Instead, the people the show aims to represent are the well-meaning but uninformed 50-something, straight, cisgender white women, and how they react to and talk about us behind closed doors. But And Just Like That doesn’t really focus on Rock’s journey, or that of people like them-people like me. They hate wearing dresses and love skateboarding, and that’s about all we get to know about them. They’re a bubbly kid who (like me) aligns with pretty much the only representation nonbinary people get to see on TV: white, assigned female at birth, someone who would’ve just been called a tomboy a generation ago. Rock is a rare character in whose life I see my own, or at least a hypothetical coming-out future for myself that I can relate to. While I’m still not out to my family or many other people, the opposite is true for Charlotte’s 12-year-old child, Rock, who features in a storyline about their budding gender identity-and their parents’ contention of it. And of all the shows out there, it’s this heteronormative dramedy that nails that particular fear-to its detriment. If And Just Like That is any proof, it’s just as plausible that my coming-out moment could become not about me but other people’s reactions to the powerful declaration of the identity I’m trying to share with them. In And Just Like That, I somehow found the thing that makes me most anxious about coming out to my family as non-binary reflected right back at me: the chance that I’ll be de-centered from my own experience. I had to discuss it with them, I said, because no matter how much I agreed that the show is otherwise not worth the screentime, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My therapist laughed and said no they had tried to watch the first few minutes, they said, but it was so bad that they couldn’t keep going. Starting a therapy session by asking my therapist if they’ve seen the Sex And The City reboot, And Just Like That, is not a moment I’m proud of, yet here we are.
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