From The Danish Girl to Transparent, 2015 has been a breakthrough year for trans characters — what’s the next step?

Director Jill Soloway and Amazon head of comedy Joe Lewis are having a different experience promoting the second series of their Emmy-winning sitcom Transparent compared with the first time around. 

Lewis says: “The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that we’re going around doing these interviews and people are using the terms ‘cisgender’ [identifying with the gender assigned at birth] and ‘transgender’ — last year I heard Jill give a hundred explanations of what that meant.” 

When the first series premiered on Amazon Prime in February 2014 it was pre-Caitlyn Jenner. It was before Laverne Cox, star of Orange Is the New Black, had appeared on the cover of Time magazine next to the words “The Transgender Tipping Point”.

Transparent is the first sitcom to centre on a transgender character, telling the story of Maura, a transgender woman coming out to her family in her seventies, and is inspired by Soloway’s experience of having a transgender parent come out late in life.

It may have seemed like a risky move given that Amazon was in the relatively early stages of developing original content, but Lewis disagrees: “I didn’t see it as a risk. Would you say it’s risky if I said, ‘I have this storyteller, she’s coming out of Sundance as best director, is it a risk to try to make a show with that person?’ No.”

“Risky” is also a word that director Tom Hooper says he heard during the seven years it took to bring The Danish Girl to the screen, but the story of Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery in the Thirties, is now one of the most hotly anticipated films of 2016.

It is a long way from 1994’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, which featured Jim Carrey vomiting after learning he had kissed a trans woman. Now, when the trailer for Zoolander 2 was released featuring a contentious joke around an apparently gender-nonconforming character played by Benedict Cumberbatch, it sparked vigorous online debate.

Besides being a crude gag about genitalia — “I think he’s asking if you have a hotdog or a bun” — this particular controversy taps into a recurring criticism that has also been directed at both Transparent and The Danish Girl: the casting of cisgender actors to play trans characters — Jeffrey Tambor and Eddie Redmayne respectively.

It’s not the first time such issues have been raised and there is a complicated history of how Hollywood has treated trans stories in the past, when they have either been played for laughs, or viewed as classic Oscar-bait: “difficult” roles that see actors rewarded for confronting such challenging material.

When the film Transamerica came out in 2005, the press were fascinated by Felicity Huffman’s “make-under” to play a trans woman. The US DVD cover even featured a hologram showing Huffman’s transformation. During that awards season, there were parallels with Charlize Theron’s triumph the year before when she was unrecognisable playing a serial killer in Monster. The message was that a beautiful cisgender woman had to look ugly to play a trans woman.

In 2013, Jared Leto did little to endear himself to the transgender community when, in his Golden Globes acceptance speech for his role playing a transgender woman in Dallas Buyer’s Club, he joked about waxing his body.

Regarding the Zoolander 2 trailer, transgender model and actress Hari Nef (who features in series two of Transparent) pointed out that the film was written by four white cisgender men.

She said: “The portrayal of women, or trans women, or a gender nonconforming person is being put in the hands of a cisgender man, and unfortunately, that — historically speaking — has not been a successful recipe for positive representation.”

So while the visibility of trans narratives on screen increases, within the industry it is the point about who is pulling the strings behind the scenes that is truly making waves.

Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst are assistant producers on Transparent. They are a couple and they are both trans. They both also advised on The Danish Girl, which includes in its cast transgender actress Rebecca Root, who also stars in the BBC2 sitcom Boy Meets Girl. 

Both Redmayne and Tambor have spoken emphatically about their research into understanding the trans experience, while Transparent now employs 36 trans members of cast and crew, using what Soloway calls a “trans-firmative” approach to diversity. 

This is in stark contrast to Dallas Buyers Club. Its director, Jean-Marc Vallée, was asked in 2013 whether he had considered hiring a trans actor. “Never. Are there any transgender actors? I’m not aiming for the real thing. I’m aiming for an experienced actor who wants to portray the thing.”

Drucker admits: “We have a bad recent history — characters who were not fair renderings and actors who were not sensitive to the issues.” She is pragmatic though about the Zoolander discussion, stressing that everything should be ripe for satire, but that the time is not yet right. “When there are healthier representations, when we have the freedom and flexibility to take ourselves not so seriously and are a part of the mainstream and pop culture in a more secure way, then we’ll be able to experience those moments with more ease.”

Emma Frankland, a UK-based theatre-maker, performer and trans activist, makes a comparison with black, Asian and minority ethnic actors in terms of representation and diversity. She says: “More than anything, we need to see something other than trans women talking to each other about trans issues. Look at the Bechdel test and swap ‘women’ for any other marginalised group. We’re looking at a mainstream industry that isn’t even representing cisgender women properly. We have to stack the deck in favour of the minority to redress the balance.”

Regarding the casting of cisgender actors, Rhys Ernst acknowledges that there are practical and emotional challenges to portraying a character before and after coming out. He says: “For example, with The Danish Girl I think most trans actresses wouldn’t necessarily want to play a character living as a man for such  long part of a film — the character is pre-transition for 70 per cent of it. Maybe some would jump at it but as a trans person myself there’s so much sensitivity around being pushed back to the gender you were assigned at birth.”

The truth of the matter is that the majority of the stories we are seeing about transgender people are focused on the transition itself, “the big reveal” as Soloway refers to it, and rarely move beyond that. Even focusing on pre- and post-transition periods neglects the diversity of the community, the broad umbrella that is gender fluidity.

Drucker compares it to when gay stories began to be more prevalent on film and television: “The gay narrative was very much the coming out story that people were stuck on — until that had been exhausted.” 

It’s one of the reasons that Orange Is the New Black is held up as a shining example to be followed. Laverne Cox (a trans woman) plays Sophia Burset (a trans woman) in a story that is not specifically about her transition. 

Now that Transparent has been granted a second series where the secret is already out, the makers have an opportunity to move the narrative further along. 

This year might have been the year of coming out for transgender cinema and television but it is very much the beginning of the story.

Transparent is available for unlimited streaming exclusively on Prime Video now; The Danish Girl is in cinemas from January 1; Orange Is the New Black series 4 is on Netflix in June

@littlewondering

While the visibility of trans narratives on screen increases, within the industry it is the point about who is pulling the strings behind the scenes that is making waves, says Rachael Sigee