“It never gets easier for girls like us:” Transgender Representation and Romance in Contemporary Television

This paper explores transgender representation across televisual media from broadcast and cable television to streaming services and web series. This analysis illuminates how YouTube offers a space for media consumption similar to legacy media like television. But as a digital space that allows individual creators more agency, it also serves as a site of reinvention of televisual media narratives, particularly those that focus on transgender characters and their relationships. I begin this paper with a literature review, discussing YouTube and its relationship to broadcast television. I then move into a history of transgender representation on television, tracing representations of romantic relationships among trans characters through time and televisual formats. Queer and heteronormative time are woven through this discussion to explore how these temporal functions are employed in television to reassert hegemonic sociocultural ideals about family life and relationships. The paper concludes with an analysis of the award-winning scripted web mini-series, Her Story, which was published directly to YouTube in 2016 and depicts the dating lives of two transgender women living in Los Angeles. Citing examples from the show, I address three key themes: (1) romance, (2) passing and disclosure, and (3) intersections of identity. I contend that Her Story as a valuable piece of trans media that presents well-developed trans characters and complex plot lines that challenge negative stereotypes and disrupt heteronormative time