are the focus of the show. Centering the narrative on the children’s reactions further solidifies the show as one from and for a cisview, for it is not Maura, a transgender person, who is focused on, but instead the cis people that occupy her life.

I was hopeful when a transgender actor was included in the cast (Ian Harvie) but his character (Dale) was fetishized and then tossed aside by the show, serving as a fantasy romp for one of Maura’s children. His story arc serves as a summary for the show. After Maura comes out, Ali decides to explore by singling out and targeting a transman for a partner. She targets him because of his masculinity, and then proceeds to go to his house to ‘do the deed’. An intricate and prolonged scene ensues, which the viewer later discovers to be a fanciful construction of Ali’s mind, where she transformed him, his words, his actions, and his house, to fit into her view of how a transman would act. This perfectly encapsulates the shows treatment of transpeople and transgenderism. Furthermore, the scene where she realizes what she went through was a fantasy (and where the viewer realizes the same) is precipitated by Dale’s sexual impotency in an awkward bathroom scene. He then disappears from Ali’s life, and the show, and we do not see him again.

The show, though hailed as groundbreaking and progressive, isn’t either. While it does deal with ‘progressive’ topics and subjects (transgenderism and transgender people), it does so in so poorly a manner that it would have been better off leaving them alone entirely. Transparent is very transparent in what it is: an attempt at progressivism by and for cis people.

Relating this to the class, though new media fosters progressivism, it doesn’t necessitate it. Though the popularization of digital media platforms has paved the way for progressive shows, this is not one of them. It can only be hoped that future attempts by Amazon and other companies will bear better fruit, and bring to popular attention the narratives of people whom society systematically silence.