TV’s influences
Americans tend to be far more familiar with gay people now than they were during the show’s initial run. But even today, only 30 percent of American adults know a transgender person. The number drops to 16 percent among people older than 65.
“TV influences those who lack real-world contact,” Schiappa says. However, his original hypothesis posits that “television exposure must be repeated or sustained over time” for viewer attitudes to shift. And, although trans characters are indeed appearing in recurring or leading roles — for example, in “Transparent,” which returns Friday — self-selection is a side effect of niche TV. Most people who watch “Orange Is the New Black” had low levels of transphobia before they tuned in.
But a study out of the University of Southern California, published last month, has proved that a positive depiction in just one guest appearance can effect change. It’s based on a 2015 episode of USA Network’s “Royal Pains,” which doesn’t usually feature LGBT stories. It determined that viewers of an episode featuring an 11-minute subplot — about a trans teenager who suffers medical complications from hormone treatments — had more positive attitudes toward transgender people and policies than did “Royal Pains” viewers who missed that episode.
When the results of the study came in, the lead author, USC doctoral candidate Traci Gillig, also discovered, as she writes in the paper, “neither exposure to news stories about transgender issues nor the highly visible Caitlyn Jenner story were associated with attitudes toward transgender people or policy issues.” So an 11-minute scripted subplot shifted attitudes, but Jenner’s 2015 interview on which nearly 17 million people watched, did not.
This was somewhat surprising because documentary can typically have just as large an impact as a fictional narrative, says one of the study’s coauthors, Erica Rosenthal of the Norman Lear Center’s Hollywood, Health and Society program: “As long as it’s perceived as realistic, either can be transporting into the storyline.” So why didn’t Jenner’s story transport viewers? In a phone conversation, Gillig hypothesizes,