We fixed a misgendering error on your chart
On trans representation in The Pitt, and in media at large
I’ve been watching a lot of The Pitt as of late, and it’s an excellent show. I could gush about the performances, the practical effects, how I want McKay to do things to me that I’m not going to repeat here, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.
What I want to talk about is the transfeminine representation in the show, and how it ties into the broader media canon’s representation of trans women. I specifically mean the wine somellier lady; to my knowledge she’s the only trans character in the show. I was going to attach a clip of the scene in particular I want to discuss, but search on every website is outright nonfunctional at this point, and I don’t want to just link to a piracy site that’s going to get taken down in 3 months with a timestamp. Watch the show, it’s worth it, and you’ll know what I mean.
In the past, trans women were seen as largely a novelty, and primarily used as comic relief in media if they were mentioned at all. Even movies that are ostensibly progressive, such as The Crying Game, the reveal is still played for laughs. Obviously, there are examples of positive trans representation back then, but they’re few and far between, and none immediately spring to mind. Probably something by John Waters.
There was also the common trope of the trans serial killer. Always a trans woman, never passing, always fetishistic. Psycho, The Silence Of The Lambs, etc. Yes, I know Buffalo Bill wasn’t textually trans, but come on. You know how people read him. Maybe not as much these days, but the term Buffalo Bill practically functioned as an transmisogynistic slur in and of itself at one point. Some people might feel the need to differentiate crossdressers and trans women in these descriptions, but to the average normie back then, they didn’t know the difference. Even these days, people don’t understand what hormones do for the most part. They think you’re a crossdresser, and then you get The Surgery(tm), and then you’re a woman. Or they think The Surgery(tm) is literally just cutting your penis off in the kitchen with a steak knife. You get the idea. Transitioning is not seen as an incremental, slow process by the average person.
Outside of outsider art made by LGBT people, typically trans women in movies were treated as either something to be mocked, or something to be feared, and this continued until around the 90s. While still often played for laughs, occasionally you’d get genuinely thoughtful trans representation, such as in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia of all shows. At a time when all of its contemporaries, the sitcoms it was a whole-genre parody of, were like “Wow, ain’t it wacky that a woman’s got a penis? Hyuck!”, Always Sunny threw its hat into the ring. There was an episode about Mac having a fling with a trans woman, but the humour was less about her, and more about how Mac and the gang reacted. Mac is a pitch-perfect parody of a DL chaser, long before that was a well known archetype. “No, you’re not getting it! I’m not ashamed of you, you’re wonderful! I’m ashamed of myself!”. This will seem familiar to any one of you who’s had a comphet phase and dated a man who refuses to hold hands with you in public. I wasted a year with that man. The others mock him, but the actual trans woman is portrayed as basically just a normal chick that happens to be packing. This was almost unheard of, especially in sitcoms.
Now, Mac is later revealed to be gay, and how this links together with him chasing in previous episodes warrants further discussion, but this is outside of the scope of this essay. What I’ll say here is that it’s probably not a super-rare occurence that someone realises they’re gay, or at the very least bi, using trans women as a stepping stone. Or femboys, probably more often. We’re seen as a third gender and ostracised, whereas femboys (despite basically just being the fake natty version of trans women) are seen as “whoa it’s my bro but he’s like… a chick… whoa”.
There are also plenty of movies that are allegories for the transfem experience, but don’t ever textually state it. Marla Singer from Fight Club isn’t ever explicitly stated to be trans, but it honestly adds to the movie as a whole if you read her that way. I can name a litany of dolls she reminds me of. There is also The Entire Film Catalogue of The Watchowski Sisters. I feel that one doesn’t particularly need explaining.
Once more serious transfem representation became more common, a frequent trope was women on the fringe of society. Prostitutes, drug addicts, et cetera. All stereotypically HSTS, if we want to dip our toes into that arena. The girl that the protagonist of Irreversible accosts while searching for the Tenia, for example. Lesbian trans women were, and still are, almost never represented. It’s hard to conceptualise for the average person, because we’re either seen as faggots who were just so gay that they couldn’t stand being men, or crossdressing rapists. A trans woman who’s just a regular woman that happens to date other women does not compute for them, for whatever reason. The one exception I can think of for this is Euphoria, and that’s probably because Hunter Schafer had a hand in writing her own character.
We’re finally getting to the scene I was discussing in the introduction. In response to what I mentioned in the prior paragraph, many films or tv shows today represent trans women as affluent, beautiful, and unaffected by transmisogyny beyond misgendering. Baby Reindeer is another example of this. I understand it’s an overcorrection, because society feels antipathy towards the downtrodden and representation can affect reality, but if anything I feel like what I described in the prior paragraph is more accurate. I know more girls who suck cock for money than I do girls who work as successful wine sommeliers. I don’t consider myself a drug addict, but I’ll do whatever anyone offers me, and I do plenty of my own accord too. This is also true of a large portion of my trans friends. Part of that is probably just us being British though, and the ubiquity of drug use here.
The sommelier in The Pitt isn’t introduced as trans, and doesn’t bring it up at all. If representation were consistently better, I wouldn’t feel the need to draw attention to that, but the bar is in hell. I may be projecting somewhat when I say this, but the fact I’m trans is a low level headache pervading my life. I don’t want to spill my guts to a stranger about how I’m just so dysphoric and disavowing my masculinity. The only reason they’d need to know I have a dick is if they’re likely to be seeing it in the near future. It does not affect anything else, and I find it frankly bizarre that the popular conception of trans women has us talking about it all the time. Maybe online, but online has entirely different social conventions to reality, and shouldn’t be considered equivalent.
The actress playing the sommelier is trans. This is also a hurdle most filmic media can’t get over. Typically they get a regular male actor and doll him up. Now, while Cillian Murphy and Eddie Redmayne look very pretty in their dresses and makeup, there’s a missed opportunity I feel.
Her character is lively, charismatic, and treated with respect. She’s written as a woman, first and foremost. As I said prior, there’s only one scene where it’s even brought up. Now, while this may not be 100% realistic, because it’s rare for doctors to see women as human beings, let alone trans women, I don’t hate it. The scene where it’s revealed is when she’s leaving the emergency ward. Javadi says something along the lines of “oh, there was a misgendering error on your chart, I fixed it”. The sommelier looks at her with a look of mild discomfort on her face and in a cadence not far removed from the “Yes, I… do” from this video says “oh, thank you”.
It’s such a subtle thing but it’s an incredible performance, one that a lot of people don’t even pick up on. It captures gratitude but also a sense of “did you really have to mention it out loud?”. It depicts well-meaning cis allies and their way of wanting to respect us while not actually seeing us as women in the slightest. We’re freaks, but freaks are okay in their worldview.
It depicts the disappointment in thinking you’ve passed in a given interaction, and then someone slipping up. They always over-apologise, and if anything that makes it worse. I don’t particularly care how someone refers to me, but making it clear you’re only treating me as a woman because you pity me feels far worse than you accidentally referring to me as a man.
There’s also the metatextual angle of how a bunch of cis allies have reposted the scene and also not picked up on the subtext I’ve mentioned. They’re reading it as “oh that’s so nice of Javadi to do!”, and “trans rep is so important!”. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t warrant drawing attention to, but also a situation where only someone trans would understand that. I’m honestly astonished it made it into the show, and it makes me wonder how much of her reaction was scripted and how much was improv, because there’s no way a regular cis writer would be able to imbue that much nuance on this particular topic into a single line read.
Despite the fact that we’ve been around for thousands of years (the Enaree, Cybele cultists, the Hijra, emperor Elagabulus, etc), society views trans women as a relatively recent phenomena, and maybe in our current iteration we are. Pregnant mare urine and castration doesn’t hold a candle to bioidentical estrogen, progesterone, laser hair removal, SRS, gummy bear implants, lip lifts, hair transplants, and Lefort 3 surgeries. It probably makes sense they don’t really understand how to interact with us yet. The issue is the underlying assumptions, in my opinion. Either you believe you’re truly able to change biological sex, or you don’t, and that informs your worldview regardless of how progressive or conservative you are. You’ll eventually slip up if you’re just doing this to be nice, because so much of social interaction is subconscious. You’ll say something insensitive or trip up with someone’s pronouns or whatever because human speech works a lot like autocorrect, and that was the next word that goes there. You’ll apologise after. We’ll shrug it off, because we’ve learned not to expect anything different at this point.