Transparent, the Amazon Studios series about an older transgender woman and her family, took home two Emmys last night—and we should all be celebrating.
Jill Soloway, the out creator of the show, won Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series for the second year in a row. Jeffrey Tambor, who plays Maura, the transgender lead character, won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series.
Soloway credits her real-life transgender father for inspiring the series. (Bonus fun fact: Her sister Faith Soloway, a writer on the show, is a lesbian mom.) Some have criticized the show for casting Tambor, a cisgender man, as Maura, but Soloway has instituted a “transfirmative action program” to favor hiring transgender cast and crew over cisgender ones, telling the New York Times that she never wants trans people to feel “otherized” on the set “because they don’t think there are any trans people listening.”
Tambor himself said during his acceptance speech that more trans talent should be given a chance, and “I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a female transgender [character] on television. We have work to do!”
Maura is not the only LGBTQ parent on the show. At the start of the series, daughter Sarah is married to a husband and has two kids. She later leaves him for a woman she had known in college.
Transparent has thus reminded the world that LGBTQ parenting isn’t just about two happy lesbians searching for sperm or two dads adopting, the usual tropes. It can also be about trans parents and bi parents and transitioning or coming out later in life and struggling with identity and dealing with the hundreds of other challenges and quirks of being a family.
And as Soloway said in her acceptance speech:
It’s a privilege, and it also creates privilege, when you take women, people of color, trans people, queer people and you put them at the center of the story, the subjects instead of the objects. You change the world, we found out….
I’ve always wanted to be part of a movement ― civil rights movement, the feminist movement. This TV show allows me to take my dreams about unlikeable Jewish people, queer folk, trans folk, and make them the heroes.
Thank you to the trans community for your lived lives. We need to stop violence against transgender women and topple the patriarchy!
Watch the whole thing: