Transgender Parents: Coming Soon to Your Living Room
A number of new TV series focus on families navigating a parent’s gender transition, as depicted in Becoming Us (above), and an expert says the effect is powerful. Photo by ABC Family.
“So I found out that A: My parents are getting divorced and B: my dad is becoming a woman,” Ben Lehwald, 17, says in a trailer for his family’s new reality show, Becoming Us, kicking off on ABC Family this summer. “Whoa.”
It’s not a surprising choice, though, for the network to profile a transgender family. The docu-series – following the Evanston, Illinois teen as he experiences his father Charlie’s transition into Carly, including her gender reassignment surgery – comes on the success of Amazon’s Transparent, a fictionalized account of this same gender and family change. That dramedy, which debuted last year, has already won 2 Golden Globes, including Best TV Series.
STORY: Transgender Parents Speak Out About What Makes a Family
And before Becoming Us comes to TV, Discovery Life will kick off an unscripted 6-part series in April chronicling a group of transgendered women, New Girls on the Block, one of whom is a mom.
A sneak peek at New Girls on the Block. Photo by Discovery Communications, Inc.
TLC also has a take: All That Jazz, featuring a 14-year-old transgender student, Jazz Jennings. There is also plenty of swirl that Bruce Jenner, patriarch of the Keeping Up With the Kardashian family, will appear in a documentary series about his transition.
Jazz Jennings. Photo by Noam Galai/Wireimage
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If 2014 was “The year of the trans woman,” 2015 is the year America will welcome transgendered families into their homes through the small screen. “It seems that American popular culture’s embracing transgender themes now echoes the presentation of gay and lesbian characters several years ago,” pop culture and media expert Bob Thompson tells Yahoo Parenting. “You started seeing much more opening up to gay and lesbian stories in the 90s but it wasn’t until 1998′s Will & Grace and Ellen DeGeneres’ show that it became commonplace to have gay characters all over TV.”
Whether this spate of new shows makes that shift for the transgender community remains to be seen. “I’ve always said that TV has never been very good at pushing envelopes,” says Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Pop Culture at Syracuse University. “Whether it’s the women’s rights movement or civil rights, other people push the envelope and then TV comes along at some point and announces, ‘OK, this is normal.’”
The acceptance that coverage provides, though, can make a big impact. “If you have a lot of these programs that start saying being transgender is normal, not something bizarre, then people become much more comfortable coming out and going through gender reassignment procedures and the rest of it,” says Thompson. “Pop culture shouldn’t get all the credit for this of course but it’s an important element.”
Making an impression is apparently what Becoming Us star Lehwald hopes to do with his family’s show. “I want to be able to provide guidance for kids who are going through it,” the teen tells People. “Maybe this will help them being able to deal with it.”
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