One Last Word about L&O

I finished watching the SVU episode "Transitions" a few minutes ago. At the end of the show, the card came up proclaiming "The preceding story is fictional. No actual persons were depicted." Fiction or not, the story hit all my buttons. When "Jackie Blaine" told her story of being attacked, it tore my heart out. Trans people are attacked all the time, just for being who they are, and all the whys don't make it any easier to understand.

Law & Order Repeat

For anyone who, like me didn't see last week's episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit all the way through, the episode, "Transitions", will re-air tonight on the USA Network at midnight. That gives me plenty to watch tonight, with the first part of the "Ryloth Trilogy" of Star Wars: Clone Wars on the Cartoon Network, and one of the last episodes of Battlestar Galactica on SciFi. Yeah, this girl is a nerd.

Correction: the SVU episode actually runs on Saturday night.

I Was Wrong (and I'm Glad)!

I was wrong about Law & Order. They handled tonight's case in an enlightened manner. The victim was not transgendered. A man was beaten nearly to death (with injuries to his genitals) in the parking lot of a strip club. There were a handful of red herring suspects: the club's bouncer (a very butch Lea DeLaria), a cross-eyed perv and one of the strippers, who it turned out was a grad student for real/pretending to be a stripper/hooker for a book she was writing. Then the victim wakes up in the hospital and says he's in a custody fight with his ex-wife, who might've attacked him.

The detectives go to see the ex, and are introduced to the object of the custody fight: 13 year-old Hailey, nee Henry. Hailey's mother supports her child's choice to transition, but the father objects. Then it comes out that Hailey has a violent streak, and her mother caught her sneaking back into the house at 2am the night her father was attacked. Come to find out, she was out with some trans friends, breaking into a pharm company's warehouse to steal hormones to sell on the black market. Her grown-up transman friend is Daniela Sea (Max from The L-Word). Hailey blurts out a confession to save her friends, but as it turns out, it was actually Hailey's school guidance counselor.

I'd have watched the rest, but I had to leave for work. I missed a guest appearance by ER's Alex Kingston. Did you know that NBC doesn't stream any of the Law & Order programs on their website, or Hulu, or anywhere else? They do show reruns on odd weekends, and the episodes turn up on USA Network a couple of weeks after they first air, but they won't post the show on their website.

Here We Go Again

I've been a fan of the Law & Order franchise since the original series premiered on NBC in 1990. I didn't watch it for years, but I started catching reruns on TNT a few years ago, and I caught myself up. Then I got hooked on the spinoff shows, SVU and Criminal Intent. I actually like these shows more than the original (at least with the current crew). SVU has covered transgender stories in the past, and the depictions have been less than flattering. They're back on next week with an episode entitled "Transitions". From the NBC site:

When a man is severely beaten outside a bar, his transgender teen becomes the prime suspect.

Like I said, here we go again. I could be wrong. The writers might have educated themselves since the last time. One can only hope.