I'm not sure what led the Washington Post's Alyssa Rosenberg to interview Jill Solloway about her newest project or why Ms. Soloway responded in the ay she did. but I have my suspicions.I would not doubt that the director of Amazon's new show Transparent is getting pushback from certain feminist sources.
Rosenberg's title sums it up: In 'Transparent', Jill Soloway argues that transgender rights are women's rights.
I’ve been writing about misogyny for 20 years and trying to understand what femininity means for my entire career,” Jill Soloway, who created Amazon’s new show “Transparent,” told me in Los Angeles in July. “On ‘Six Feet Under,’ [massage therapist] Brenda was palling around with a sex worker. And [teenager] Claire was trying to figure out if she was a lesbian. And same thing in ‘Afternoon Delight.’
--Jill Soloway
The inspiration for Transparent was Soloway's
own father's transition late in life.
The Lunch scene
When she began filming the series, she instituted a "transfirmative" action policy which favored the hiring of transgender candidates over nontransgender ones.
Soloway wanted to create a set on which inclusivity was more than a buzzword, a place where no one should ever feel that they are part of a majority — not even the majority, whoever that might be on a particular day. “I really want it so that there’s no moment, on the set, when trans people are being otherized by people in the crew because they don’t think there are any trans people listening.” As of this writing, 20 trans people had been hired in the cast and crew, and more than 60 had been employed as extras.
One is that people treat trans women like they’re crazy, because you have to be crazy to give up your male privilege,” Soloway told me. “Just that, as an understanding of how it is that trans women get so much of the harder side of things when it comes to hatred and misogyny and violence. And then, I think a lot of people who would otherwise be gentle with women feel comfortable being horrible to men. And in their mind, they can be horrible to trans women because they don’t feel like they’re being horrible to women. There are these kinds of subtle, subtle ways that transphobia can express certain kinds of misanthropies and misogynies that I think I’ve been really kind of waiting to understand my entire life.
--Rosenberg
I recall at the beginning of my own transition getting told I was nuts by a woman I admired for giving up male privilege. But then, there are those feminists who do not believe that is possible...that somehow we hang on to it...as if there was room in the old boy's network for a trans woman.
Older transitioning people have a particular interesting time, because I don’t think it’s as simple as it is for younger people, where you can simply make the decision, move to the new gender, let everybody know,” Soloway explained of Maura’s transformation into her true self after seven decades presenting herself to the world as a man named Mort. “When you’re older, the letter needs to go out to everybody. Everybody in your office needs to get the letter or the e-mail, and then there’s that awkward time where you’re trying to gracefully become [yourself].
Soloway claims that she was profoundly changed by Julia Serrano's Whipping Girl, ploiticiing her around the connection between Feminism and trans women's issues. She says she took away two crucial ideas.
When I look at all of the different ways that femininity is explored in ‘Transparent,’ I find myself constantly thinking about the feminine in our culture, about being a child of the ‘Free to Be … You and Me’ generation, where we listened over and over again to a story where the girl who was really girly got eaten by the tiger
--Soloway
Ladies First:
Trying to come out to her children:
If we have the show going for five years, everyone, at some point, is going to be bi. Or be a lesbian. Or be gay. I mean, Maura’s going to question whether or not she wants to identify as a lesbian, and probably whether she wants to identify as bi. Gaby’s character, Alison, is absolutely going to be struggling with questions of gender as well as identity and sexual identity,” Soloway explained. “The show is in some way about boundaries. If the secret was the boundary, now that the secret is gone, where are our boundaries? And now, over the course of the new season, you get to watch all of the boundaries fall away.
--Soloway
Trailer: