Alexa & Katie, The Babysitters Club & trans girlhood
Part 1: Looking for lesbians in all the wrong places
Read the prelude to this essay here.
“Alexa and Katie should’ve been lesbians,” I think, perhaps selfishly, “They should’ve been sapphic,” I dream.
To me, in a lot of ways, I cannot separate Girl Meets World and Alexa & Katie. When I found out about Alexa & Katie in 2018, a year after Girl Meets World was canceled, I found a new outlet for feelings that to this day I still have not properly processed. What is a transgender woman to say about her youth? What is she allowed to say? It remains controversial that a transgender woman’s youth is one of girlhood, that there are unique differences between the youth of a transgender girl and a cisgender boy. There are still those who are invested in the idea that what determines one’s lived experiences is one’s sex, so that all males, or all of those assigned male at birth, will have similar lived experiences. I don’t buy it. Lots of trans women don’t buy it.
Furthermore, there are those who believe in varying degrees that children shouldn’t have an autonomous gender until they are 18. Let me try not to create a strawman out of this argument: predominantly in public discourse this idea coalesces around medical intervention. There is a lot of misinformation here, but the idea is to prevent transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) children from accessing puberty blockers, for, at best, puberty blockers are what most children have access to until they turn 18! However, let us not let this focus confuse or mislead us! Of course, there are still parents out there who won’t let their children express their gender in the ways they want to! Not in name, not in pronoun, not in attire, not in adornment, not at home or at school or hanging out with friends, or anywhere. All of this we must address! Children deserve autonomy over their gender! And all of this we should acknowledge when we consider the things that children’s television is not yet willing to do.
Shows like Alexa & Katie and Girl Meets World, by their nature as being television for girls, each show being rated TV-Y7 and TV-G respectively, highlight key social moments that act as signposts for a girl’s life. And there’s something worth noting about the shift I’ve experienced as a viewer. When I was in elementary school and I would watch Lizzie McGuire and Kim Possible I was watching shows that allowed me to imagine myself as the girl I knew I was, but that the world I lived in wouldn’t allow me to be. Eventually I was fortunate enough to grow up and come out and have agency over my gender. And let’s make no mistake, being able to grow up and do those things is a fortune! But the trans girlhood I lived didn’t look anything like the cisgender girlhoods on TV. And being raised in a working-class family in Georgia, there were ways that it was never going to look like the girlhoods on TV, but it could’ve gotten a lot closer than it did!
There’s an understanding in the queer community that a person never finishes coming out. This is true and has certainly been true for me. However, there is a point I mark in my coming out. While I tried in myriad ways before the age of legal adulthood (18) to come out as a queer trans girl, I was met with little if any acceptance. And throughout high school I was deeper in the closet than any other time I had been since I first started to realize that I wasn’t cis in 3rd grade. This aside is only to point out that this divide I note in my personal history is tied up in my becoming a legal adult, though for years I continued to wrestle for my autonomy, which I wouldn’t gain in earnest until I was 22. My girlhood, my transgender girlhood, is inextricably connected through the closet, not as a passive construction that I could’ve stepped out of at any time, but as an object that was made up of violence, that meant violence to me, that meant that I was violent in ways I regret. It’s likely that if there were a television show about a trans girl whose relationship with her gender is shaped by a live in the closet it would be met with being too dark and too grim. I might join in that critique. In our television of course many of us want just a bit more hope than perhaps we get otherwise. If Girl Meets World or Alexa & Katie came out when I was in high school, I don’t know if I would’ve been brave enough to watch them. Perhaps I would’ve waited until late at night, when everyone was asleep, to watch them in private, in secret. This is something that would be magical to see on screen: to see a trans girl living her gender in the small moments she can steal. Later I’ll write briefly about the novel George, in George the reader can see moments of a trans girl stealing moments of girlhood, and the novel is not a net negative, net pessimistic, net maudlin depiction of the life of a trans girl. There can be both the hard parts and the positive parts in a telling of a story. Yet, with queer stories, we seem to live in a moment where we want only the positive, to a point that is almost saccharine.
These shows also, through the nature of television, encapsulate and market aesthetics. I am very susceptible to this. I am 28 and I still mourn my lost teenagehood. I lost my teenagehood to the closet. I lost it to anxiety. I lost it to depression. I lost it. And I can’t get it back. I don’t want to go to an LGBTQ prom, I want to be the prom queen at a queer dance. If you’ve ever been to a Pride Gala vs. a queer dance party, you know the difference. I never really had a femme mother, queer or otherwise. I don’t want to take agency away from my mother. Maybe she identifies as feminine, in her own ways. But of course, she mothered me as if I was a boy. She thought of me as a boy. She raised me to be a boy. Maya and Katie have absent fathers. There’s so much media about absent fathers. There isn’t quite as much about absent mothers, that I’m aware of. Shawn, in Boy Meets World, he had an absent mother. He also had immediate surrogate parents in the Matthews and Mr. Turner.
God knows how I’ve sought out surrogate mothers. It’s brought out the worst and most demanding in me. Of course, this pause on femme mothering and femme motherhood isn’t necessarily rooted in these shows. The mothers and their daughters aren’t seen bonding over femme rituals per se, as the daughters always participate in their femininity with their best friend. Of course, when I was the age of any of these four protagonists, at best I was on the periphery of my friend’s experiences of these moments. At the worst I was temporarily displaced from my friendships because after all I was a boy. I’ve written about this displacement before, so I don’t want to belabor it here. Suffice it to say, if Alexa and Katie and Riley and Maya had each other to experience their girlhoods with and through, I had no one.
It is important to note that while Girl Meets World is a coming-of-age story whose main gimmick was being a spin-off or sequel series, it didn’t bring any extra twists to the table. And in the end, it was allowed only half the number of episodes Boy Meets World received. While audiences followed Cory, Topanga, Shawn, Angela, Eric, and the rest of the gang not only to, but through college, audiences of Girl Meets World barely got to see Riley and Maya make it to high school. With Alexa & Katie, however, the show centers around Alexa, who is a cancer survivor.
And while Alexa & Katie starts in a hospital, the first two things the protagonists talk about are food and fashion! Alexa says to Katie that she’s found their first-day-of-school outfits! It may be unremarkable that I cannot remember what I wore my first day of high school, but I can tell you that I do not remember, and I very seriously doubt I planned it out (and I certainly didn’t plan it out of an issue of Vogue)!
Alexa and Katie spend much of that first season with buzzed heads, and while they often wear wigs, when they aren’t wearing wigs, they are definitely channeling some futchy aesthetics that I read more into than I ever should have. Alexa only shaved her head because her hair was falling out from the chemo and Katie only shaved her head in solidarity with Alexa. It wasn’t an act of gender expression; it was an act of solidarity with a sick friend. When I was watching the show for the first time, I was hoping that it could be both. I thought that maybe way back in the ancient times of 2018 the world (or Netflix) would be ready for lesbian protagonists in a kid’s show. It was just wishful thinking on my part.
There is an ongoing conversation about representation and why it matters. And I don’t know why the protagonists of shows like Alexa & Katie and Girl Meets World can’t be lesbians or sapphic. I mean I do, it has to do with viewing being a lesbian as inherently overtly sexual and we can show, for example, heterosexual kissing, but God forbid we show lesbian kissing! When I think about representation, I think back to my early teenage life, when I was still in middle school, in fact, and I think about South of Nowhere and Degrassi. What can I say about South of Nowhere without rewatching the entire thing? There is something to be said for the pull between bisexual and lesbian in my life (and later pansexual and sapphic), but that would be its own long exploration. But it is important here to know that I never identified as “straight,” save for possibly in high school when I was so far in the closet, I didn’t know which way was out. I first came out as bi and then after watching South of Nowhere I came out as a lesbian. I still didn’t know the word transgender at the time. I didn’t think I was a transvestite, though I did identify as a cross-dresser, and as a middle schooler, the ideas of what I’d read about transsexualism scared me. Surgery sounded scary! I’d never had surgery! I still haven’t. When I came out as a lesbian it was because of South of Nowhere. That show helped push me toward understanding that I was trans. There’s this old transphobic and lesbophobic joke that I think about every time I think about the way I journaled about my gender at the time. The joke goes, “I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body!” It’s sometimes told by people who say before or after that they aren’t homophobic! I would write in my journal about how I was a girl in a boy’s body who liked girls.
In those days I really did feel more trapped in my body. It’s a problematic narrative and I’m not sure where I picked it up from as a middle schooler in a rural southern town (Susan’s Place? Jerry Springer? Cops? Ace Ventura?) However, suffice it to say, South of Nowhere was what made me realize that I could be a lesbian. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before then, but it hadn’t! And I was excited at the realization.
Which is to say that representation might matter! It’s not the end-all-be all and once we move toward liberation; we won’t need to depend on consumerism to feed us our genders and sexualities. And yet, what I wouldn’t give for a show about two sapphic trans, non-binary, queer tween or teen girls in platonic and romantic love, facing down the trials and tribulations of middle school, high school, and/or college! Some of it may not fit the glossy veneer of shows like Alexa & Katie or Girl Meets World and may also not find a home in the teen drama of South of Nowhere or Degrassi, so give us both! Give us all the above! Sapphic, lesbian, queer, trans, non-binary kids, pre-teens, and teenagers deserve these shows.
In part two, the final part of this essay I’ll look at trans girl representation and why I think it matters. I’ll do this mostly by looking at The Baby-Sitters Club and the novel George.
Part 2 will be released on August 31.
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