-By Warner Todd Huston
If you’ve watched SyFy, the science fiction cable channel, you may be aware of a show called Lost Girl. The show is well known as being quite “inclusive” commonly portraying gay, lesbian and cross dressing characters. Despite this fealty to the cause, a national gay group is still attacking the show over a recent episode.
Lost Girl follows the exploits of a heroine named Bo who investigates crimes involving supernatural or mythic beings such as vampires and the like. The show is in its third season on SyFy.
After the debut of its third season opener, the show, a Canadian import, has apparently made an enemy of GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, over the way a particular “transgender” character was treated.
Even though the “transgender” character happened to be the villain in the episode, the gay advocacy group was angered by the violent and humiliating end the character experienced.
The villain was a warden in a woman’s prison run by fabled Amazons and portrayed as female through most of the show but the reveal at the end proved the character to actually be a man. The evil warden ended the episode dragged brutally out of the scene after being viciously grabbed in the crotch.
Later other characters insist on referring to the warden as a “he” instead of a “she” despite that he chooses to appear as a woman. This particularly upset GLAAD because other characters denied the “choice” of gender chosen by the warden.
In a statement GLAAD disparaged the show for its attack on the transgender character.
“The Warden being ‘discovered’ and then viciously attacked is a scenario tragically based in reality, but here is played out for the enjoyment of the audience,” Kane said. “It’s also evocative of the offensive claim that transgender women are ‘tricking’ their way into female-only spaces for perverted or criminal purposes.”
The show’s producers initially scoffed at GLAAD’s attack saying that it doesn’t deal with human characters but mythical creatures and the warden wasn’t just a man, he was a shapeshifter.
Regardless, producers have sitill apologized for upsetting GLAAD, saying, “Lost Girl prides itself on being open and accepting to everyone, and are enthusiastic supporters of the GLBT community.”
Mark this one in the “can’t win for losing” category.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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