Becoming Trans-parent

So what do you do when your brother-turned-sister lets you take the fall for attempted murder and then tells you that s/he’s really the biological father of your child (back when she was a he, of course)?

The absurdity of the plot lines on Ugly Betty points directly to its telenovela origins, but have an interesting effect on the social margins the show’s characters have a habit of pushing. It would be easy to write a show where a character’s sex change was the dramatic focal point. But Ugly Betty buried Alexis (Rebecca Romijn) under melodramatic relationships with the show’s other characters, effectively normalizing her as trans-gendered. The latest twist with revealing her paternity of Daniel Jr. (Julian De La Celle), the heretofore assumed illegitimate son of her brother Daniel (Eric Mabius) was the first thing in a while that reminded the viewers that Alexis Meade used to be Alex. The show did the impossible: it made someone who had a sex change just another player in a show of ridiculously intense relationships. In Alexis’s final moments on the show (at least for a while), she was nothing more than a woman who let emotion get the better of her.