NBC’s dramedy Good Girls has been carefully unspooling the gender identity of 11-year-old Sadie (played by Isaiah Stannard, an out trans boy), the 11-year-old child of Mae Whitman’s character Annie, and last night’s episode was a big one.
After Annie revealed that Sadie’s stepmother Nancy had a baby (Yay, it’s a boy!), Sadie paused and replied, “Mom …. so am I.”
Check out the scene to see Annie’s beautiful reaction.
Variety reported on the storyline last June: ‘“Good Girls” creator Jenna Bans had an eye-opening experience when casting her NBC dramedy. She had originally written Sadie, the tweenage daughter of Mae Whitman’s Annie, as a boy named Ben. When her casting director asked if she’d be interested in seeing a girl for the part of a boy, she was intrigued and hired Izzy Stannard — a young actor who, at the time, seemed to identify with the female gender assigned to him at birth. By the time filming began, Stannard made it clear that he identified as a boy and was using he/him pronouns.’
Said Bans to the publication: “We realized we had a really great opportunity to tell a story about a character who was gender non-conforming, but at the same time not necessarily have that be what leads the story. What’s most important to the character and the story we’re telling between Sadie and Annie is really about the bond between Sadie and her mom. We liked the idea that the character of Sadie was exploring her gender [expression] in the show, but I think what we responded to more was that the Mae Whitman character just couldn’t care less.’
