From Sex and the City to Mean Girls, the Gay Best Friend trope has become one of the most enduring forms of LGBTQ+ representation in film and television. The phenomenon has bled over into real life, too, with many clueless cishet women openly yearning for a Gay Best Friend of their very own, the Stanford Blatch to their Carrie Bradshaw. In 2013, it even became the title of a film parodying the concept: Darren Stein’s queer cult classic, G.B.F.
The problems with the GBF are well-documented: The recurring trope has encouraged the cultural assumption that all gay men are unthreatening, effeminate fashionistas who lack inner lives of their own, preferring instead to serve as confidantes to cis women. Think Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada or Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding. There have been dozens of gay male characters in major-studio rom-coms but it took until 2022 for a gay man to actually play the lead in one, thanks in large part to LGBTQ+ media advocacy.
Unfortunately, instead of ditching the GBF altogether, it seems the entertainment industry seems to be merely resurrecting the trope in a new form. Enter the “Trans Best Friend.”
The Trans Best Friend, or TBF, has troubled origins. One of the earliest and the most obvious examples is the 2013 film Dallas Buyers Club, in which country boy Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) learns how to be a better and more accepting person by bonding with Rayon (Jared Leto), a transgender woman, over their shared struggles with HIV/AIDS. The film casts Rayon as an almost mythical, fairytale creature who exists largely to fuel Ron’s journey, and to make matters worse, she is played by a cisgender man. The fact that Leto won an Oscar for the role not only encouraged Hollywood to continue casting cis men as trans women, it seeded the idea that trans characters made fantastic plot accessories.
The Prime Video series Transparent, which premiered in 2014, tried to have its cake and eat it, too, casting a cis man, Jeffrey Tambor, as a trans lead character while also slotting trans women like Alexandra Billings and Trace Lysette into supporting roles. It’s telling that the actual trans women in the show were relegated to “Best Friend” roles, playing the experienced elder mavens who usher Tambor’s Maura into the community and show her the ropes of womanhood.
Transparent did create space for powerful performances by trans performers, but it could never overcome its original casting sin, and the multiple trans best friends always felt like compensation for not just centering an actual trans woman in the first place. In retrospect, the episode about a fling between Joshua (Jay Duplass) and Shea (Trace Lysette) feels particularly uncomfortable. Entitled “The Open Road,” the episode attempts to explore the reality of relationships between trans women and cis men, but ends up reducing Shea to her sexuality because we primarily learn more about her character through the lens of a cis man’s attraction. Especially given the actual harassment Lysette allegedly experienced on set from Tambor, Transparent’s refusal to center trans performers in an authentic way feels even more problematic in hindsight.
