The co-creator of Friends said it was a mistake not to use appropriate pronouns for Chandler Bing's transgender parent in the hit 90 s sitcom.
Marta Kauffman, 65, said she regrets the portrayal of Amanda Bing, played by Kathleen Turner.
She said in an interview with The Conversation on the BBC World Service that Chandler s father was referring to her as Chandler's father, even though Chandler's father was trans.
Pronouns were not something I understood yet. We didn't refer to that character as she. That was a mistake. In 1994, Kauffman co-created Friends with David Crane. The show, which ran for a decade, followed the lives of six friends living in Manhattan, New York, and earned tens of millions of dollars in syndication and streaming for its creators and cast.
Chandler, played by Matthew Perry, was one of the main characters of the show, along with Rachel Green Jennifer Aniston Monica Geller Courteney Cox Ross Geller David Schwimmer Phoebe Buffay Lisa Kudrow and Joey Tribbiani Matt LeBlanc Turner, who appeared in the sitcom in three episodes of season seven, which was first broadcast in 2001. Her character's identity and appearance were often mocked by the others, including Chandler.
The character was never explicitly acknowledged as trans in the programme, but was referred to as gay and shown working as a drag artist called Helena Handbasket.
Turner, speaking to Gay Times in 2018, said she would not take the role if she was offered it again and would leave it to a trans woman instead. I don't think Friends has aged well. It was a 30 minute sitcom. She said that it became a phenomenon, but no one ever took it seriously as a social comment.
How they approached me with it, was: Would you like to be the first woman playing a man playing a woman? I said yes, because there weren't many drag trans people on the television at the time. Kauffman, who is also the creator of Netflix's hit Grace and Frankie, said she now strives to create inclusive and diverse workplaces.
She said that she likes to create an environment where we have a happy set and a happy crew.
It is very important to me that where we are a safe place, a tolerant place, where there is no yelling. I fired a guy on the spot for making a joke about a trans cameraperson. Kauffman said Friends did not have enough representation of black people and that she was clearly part of systemic racism in our business. She added: I was unaware of that, which makes me feel stupid. I still get emotional about that because I was very emotional about it. It was a very valid, extremely difficult criticism.
If I knew what I knew now, there are certain things I would have changed. I didn't know them, but I have since learned. It comes after the writer and producer announced that she was donating $4 m 3.3 m to her old university in Massachusetts to establish an endowed professorship in the school's African and African American studies department, because she was so embarrassed by the white homogeneity of the characters on Friends.
After what happened to George Floyd, I began to wrestle with systemic racism in ways I was never aware of, she told the Los Angeles Times. It was the moment when I began to examine the ways I had participated.