According to the Hollywood Reporter, “the series is described as an earnest look at a group of millennial women — who happen to be transgender — living, loving and building their careers. The series will explore how their sexuality impacts their lives.” Now, I’m pretty sure they mean “how their gender impacts their lives,” but hopefully the show will also have a diverse range of sexualities among the women.
Carrera in Glamour UK
Carrera, famously a Jersey Girl, will be moving to Chicago for the series and will also act as a sort of role model for the others/host for the show. Other prominent trans women (like Calpernia Addams in the pilot) will also make appearances. Carrera will be joined in the show by Giselle, who is applying for grad school, preparing for gender confirmation surgery and looking for the perfect man; Natalia, who works for Christian Dior cosmetics and is trying to gain the support of her family; Sidney, a party girl who is trying to juggle having fun and finding out what she wants to do in life; and Victory, a goal-oriented woman with dreams of becoming a doctor.
Initially, I was a little worried that a “docuseries” could end up being somewhat exploitative or over the top. Reality TV is often edited and even scripted in ways to make the people into characters and the moments into Situations. However, the people behind this series do seen to be taking a lot of steps to make sure things are done right.
Executive Producer Tyra Banks already has some experience working with a trans woman on her show
America’s Next Top Model. Back in 2008,
trans woman and model Isis King was a contestant after being discovered by producers the year before when they were doing a shoot with homeless youth. She has also featured
transgender guests on her eponymous talk show. Although they had their missteps,for the most part, her shows treated King and other trans women with respect, and here’s hoping that this show will do an even better job.
As you might also remember, Carrera also has a TV background, first getting into the public spotlight as a contestant on
Rupaul’s Drag Race. Since coming out as trans after being on the show, she’s has a successful modeling career, signing with Elite Model Management, walking in a
Marco Marco runway show and having a
spread in W Magazine. I’m glad that Carrera will be the star of this project. She’s shown in the past that she can be both hilariously funny and extremely well-spoken about trans issues. If you just watch her
brilliantly handle the extremely uncomfortable questions she gets from
Katie Couric or watch the
YouTube video she made after one of her cishet friends told her that she couldn’t go out with her because it was “a straight night at the club,” you’ll see what I mean.
Carmen Carrera not taking any of Katie Couric’s nonsense.
Additionally, Viacom (which owns VH1) already has a history of shows starring trans women on both VH1 and their other networks MTV and LOGO. There’s been
I Want to Work for Diddy, which gave
Laverne Cox one of her first breaks;
Making his Band, which featured trans singer
Jaila Simms;
TRANSform Me, a makeover show starring three trans women (Cox,
Jamie Clayton and
Nina Poon); and the LOGO shows
RuPaul’s Drag Race (which has featured trans women including Carrera,
Sonique and
Monica Beverly Hillz) and
Transamerican Love Story, a dating show starring the aforementioned Addams. On the other hand, LOGO also recently came under fire from the trans community for transmisogynistic slurs and games used on
Drag Race. LOGO
eventually did decide to apologize and change the language, but they definitely dragged their feet in doing so.
This show looks like
Viacom has learned their lesson. By featuring trans women of color and involving trans women of color in the making of the show, they’re giving me more hope for this show than I thought I would have. Banks said that
“TransAmerica is a groundbreaking docuseries that will blow the roof off stereotypes and set the record straight as we experience the lives of these fun, stunning women.” Carrera added, “Being a woman means everything to me. Before my transition I felt trapped, and now I’ve been set free. Carmen has arrived and I can’t wait to share my story.”
This is the latest is a group of reality shows and TV documentaries starring trans women to come out or be announced lately. First there was former Miss Universe contestant Jenna Talackova’s show that debuted earlier this year, then it was announced that Against Me!’s lead singer Laura Jane Grace would be getting her own show through AOL, and now this one and the recently announced Trans Teen: The Documentary, produced and hosted by Cox for MTV, that are both coming soon. Hopefully with more trans representation like this, more and more people will start seeing and treating trans women (and all trans people) as the human beings that we are. Hopefully the more they see us on TV and learn about us, the less they’ll feel like they need to ask invasive questions. I’m super happy to be seeing so many trans women getting what seems to be positive representation on TV; now we just need to see the same kind of representation in film and TV, where trans women are still often played by cis men and are still usually only portrayed as sex workers and the victims of violent crimes. I’m excited to watch this show when it eventually airs later this year or early next, and I’m excited to see Carrera moving up in the world like this.
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I would marry Carmen Carrera so hard. This TV show is the best thing to happen to my entire life.
Personally, I don’t trust Tyra Banks when it comes to the representation of trans people. Way too many of her Tyra shows on the subject were objectifying lowest-common-denominator trash (and yes, that even extends to her exploitation of Isis). As to this show, I’m instantly suspicious they fly Carmen Carrera into Chicago. If you want to make a show about trans women in Chicago, then get a group of trans women from that city rather than having a casting agency doing auditions. Instead, the producers are carefully cherry-picking who fits the (passable/femme) image of what they want to present on the show and, for me, that spells reality television, not documentary. I will be looking forward to Laverne Cox’s upcoming VH1 show on trans youth. This… not so much.
I’m inclined to agree about not trusting Tyra. I know that ANTM is orchestrated in such a way as to maximize drama and meltdown potential but the way she handled Isis’ story arc on her first ANTM appearance seemed designed to trigger dysphoria-related meltdowns. Isis conducted herself with class, but she shouldn’t have had to deal with some of the shitty situations Tyra subjected her to. I can see Tyra making this new show real exploitative real fast.
What great news. i am so happy to see more trans women get the opportunity’s they deserve and hopefully they will be good representation and not ruined by studio execs.
I think this show really does have the potential to do a lot of good. I just hope that they do give a voice to a variety of trans women and I also hope they don’t focus primarily on the fact that they are trans. Also, a little off topic, but I can’t help notice that the media is loving trans women. (which is great!) but they’re making a select few trans women the faces of a trans identity, which is problematic in itself, but it also creates this idea that a trans identity is mainly a trans woman identity. There seems to be a significant lack of trans men in the media.