The Awful (And The Amazing!) Trans Rep In Lost Girl
The producers said they didn’t mean it, but is ignorance enough to excuse blatant transphobia?
Lost Girl: a show that directly challenged (or directly ignored) patriarchal ideals and binary assumptions about gender and sexuality
Lost Girl is a Canadian supernatural drama television series that premiered on Showcase on September 12, 2010, and ran for five seasons. The series was created by Michelle Lovretta and produced by Jay Firestone and Prodigy Pictures Inc., with the participation of the Canadian Television Fund (Canada Media Fund), and in association with Shaw Media.
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The initial premise centers on the gorgeous and charismatic Bo, a supernatural being called a succubus who feeds on the energy of humans, sometimes with fatal results. Refusing to embrace her supernatural clan and its rigid hierarchy, Bo is a renegade who takes up the fight for the underdog while searching for the truth about her own mysterious origins.
Over the years, the show provided dynamite representation not just for powerful women but queer people of all shapes, sizes, and colors. The show provided sexually charged plot lines that directly challenged (or directly ignored) patriarchal ideals and binary assumptions about gender and sexuality.
During Lost Girl’s original run, PinkNews described the show as “widely regarded as being one of the most LGBT inclusive on air.” The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation promoted the show in The GLAAD Wrap and “What to Watch.”
Expressing warmth and enduring love for the series, oldaintdead wrote “My Love Letter to Lost Girl After 5 Years of Fabulous TV,” saying:
There were bi women, gay men, lesbian women, straight folks and it was all good. Kenzi’s declaration that she liked men was treated with the same respect as Lauren’s declaration that naked football players really weren’t that interesting.
Hells yeah! That sounds great. What else did they say?
In a larger sense, there was much about Lost Girl that was significant in the landscape of pop culture. The attitude toward sexuality was all-inclusive (well, minus a transgender character).
Oh no.
Oh…
Oh no.
“Well, minus a transgender character”: Explaining THAT episode of Lost Girl
The season three premiere, “Caged Fae,” was the show’s take on pulpy “women in prison” films. In the episode, Bo gets herself tossed in a jail for supernatural beings to uncover a criminal plot.
The jail is run by Amazons (as in the mythical all-female warrior tribe, not the Wonder Woman gals from Themyscaria). And thank Hera, because that’s where the similarities end.
The Amazon guards and the villainous prison warden are secretly impregnating prisoners and selling their offspring.
That’s awful. I mean wtf. But that’s not where the episode stops.
What Bo and the rest of the pack do to defeat the warden is V-I-L-E.
Warning: extreme transphobia
Bo “exposes” the warden by kissing her, remarking on a suspicious amount of beard stubble, and telling the Amazon guards that the warden is clearly a man in disguise.
It gets worse — a guard grabs the warden’s crotch in a forceful manner and declares that what he has found is proof that this is not a “real” woman.
As the guards drag her away, the warden screams, “My mother was an Amazon! I’m one of you!” Afterwards, the other characters mention that the warden survived the attacks, but they refer to her with exclusively male pronouns.
Y-I-K-E-S.
The warden’s actions are unforgivable —but they don’t justify transphobic violence as a response or punishment.
But more than that…
Just because the warden is pure evil doesn’t make her a man
As far as proving she’s a woman, the warden has a lot in her favor. She has what some consider to be the cis-normative appearance of a woman. Her mother was an Amazon.
And if there’s any doubt, she tells us she’s a woman.
She knows she’s a woman in her truest core because she is not just trans — she’s from a group of shapeshifters known as the Liderc.
Like the payoff to “Striking Vipers,” one of the most controversial episodes of Black Mirror, the ability to shift between one body versus another doesn’t necessarily lead to the slippery slope of “any body will do.” It can instead reveal the best options from a menu unique to our identity.
Much like the iconic Mystique from the X-Men franchise, being able to choose the exact form of her body empowers the warden to embrace which aspects of her identity remain true and constant.
“Woman” is not merely what she wears but who she is.
To be honest, this all seems kind of obvious these days. The conversation has moved so far beyond the already debunked conservative/centrist talking points that for a queer-allied show like Lost Girl to get it so wrong so recently seems, well, less credible than meeting an actual succubus.
Reviewing the Criticism
By and large, critics and allies alike criticized the blatant transphobia in the episode.
Lost Girl: “Caged Fae” (AV Club)
The final revelation of the episodic plot regarding the Amazon warden felt so terribly like that “She’s a man, baby!” moment from Austin Powers, I couldn’t stand it.
I Just Now Saw: Lost Girl (Autostraddle)
I’ve read absolutely nothing about Lost Girl anywhere, except for a review of the first episode of the third season on AV Club to see if they said anything about the fact that it was the most transphobic thing I’ve seen on television in quite some time. (They didn’t.)
GLAAD issued a statement condemning the outrageous transphobia:
“Whether or not you consider the prison warden to be a transgender character is open to interpretation given that the character is a mythological shapeshifter, but there’s no mistaking the scene that takes place out at the end of the episode,” GLAAD’s blog notes. “The warden being ‘discovered’ and then viciously attacked is a scenario tragically based in reality, but here is played out for the enjoyment of the audience. It’s also evocative of the offensive claim that transgender women are ‘tricking’ their way into female-only spaces for perverted or criminal purposes.
Other notable alternative media blogs like Bilerico.com and Planetransgender.blogspot.com played an important role in raising immediate awareness and need for public accountability from the studio.
The studio’s response
The people behind Lost Girl were among the strongest allies the queer community had ever seen, so it was not without surprise that despite their profoundly ignorant and transphobic episode, they were ready to acknowledge the harm and make amends.
The studio issued a statement acknowledging the harmful impact. They explained that their ignorance came from a place of good intentions. They said they’d intended only to authentically represent a character based in folklore and mythology.
We want to let you know that the Lost Girl writers base all episodic characters off of researched folklore, and that the character of The Warden in the premiere of Season 3 is a character based off the mythological shapeshifter known as the Liderc. The Warden was only intended to represent this mythic being. We did not intend this character to be seen as a transgender person, we apologize if the character was seen as such. We do hope that you accept that no comparison or discrimination toward the transgender community was intended by the depiction of this mythological character.
Lost Girl prides itself on being open and accepting to everyone, and are enthusiastic supporters of the GLBT community. We want to encourage a society in which everyone can feel comfortable to express and be who they are without judgment. Equality and a world without labels is important to all of us at the series. We strive to create three dimensional characters, who empower all viewers regardless of sexuality or gender.
Sincerely,
The Producers of LOST GIRL
Remarking on the aftermath
That’s a remarkable apology, but the problem was that this wasn’t just some subtle nod that caused audiences to grasp their pearls.
It’s one thing when audiences vilify a character for the wrong reasons — the villain in Ace Ventura, for example, is a literal male predator using the disguise of a woman to better dupe his victims. For all it gets wrong by making it so easy to conflate men pretending to be women vs actual women with trans medical backgrounds, Ace Ventura at least makes it clear that the two aren’t the same.
Lost Girl, however, failed trans people because it went so far as to have the trans character declare that she was trans — only for the protagonist to be the very person ensuring the warden will suffer the same violent “justice” so commonly delivered to innocent women with trans medical backgrounds.
For Lost Girl, “Caged Fae” was an example of such blatant transphobia that it can’t be excused through mere ignorance — but it could be redeemed through growth and progress.
Now let’s go over the AMAZING trans rep in Lost Girl
“Like the patriarchal society to depict its most powerful member as male — I’ve had many forms, but currently…Zee is a she.” — S5E8 “End of Faes”
Before there was Zee, there was Zeus. I mean Zee. I mean Zeus. I mean —
That’s the thing. Zee/Zeus is genderfluid. Her children Persephone and Iris have a powerfully accepting relationship toward Zee and her genderfluid husband Heratio (more on him below).
For the duration of her appearances on Lost Girl, Zee is a woman fiercely in conflict with patriarchal ideals, especially those we might normally associate with “Zeus,” the supreme ruler of the Olympians.
Similar to how Bo feeds off sexual energy, Zee feeds off the energy of euphoria created among crowds of people by the success of a descendant. And much like her MCU Asgardian counterparts, she can of course redirect and manipulate energy in the form of lightning.
Lost Girl ended in season 5. If it had continued, it’s not so big a stretch after all to imagine Zee might have eventually shifted into a form that looks a heck of a lot like Russell Crowe.
Appearances of Zee in Lost Girl include:
- 5.02 Like Hell Pt.2
- 5.03 Big in Japan
- 5.04 When God Opens a Window
- 5.06 Clear Eyes, Fae Hearts
- 5.07 Here Comes the Night
- 5.08 End of Faes
- 5.09 44 Minutes to Save the World
- 5.10 Like Father, Like Daughter
- 5.12 Judgement Fae
But wait, there’s more.
Heratio
Look no further than Zee’s husband for ANOTHER gender funky character on Lost Girl: Heratio.
In ancient civilizations, Heratio was worshiped by humans as the goddess “Hera.” In Lost Girl, Heratio is a member of one of the most powerful Fae families that ever lived.
He is neither trans nor cis, but is instead genderfluid, equally accepting of the label “mother” and “father.” Is it any wonder he’s so perfectly suited for Zee/Zeus?
Appearances in Lost Girl include:
- 5.05 It’s Your Lucky Fae
- 5.06 Clear Eyes, Fae Hearts
- 5.07 Here Comes the Night
- 5.08 End of Faes
- 5.09 44 Minutes to Save the World
- 5.10 Like Father, Like Daughter
- 5.12 Judgement Fae
In celebration of all who are in the Gender Funky Family of Fae
Thanks for joining us today to explore the trans and gender funky representation in the queer-allied show Lost Girl.
What do you think about that season 3 prison episode? Would you feel differently if they’d found a way to defeat the warden that didn’t mirror so much real-world violence against innocent trans people?
If you want more explorations of gender funky moments in media, check out why Barbie is just another sequel to The Matrix, the amazing trans and intersex representation in the acclaimed first season of The Power, or listen to the most gender funky version of Kanye West’s “Heartless” to ever be put to music.
Or if you just want to watch some tv?
Stream all five seasons of Lost Girl for free on The CW
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