Having stayed at Davina’s house after their night out, Maura gets educated around the breakfast table by another trans woman, Shea, and her host. The former reveals she slept with a man from the club, leading Maura to ask whether she has a vagina (she does) and Davina to question why, in that case, she still pursues trans-amorous men (she likes “getting fucked”).
The trio cheers their coffee to the latter sentiment, Shea with the phrase “yas queens” (so now we know the Transparent characters watch Broad City).
Meanwhile, Josh – on an extended and quite unsettling emotional high – takes Colton to enroll at his old school, where he reminisces about resident disciplinarian Mr Irons (an event that will strangely carry over into Sarah’s life when she fantasizes about Irons and his paddle at the end of the episode).
Ali’s also thinking about school, this time of the grad variety. So one-time professor Maura takes her to lunch with an old colleague and his friend, poet and UCLA academic Leslie Mackinaw. But it’s actually Maura who is (again) enlightened by the experience, this time taught a lesson about male privilege.
Mackinaw reveals that when the pair were at Berkeley together the latter blocked Leslie’s efforts to contribute to Perspective On Politics (a magazine that Maura edited for many years) because she belonged to a radical feminist group called the Berkeley 7. Leslie remembers Maura only recruiting men – and one big-busted woman.
Sarah lets herself into the family home on one of Len’s custody days, and after a frosty reception rifles through his new girlfriend Melanie’s belongings in the bedroom – aggressively snapping shut an eyeshadow palette and leaving a massive stain on the carpet. Meanwhile, at a Fussypuss session with his old boss (the party disaster obviously hasn’t been held against him), Josh discusses tactics for proposing to Raquel, who has been increasingly frustrated by his delay in doing so.
He’s too late though: when he gets home Raquel has decided to take matters into her own hands and propose to him instead – which Josh interprets as a sign of mistrust (and, you can’t help but feel, gender subversion – Josh has been playing the capable patriarch to a frenzied extent this series). The mask finally slips and Josh loses his temper.
Out with Syd and friends at a bowling alley with a primarily lesbian clientèle, Ali looks up Leslie on her phone. As she internally recites one of her poems, the meaning of the line “this is my country” bleeds over to the scene. Ali begins to embrace her surroundings, along with the affections of Syd, who confessed her long-standing love for Ali in season one. But whether it is Syd or Leslie’s feminist sentiment that has seduced her remains to be seen.
Talking points
- Leslie Mackinaw. In a recent New Yorker profile, creator Jill Soloway revealed that Leslie was based on the poet Eileen Myles. Transparent is already loosely autobiographical (Soloway’s father came out as transgender a few years ago), but life and art have an even more complex relationship now: subsequent meetings with Myles led her and Soloway to become an item.
- Patriarchy. Soloway’s production company is called Topple (as in “topple the patriarchy”, according to the aforementioned profile), and now Transparent is beginning to entertain ideas of gender as an oppressive societal construct. When Leslie is introduced to Ali as part of the women’s studies department, she corrects her colleague: “Woman is a dirty word around here” (an idea that clearly complicates Maura’s identity). And, potentially even more confusingly, despite her time as Mort largely being a performance, it doesn’t change the fact that Maura had a legitimately male privilege. While Maura accepts she subjugated the Berkeley 7 now, it is not an act she has ever bothered giving much consideration to (privilege perhaps being most keenly felt as elective blindness to disadvantage). Finally, when Ali asks her friends at the bowling alley if they’ve heard of Leslie Mackinaw, they respond that she would have been “Allen Ginsberg if we hadn’t grown up in a patriarchy”, before sing-songily chorusing the phrase. It might present a world in which absolutes are slowly losing currency, but Transparent is unequivocal on one thing: we have all grown up in a patriarchy.
