I’ve been meaning to post about Max, the ftm character on the new season of the L Word, and the burdens of trans representation. The L Word already has a considerable burden of representation — it’s about dykes, and their friends and their ‘communities’, and while the first season channelled viewers into the characters’ dramas through an outsider’s (straight, male) gaze, threatened but also titillated, subsequent seasons have abandoned that tack and inserted more and more queer in-jokes. The hair has gotten shorter, the clothes have gotten less girly and more dykey… The only thing that hasn’t changed is, everyone is still rich. Pretty much. But the producers are now obviously communicating with and fed by the desires of their queer viewers.

Enter Max, once Moira, a working-class trannyboy from the mid-West who doesn’t know how to eat lobster and never gets introduced to anyone by his stupid girlfriend, Jenny. He begins to take T (which he gets without a doctor’s prescription, mysteriously) and talks to surgeons about having chest surgery (the surgeon actually suggests he hold a benefit to pay for surgery. Has anyone ever experienced that?) He also develops a raging temper and becomes more possessive of his girl — no-one else can even dance with Jenny, let alone make a pass at her. Meanwhile, he cheats on her with gay men, because somehow, fucking a guy makes him feel more like a guy. (It’s obviously a guy thing.)

Now there’s a petition to sign, attesting that L Word is transphobic, and people are mad.

(From the petition, via Transcending Gender:

Many of the aspects of Max’s character arc are based on the stereotype that transmen are driven by and use testosterone as an excuse to become abusive, violent, and over-sexualized. We believe that this is inherently transphobic, inaccurate and exaggerates most transmasculine experiences of testosterone. This also dangerously implies that people who physically transition cannot control of their actions under the influence of hormones.

Further, much of Max’s physical transition is inaccurate and very misleading. Max’s transition is sped up to cover several years of physical changes in a few months which extensively inflates a person’s physical transition. Max uses street hormones without the supervision of a doctor, a *highly* dangerous practice, the risks of which are not acknowledged on the show. Lack of access to trans-sensitive medical care is a huge issue for people of trans experience and it often takes years to even be able to access hormones and surgery, (which does not even include the financial barriers that are mentioned in the plot.)

Some of this is true: Max’s facial hair grows in wayyy too fast, and he sports a moustache supposedly a month after starting T. (No-one has ever grown a moustache that fast, not even hairy folks.) And yet, I don’t like the politics of representation at work here. A primetime television show — even one about queers — is not a viable political space for the ‘authentic’ representation of transpeople. Secondly, I guess I’d like to respond in a more complex, subjective way. Personally, I want the character to be perfectly identifiable — a good ‘fantasy’ FTM, like the lesbians on the show are good fantasy lesbians with their swimming-pools and their seeming ability to get laid anytime, anywhere. An FTM I can watch with pride. So it’s not so much the ‘inauthenticity’ of the character that is the problem, but that the character represents the wrong kind of inauthenticity — an undesirable one.

Perhaps for that very reason, I find most of Max’s screentime embarrassing and weird. I was also a moody, intemperate T newbie three years ago. I’ve sat with other trannyboys who talked about how screwed up “women” are, and I probably didn’t say, “This is bullshit,” like I oughta have. I know many transmen who have worse gender and sexual politics than most nontrans men. Taking T doesn’t do that to you. T can unbalance something, for a while, and make visible stuff that was present already, but the act of becoming male doesn’t make that happen. It seems easy to read Max’s character arc that way; the other characters certainly do.

So I’m conflicted. It’s not enough for me to say, “This is transphobic.” It’s discomforting and possibly dodgy, but what primetime television show ain’t? Partly, I admire the writers for having the courage not to write a character who is totally sympathetic. The other characters are equally fucked up at times (in fact, I can’t think of another character who hasn’t behaved very badly at some point across the series.)

It remains to be seen whether Max’s roid rage will settle, and whether he’ll ‘learn something’ from his experience (like all good minority members in television shows) or personify that old dyke community fear about ftm’s — that not only will all the good butches turn into men, but they’ll also turn gay to boot. Maybe, once his ‘trans’ arc finishes, he can become a part of the architecture of the show, just another character, interacting and having dramas like the rest. Stay tuned.