One such child is the son of the author Lori Duron, who provided counsel to the “Roseanne” showrunner, Sara Gilbert, in the creation of the character. with it,” says his mother.Īnother reason the show cheers me is that the world is filled with many, many children just like Mark.
In part, because the millions of viewers of “Roseanne” - yes, including all those Trump voters - will see a family standing behind their child. Barr’s cruel comments about actual trans people (whom she equates with “a huge guy with boobs”), I’m still glad to see this character on TV. What to make of all this? While I find a certain hypocrisy in the disconnect between the show’s embrace of Mark’s difference (“God did not give me this big a head to hold a narrow mind,” says Dan Conner) and Ms. She also notes that if the grandchild did come out as trans, Roseanne, the actress, would be the first person to disown her. Barr’s worldview that gender-variant people are really just playing dress-up.
Barr’s long history of mocking and scorning trans people her point is that a boy who wears nail polish and is, at the same time, decidedly not transgender fits into Ms. But in reality, Mark’s gender nonconformity on a show starring the openly transphobic Roseanne Barr plays into a dogma that uses slightly expanded tolerance for (cis)gender expression as cover for rejecting the legitimacy of gender identity altogether.” So here’s a boy who loves being femme, who’s willing to suffer what the world has in store for him as a result, but who we are told clearly is not trans, and whose interest in glitter and miniskirts, according to him, has nothing to do with actual gender dysphoria.Īt the other end of the political spectrum, Brynn Tannehill, writing in Slate, says: “The character of Mark may seem like a positive portrayal to observers unfamiliar with Roseanne’s hostility to transgender people and the ideology she’s aligned herself with. When Roseanne tells him that you have to pick your battles in life, and she asks exactly how important this all is to him, Mark replies, bravely and succinctly, “It’s important.” Nine years old, he wears skirts to school, paints his nails and on the whole prefers “colors that pop.” And yet, Mark is not transgender - he says, quite firmly, that he’s a boy. At the same time, I’m reluctant to conclude that the popularity of the new “Roseanne” proves growing support for the president any more than the imminent reboot of “Lost in Space” suggests a national yearning for a trip to Alpha Centauri.īut the controversy around the grandchild, Mark, drew my attention. Trump and endorses the false narrative that it was white working-class families who elected him.
My colleague Roxane Gay suggested that, despite the series’ charm, it wasn’t worth the effort to watch it, because of the way it normalizes Mr. But when I read that people on both the right and the left were incensed about the gender-nonconforming grandchild of the title character, I decided to take a cautious peek back into Lanford, Ill., where the beloved sitcom characters of the 1990s have been resurrected, in Donald Trump’s America, a little worse for wear but still devoted to one another. Jackson’s character in “Pulp Fiction ” says he’ll never learn whether sewer rat tastes like pumpkin pie. I wasn’t going to watch the “Roseanne” reboot for the same reason Samuel L.