Sundance Channel Logo TV TransGeneration is an American documentary-style reality television series that affords a view into the lives of four transgender college students during the 2004–2005 academic year.

A feature-length preview of the series premiered at the Frameline Film Festival in June 2005, and was screened at numerous other venues before the television debut.

The complete, eight-episode series aired on the Sundance Channel from September to November 2005, and on Logo TV from January to February 2006.

The New York Times published the piece in March;[30][31] some Sundance Channel staffers (including Adam Pincus, senior vice president of original programming) read it, and saw potential for a documentary series.

The director and supervising producer was Jeremy Simmons, who had previously directed the 2003 documentary Gay Hollywood for World of Wonder.

[32] To cast the series, Jeremy Simmons and Thairin Smothers posted to LGBT Internet forums and electronic mailing lists, and visited college campuses.

[40] In February 2005, the administration at Smith College prohibited the crew from continuing to film one of the documentary's subjects, Lucas Cheadle, on campus (except in his apartment).

[35] In the months leading up to TransGeneration's TV premiere, Sundance promoted the series across a range of media, including advertisements and mentions in several gay and lesbian magazines; posters;[43] television ads on the Sundance Channel, NBC, and VH1 (all of which are properties of the corporate stakeholders, Viacom and NBCUniversal); preview screenings at more than 150 LGBT events;[44] a billboard in Los Angeles;[45] and MTA bus advertisements in New York[46] (one of which wound up in the background of a scene in The Devil Wears Prada).

[67] After Robert Koehler of Variety previewed the screener edit of the series at the Outfest film festival, he wrote: "What would have been spectacular stuff just 10 years ago is now something closer to a high-quality Oprah special, humanizing in rather simplistic terms complex lives…".

"[68] Billy Curtis, director of the Gender Equity Resource Center at UC Berkeley, was deeply moved by the preview; but he also looked at it from a practical perspective: "I knew immediately I could use it as an educational tool for faculty, staff, administration and students.… It doesn't try to represent the entire trans experience, but it… answers some of the most basic questions about what it means to be trans while being this great conversation starter.

[53] Meanwhile, columnist Mike S. Adams told Townhall readers that he would attend the UNC Wilmington screening, and listed taunting questions he said he would ask.

[70] She elaborates: "What's radical here isn't the topic so much as the way it's handled with maturity and respect at a time when every personal issue seems fodder for a leering TV treatment.

[12][73] Bloggers Joey Guerra (AfterElton) and Jay Cheel (The Documentary Blog) found Gabbie, Raci, Lucas, and T.J. fascinating and their stories engrossing.

[65] In a 2005 essay published in the online journal Flow, Shana Agid, guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, wondered whether programs like TransGeneration "take away from other possibilities for change" if—in an effort to make queer subject matter "straight-friendly" and "consumable"—they only represent transgender people who fit a certain narrative and adhere to a gender binary.

[46] Like Agid, Todd Ramlow of PopMatters lamented the production's fixation on binary gender, but he found positive qualities in its presentation of some of the struggles and anxieties a transgender person might experience.

[76] K. Nicole Hladky (2013)[77] identifies four themes in the series: process (the various dimensions of transition); intersection (of transgender with race, class, age, nationality, etc.

); stigma (borne by transgender people); and prescription, in which the documentary perspective of TransGeneration prefers or endorses "particular views of transgenderism and approaches to transition".

[77]: 107–9  Hladky concludes that "[al]though the series does present a number of the complexities surrounding transgenderism, it nonetheless limits transgender individuals by the prescriptive view of transition it reinforces".

[8][84] The award went to Brent and Craig Renaud's Off to War,[85] a miniseries about citizen soldiers in the Arkansas National Guard, who are deployed overseas as part of the military occupation of Iraq.

[12][77]: 101 In February 2006, during the interim between the show's GLAAD Media Award nomination and the awards ceremony, T.J. Jourian was interviewed by Larry King on the CNN talk show Larry King Live, along with trans man Aiden Key; trans women Brenda Chevis and Jennifer Finney Boylan; sexologist Michelle Angello; and Felicity Huffman, star of the 2005 film Transamerica.

[87] The interviews were parodied in a comedy sketch on the March 4 episode of Saturday Night Live, in which Natalie Portman played Jourian.

[91] In the spring of 2006, Bonnie Miller Rubin of the Chicago Tribune described TransGeneration as a pop-culture vehicle that "helped trans issues gain more visibility".

[92] The show inspired writer/actor Megan McTavish to create a transgender character for All My Children, a US soap opera for which she was the head writer.

[94] World of Wonder's next reality television show with a transgender theme was Sex Change Hospital in 2007, followed by Transamerican Love Story in 2008.

[10][95] Sex Change Hospital focuses on the patients and medical practice of Marci Bowers,[96] the OB/GYN who performed Gabbie's genital reassignment surgery.