Fox has a new show that's been out for several weeks called "The Mick." It's really funny and you should watch it. It stars Kaitlin Olson from "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" and she plays the titular character, Mick, who has to take care of her sister's children after her sister and her sister's husband have to flee the country to avoid getting arrested for fraud and money laundering.
The reason why I mention this show is that its most recent episode featured a very interesting topic in a very interesting way. The conflict of the episode is that the youngest child Ben (who is literally the most photogenic child I have ever seen) has gotten in trouble and Mick, in her stubbornness, pulls him out of school to try to find him another one. Part of what Ben was getting in trouble for was that he had been wearing some of his mom's clothes to school. This gives Mickey the bright idea to try to get Ben into the girls' school across the street by putting him in a dress and telling the chancellor he's a transgender girl named Beth. Well, Ben gets in but only for a day or two before one of the parents gets their panties in a bunch about Ben, leading to Mick once again letting her pride get the best of her until she ultimately realizes that she hasn't been putting Ben first and that he wants to be at his old school. In an interesting twist, Ben also tells Mickey he wants to keep wearing dresses.
What I found so interesting about this episode is how it tackled the main argument in the 'transgender people in bathrooms' debate while remembering to include gender non-binary and gender non-conforming people in the conversation. Mick knows that it was wrong for her to pretend that Ben was transgender, but, when it got to where one of the parents suggested that Ben would molest his daughter because he was just a boy in a dress (the school and parents didn't know that Ben was not actually trans), Mick immediately recognized that the parent's problem was he didn't see Ben as a girl but as a boy doing things that boys shouldn't be allowed to do. She also called the parent on his assertion that a 7-year-old who did not know what sex was much less actually be capable of sexually molesting a young girl in a bathroom.
But that's not even what was so interesting to me. What really surprised me was that the show included gender non-binary and gender non-conforming peoples. Ben's older sister suggested that Ben was probably more likely to be genderfluid than anything, something that Mick relays to the headmaster of Ben's old school when she gets him back in there, but, ultimately, Mickey understands that Ben is just a boy who feels like himself when he wears dresses, skirts, and heels in addition to when he wears t-shirts, pants, and bow ties. Ben knows exactly who he is and what he wants even though he doesn't really have a word for it.
"The Mick" understands that when transphobic people call transwomen 'men in dresses' that it's because they feel like these transwomen are just men doing things that men should not be allowed to do, but even that defense doesn't stand up to snuff. When boys wear dresses, they're attacked for abandoning their masculinity. When girls cut their hair short and play sports, they're attacked for not being feminine enough. "The Mick" understands this, and it shows it perfectly in that it ultimately wasn't about Ben being trans or genderfluid, it was about Ben wanting to wear dresses regardless of what that made him.
