Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
I was 12 when I first saw a trans character on TV.
It was 1983, and the medical dramaSt.
Elsewherewas in its first season.
I already knew I hated being a boy, but I believed I had no choice.
Transparent, which ran from 2014 to 2017, tried hard to do better.
Multiple trans people serve as elected and appointed government officials (Virginias Danica Roem).
But its hard not to feel that, for trans people in the U.S., 2019 beats 2014.
So how doesTransparents progressive vision look, five years on?
What can Maura tell us, or show us, today?
Sometimes they send me through X-ray machines instead.)
(in one characters words) while creating space to feel feminine and fulfilled.
Why am I so unhappy?
Maura exclaims, while working (with apparently minimal training) at a suicide hotline in the season-three premiere.
One unfortunate episode implies apparently because Maura believes that satisfactory medical transition requires surgeries.
(The phrase medical transition usually means hormones.)
I didnt want to be trans I am trans!
Was Maura a frequently self-absorbed jerk who happened to be a trans woman?
Did being trans make her self-absorbed?
Did being closeted for so long make her self-absorbed?
Are all trans ladies so troubled, so headstrong?
Parts ofTransparentdid hit hard.
Maura feels like a new woman, but shes also the same person who once married Shelly.
Jill Soloway shouted, when accepting their Emmy award (for the Womyns Music Festival episode).
The patriarchy, alas, survives.
Stephanie Burt is a professor of English at Harvard.
Her new book isDont Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems.
