I am not going to go into a lot of detail, but I am going to salute Law & Order: SVU for once again touching upon the topics other television shows run from. Tonight's episode focused on a transgender child. The 13-year-old at the center of the episode goes by Hailey but was born Henry.
When I first heard that this was going to be the topic of this week's episode, I must say I was initially worried. I was afraid the show would go about discussing the subject in very stereotypical ways. But the show did many things correctly. They defined transgender in a way people could understand and, more importantly, they said all of the right things. The common phrases "body betray you," "feel trapped," "anatomy is irrelevant," etc. were all used.
In a class I am taking, Communication and Gender, we have spent the last week or two talking about transgender people and seeing the issue brought up in the mainstream media means a lot to me, especially since this is not a topic usually used for material.
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This week's This American Life covered the topic too. It was a topic I'd never really thought of before, and they handled it really tastefully and with a lot of insight.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=374