The Friends co-creator said it was a mistake not to use proper pronouns for Chandler Bing’s transgender parent on the hit ’90s series.
Martha Kaufman, 65, said she now regrets portraying the character Amanda Bing, who was played by Kathleen Turner.
“We kept calling her Chandler’s dad, even though Chandler’s dad was trans,” she said in an interview with The Conversation on the BBC World Service, which will be broadcast on July 11.
“Pronouns weren’t something I understood yet. So we don’t call this character a she. This was a mistake.”
The Kaufmans created Friends with David Crane in 1994. The decade-long show followed the lives of six friends living in Manhattan, New York, and earned tens of millions of dollars in syndication and streaming for its creators and cast.
Chandler, played by Matthew Perry, was one of the main characters in the series along with Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston), Monica Geller (Courtney Cox), Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) and Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc). .
Turner appeared on the sitcom in three episodes in the seventh season, which first aired in 2001. Her character’s identity and appearance were often mocked by others, including Chandler.
The character was never explicitly acknowledged as trans in the program, was referred to as gay, and was shown working as a drag artist named Helena Handbasket.
Speaking to Gay Times in 2018, Turner said she would not take the role if offered again and would instead leave it to a trans woman. “I do not think [Friends] has aged well. It was a 30-minute series. It became a phenomenon, but no one ever took it seriously as a social commentary,” she said.
“The way they approached me with it was, ‘Do you want to be the first woman to play a man playing a woman?’ I said yes because there weren’t a lot of drag/trans people on TV at the time.”
Kaufman, who is also the creator of the Netflix hit Grace and Frankie, said she now aims to create inclusive and diverse workplaces.
“I really like creating an environment where we have a happy set and a happy crew,” she said.
“It is very important to me that where we are is a safe place, a tolerant place where there is no shouting. I fired a guy on the spot for making a joke about a trans operator. It just can’t happen.”
Kaufman also said that Friends “didn’t have enough black representation” and that she was “clearly part of systemic racism in our business.”
She added: “I wasn’t aware of it, which made me feel stupid. It was a very valid, extremely difficult critique that I’m still… excited about.
“If I knew then what I know now, there are some things I would change. But I didn’t know them, and I’ve since learned.”
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It comes after the writer and producer announced she was donating $4m (£3.3m) to her alma mater, Brandeis University in Massachusetts, to create an endowed professorship in the school’s African and African American studies department because she was so “embarrassed” by the white homogeneity of Friends characters.
“After what happened with George Floyd, I began to struggle with the fact that I had become addicted to systemic racism in ways I never knew existed,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “That was really the moment I started to explore the ways in which I had been involved. That’s when I knew I had to correct course.”
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