Alexa & Katie, The Babysitters Club & trans girlhood
Part 2: The Babysitters Club & trans girl representation
Read the prelude to and part 1 of this essay here and here.
What I’m advocating for here are not just queer characters in media. We do need more queer characters in media, but that’s not my point here. Oftentimes if kids shows have queer characters at all, they will allow there to be queer adults, while maintaining heterosexual children. Which raises the question, why are girls (and children more broadly) made to be heterosexual while it is permissible for women (and adults more broadly) to be queer? As I was writing this essay, I noticed a new show on Netflix, an adaptation of the popular novel series The Baby-Sitters Club. I can’t remember having read the books as a kid, but I knew this type of show was exactly the type of thing that would fit into the parameters of this essay, so I began to watch it. I was not prepared for the emotional rollercoaster that this show would take me on! Since this show is fresh in my mind, I will talk about it most in-depth, and that conversation will involve spoilers! So, beware!
The Babysitters Club has a lesbian couple and a gay couple. They’re both minor couples in the show. The lesbian couple involves the art teacher and the gay couple involves Dawn’s dad back in California. These characters are left at the periphery.
And then there’s episode 4: “Mary Anne Saves The Day.” This episode, featuring Mary Anne struggling with finding her own voice and not being so timid, gives her the opportunity to take a stand in an interesting and complicated way. Mary Anne is given the opportunity to babysit for a friend of her dad’s. This parent only wants Mary Anne for now, since she knows her dad. The audience doesn’t know more than that until later when Mary Anne is at the babysitting job. Mary Anne and the child she is babysitting, Bailey, are playing and they’re having tea when Bailey accidentally spills some on her dress. Mary Anne handles the situation very well and the two go off so that Baily can change into a fresh dress. As Mary Anne looks into Bailey’s closet, she’s disappointed not to see a replacement dress, saying “Well this won’t do.”
Bailey remarks, “Those are my old clothes,” as she opens a drawer of pink clothes. This is how the audience learns that Bailey is transgender, even though the show never once uses the word.
Later, once Bailey has changed and Mary Anne and Bailey are playing again, Bailey says that she doesn’t want to play and that she wants her mom. It turns out that she has a fever. Mary Anne can’t get ahold of Bailey’s mom or her (Mary Anne’s) dad. Eventually Mary Anne decides to call 911.
At the hospital a nurse and a doctor walk in, and they both begin to misgender Bailey. Bailey, the little trans girl with no agency, squirms in discomfort from the fever and the misgendering. Finally, Mary Anne, in her triumphant moment of saving the day, asks to speak to the nurse and the doctor outside, where she sets them straight. On first view, her monologue is very enjoyable, and I absolutely teared up (and sent it to my best friend on Snapchat). But when I think about it, when I start applying that lens from that one summer semester film class I took, I think about how the audience doesn’t see Bailey any more after Mary Anne’s monologue. Not in that episode or for the rest of the season.
This isn’t a centering of transgender people! This is an exploitation of transgender people to score points for being woke and feminist. And I get it — “don’t bite the hand that feeds!” — however, what I’m advocating for here is transgender protagonists!! Why couldn’t Mary Anne be trans? Why couldn’t Kristy be trans (I was holding out for her to be a futch lesbian, at least!)? Why couldn’t Claudia be trans? Why couldn’t Stacey be trans? Why couldn’t Dawn be trans? Why is it that transgender girls can be the children of the clients of The Babysitter’s Club, but they can’t be the babysitters of that club?
Which brings me back to the lesbian couple and the gay couple. I feel like the whole concept of wanting gay characters where their gayness isn’t a big part of who they are as a character has provided cover for really boring queer characters whose queerness is only mentioned in passing. To make queer characters the secondary and tertiary characters of the show and to mention their queerness in passing is further decentering. I would’ve loved to see more of Mrs. Johanssen and her wife! I would’ve loved to see more of Marc and his husband! Instead what we get are microscopic moments in a show that is wrapped up in heterosexuality. At one point or another most of the main protagonists develop crushes, with Stacey getting an entire episode dedicated to her being “boy-crazy,” while the show is framed in the first 8 episodes around Elizabeth’s marriage to Cliff Calley! Episode 8, Kristy’s Big Day was probably the most disappointing. And I don’t know if I can write about this in a nuanced way and have it be well-received on the internet.
Let me start by saying that I think young cisgender girls deserve representation like that of Kristy’s Big Day. As someone who doesn’t menstruate, I can’t speak really on the quality of that representation of menstruation and someone’s first menstruation experience. However, I think that menstruation should continue to be represented in the media. Having said that, the episode doesn’t just disallow for the possibility that Kristy is a trans girl, but that any of the protagonists are trans girls, as it is revealed that they’ve all had their period, when they are all their for Kristy as she has hers for the first time!
Ultimately what we need and what young queer and transgender girls deserve, those girls who are the target ages of these shows, is better representation. They deserve lesbian and sapphic protagonists, they deserve transgender protagonists, they deserve to see girls like them in these shows. Kids watching these shows deserve to see “agentic subjects” (Byers 2018) who look like them. The writers, directors, and producers of these shows must resist the temptation to advocate through their art a static understanding of transgender bodies (Byers 2018). We must all find and create art that puts objects within the reach of transgender kids that allows them to imagine their own transgender futures (Byers 2018). We must allow for transgender characters with agency who don’t pass, who don’t medically transition, who are in mid-transition, who disrupt cisnormative ideas of what gender is meant to be! Those who create this art must be unwilling to use heterosexuality or even heternormativity, class, or race to set their tween and teen characters into an innocence made available to white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class tweens and teens. While I must admit I would probably marathon a show that was Alexa & Katie but trans or The Babysitters Club but trans, but I know that there can and should be more, and transgender kids deserve more. They deserve fully queer and non-normative art. Not commercial television with normative messages, though there will be that, but something more. With every new transgender character we must understand what audiences are being presented with. What representations are being made available. What does Bailey from The Babysitters Club tell us about which transgender children are allowed to enter into history (Byers 2018), and can Bailey tell us anything about the transgender children who remain outside of history?
When we talk about the girlhood of trans girls, what we must understand is that even when we talk about trans girls who aren’t out to themselves, often others see in them the presence of femininity. Let me not appeal to a “born this way” or biological/natural narrative but offer at least anecdotal evidence that this much is true. It is possible for a trans girl to do things that will be perceived as feminine without her or others identifying her that way! This femininity does not go unnoticed, it does not go unremarked upon, even when those remarks don’t reach the trans girl directly, and often, this femininity doesn’t go unpunished. Transgender girls are often encouraged through myriad means, to “toughen up,” to act more masculine. For a transgender girl these experiences can be confusing at best and traumatic at worst.
If one wants to imagine ways in which to bring transgender girlhood to television, they may turn toward Alex Gino’s George for inspiration. George is a fantastic middle grade novel that follows 4th-grader George as she struggles with being a girl trying to find the space to be truly herself. I appreciate George as a novel because it doesn’t insist on cheeriness. George struggles, she cries, she fights, she stands up for herself, and sometimes she is stood down. She is given space, and makes space, and finds space. Her best friend stays with her through everything and at every step of the way helps George to take the space she needs to be the girl she wants to be — from auditioning to play Charlotte in the class play, to playing Charlotte even when their teacher wouldn’t give George the role, to giving Melissa an entire day to be her full self. This is a perfect example of what I would like to see on TV. It is a perfect example of what I think transgender girls deserve to be able to see on TV.
In two weeks, on September 14, I will release the first part of a new essay on how I came to do interdisciplinary work in academia.
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