The Pitt has become one of my very favourite shows. It’s a hospital-set drama with a huge heart, originally conceived as a follow-up to the 1990s series ER in which Noah Wyle played a young doctor. Unfortunately – or fortunately, given the result – ER writer Michael Crichton’s estate nixed that so Wyle created a stand-alone series instead. This time around Wyle plays a grizzled veteran who’s trying very hard to keep it together while under incredible pressure. He’s fantastic, as are the rest of the ensemble cast.
There’s a minor story in The Pitt featuring a transgender woman, and it’s really interesting to compare that with the trans storylines in ER. Because ER’s portrayal of trans and intersex people was vicious.
[Content warning: slurs]
Writing on Tumblr, Brin (aka Brinconvenient) describes multiple episodes of ER featuring trans, intersex and gender non-conforming people. The first, ER Confidential, was broadcast in November 1994. Brin goes into detail for that episode but to summarise: the trans woman is played by a cisgender man, she’s treated with disgust and hostility by the show’s stars, and she’s called a slur by one of the nurses. Her story arc ends with her jumping off the roof of the hospital because she’s too old and too mannish to be a believable woman.
Brin was 16 at the time.
Just think of the message this episode sends. Are you a young trans kid? Better transition while you’re young or not at all, because you’re on a clock – you have an expiration date. If you transition later, you’re just going to look like a man in a dress, everyone will clock you, everyone will find you disgusting, and they’re right too. You’ll get called names, you’ll get the barest modicum of tolerance, if you’re lucky, and even then, you’ll be kept at arm’s length.
And hey, if you get old? Or older, really, because you don’t even have to be THAT old, then your life is over. It’s best just to kill yourself instead of not passing.
I was an ER watcher too. So I got that message loud and clear – not just in that episode, but several times.
There were plenty more examples.
over 15 seasons, 331 episodes, ER had a total of 5 explicitly trans women and one explicitly intersex women (and zero trans or intersex men).
None of them have a happy ending.
As Brin says, “the general cis idea of trans people is informed by all of these Sad, Angst, Tragic Trannies ™”, and while things have got better we’ve had decades of this stuff in popular culture (I go into a lot of examples of that in both of my books). Other shows were just as careless/callous: for example NYPD Blue, another show I watched religiously, consistently showed trans people as sex workers, dead sex workers or ludicrous caricatures, had the star characters insult and misgender those characters, and titled a 2003 episode about the murder of a trans sex worker “Tranny Get Your Gun“. This was considered completely normal and entirely acceptable.
I don’t know if Noah Wyle set out to try and do better now than his character did in ER. But The Pitt gets right what ER consistently got wrong.
First of all, the trans woman is played by a trans woman (the luminous Eva Everett Irving). Tasha is a glamorous, likeable and fun character, a sommelier to the rich and famous. She’s not in the ER because she’s trans; she’s in the ER because she’s got a nasty cut on her hand. The hand is fixed, the deadname on her file is quietly corrected by one of the medical students, and she’s off again to her glamorous life. She’s not there to make the main characters sad, or to be a tragic figure. She’s just another patient.
That shouldn’t be remarkable. But sadly, it is.
