Indie Spotlight: ‘Sitting In Bathrooms With Trans People’ Will Make America Great Again

We receive a ton of tips every day from independent creators, unaffiliated with any major motion picture studios, television networks, new media studios, or other well-funded online video entities. The Indie Spotlight is where we’ll write about and shout out to a select few of them and bring you up to speed on the great (and sometimes not-so-great) attention-grabbing series you probably haven’t heard about until now. Read previous installments here.

As laws like North Carolina’s HB2 — which bans trans citizens from using public restrooms that correspond with their gender identity — are spawning heated debates across the country, a new web series aims to dismantle anxieties related to such legislation through humor and relatability.

The brainchild of comic Dylan Marron, Sitting In Bathrooms With Trans People is an interview series for Seriously.TV — a millennial-leaning channel created jointly by Verizon and Hearst. In each episode, Marron will interview a different transgender guest — the first being Jackson Bird (below). In addition to talking to Bird about his transgender journey, the two also eat waffles, chug beers, and play ribbon dancer with some toiler paper over the course of the roughly four-minute episode, which now counts almost 90,000 views on Facebook.

“What I wanted to do here was completely humanize the issue,” Marron told MSNBC of the series. “To have an honest, human, warm, emotional conversation with a trans person in the bathroom is just basically saying, ‘Hey viewer, this is something I want you to open your heart to.’”

OTHER UNDER-THE-RADAR SERIES TO CHECK OUT

• All My Friends Are Married. A quirky comedy that highlights the joys and pitfalls of being single and living in New York City.
• Chronicles of Humanity. This animated sci-fi show set in 2340 follows a young woman on a quest to uncover a government conspiracy.
• Emergency Contacts. Two mismatched roommates — a cheery extrovert and a quiet homebody — are attempting to navigate life in New York City.
• The Grey Matter. Two teenage girls must overcome their differences in order to free a mutual friend from the grasp of a supernatural being.

Got a series you’d like to see featured in the Indie Spotlight? Be sure to contact us here. For best coverage, please include a full episode in your e-mail.