It seems that just in the past year or two, the amount of transgender representation in mainstream media has grown exponentially. Last year it was Amazon's Transparent and this year it was Glee's second transgender character, Coach Beiste, and now, for the first time, TLC will be producing an 11 part reality series surrounding the life of a transgender teen Jazz Jennings, aptly titled All That Jazz. While more and more transgender-themed reality shows (ABC Family's My Transparent Life, Discovery's New Girls on the Block, etc.) are airing with each passing month, All That Jazz offers a more unique perspective. It shows the transgender journey in first-person while also showing Jennings' traversal the infamously difficult teen years. And with Jennings already having an amazing reputation as a teen author and activist, the possibilities for this show to break boundaries that even others have failed to are unlimited. But as Nancy Daniels, General Manager of TLC, stated, "Jazz may be known as an author and activist, but she’s first and foremost a teenage girl with a big, brave heart, living a remarkable life."
Looking at the bigger picture, this boost in transgender media prevalence points to good things for the television industry as a whole. As we've discussed in class, TV shows for a long time have been fairly homogenous: all white, all straight, with the occasional gay couple. By breaking the norm and increasing the representation of more members of the LGBTQ+ community (although only transgender for now), networks are allowing for "transgender Americans [to become] ever more visible in pop culture, normalizing the way society views them." Similar to the goals of eliminating the racial TV Tokenism, eliminating LGBTQ+-based TV Tokenism could further help America reach the equality it seems to be striving for. Considering television is often a reflection of the society it's coming from (to a certain extent), seeing progress on the screen would mean progress in the real world, which in the end, is what really needs to happen. If trends like this continue in what appears to be a snowball effect, maybe we will see this change sooner rather than later.
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Jennings' inspirational ad for Clean & Clear:
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