http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/27/entertainment/glaad-study-transgender-tv-thr-feat/(The Hollywood Reporter)—Jeffrey Tambor may have won an Emmy this year for his portrayal of a transgender woman in Transparent, but LGBT representation is still sorely lacking on television, according to GLAAD.
The advocacy organization's annual report on diversity in scripted programming released Tuesday morning, which analyzes the quantity and quality of LGBT characters in the current season, dug up some overwhelmingly negative data about the number of transgender characters on TV.
In fact, the "Where We Are on TV" report found that transgender characters are absent entirely from primetime broadcast programming. And it's not much better on cable, which only counts three recurring trans roles, or two percent of all characters.
Streaming services like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, which GLAAD measured in its study for the first time this year, actually boast the highest percentage of transgender characters at seven percent, and two of the four of them are series leads (Maura on Amazon's Transparent and Nomi on Netflix's Sense8). Out of the seven total trans characters on TV, only one is a transgender man.
"The expansion of the television landscape into digital platforms is helping to spark needed changes, as content creators like Netflix and Amazon are making their mark with groundbreaking series like Sense8 and Transparent," said GLAAD CEO and president Sarah Kate Ellis.
Although racially diverse LGBT characters are notably lacking on all platforms (71 percent of the LGBT characters on cable and 73 percent of them on streaming services are white), the study found that racial diversity on TV overall is increasing. Out of the 881 regular characters counted on primetime broadcast shows, 287 of them are people of color — a six-point increase from last year. NBC is leading the charge among the five broadcast networks. Of that number, 16 percent, or 145, are African American, which marks the highest number of black characters on broadcast TV GLAAD has ever counted (though less than half of them are female).
"The critical and commercial success of series like Empire, Transparent and Orange Is the New Black can serve as an example to network executives that audiences are looking for stories they haven't seen before," said Ellis. "There are still plenty of stories about our community yet to be told. LGBT people of color have remained underrepresented for years, and transgender men have been all but invisible in the media."
WTF?! Now we have to have the right amount of minority transgenders portrayed on television???
