Sex Education stars changed their groundbreaking trans sex scene: ‘We wanted to do it right’

Sex Education stars Felix Mufti and Anthony Lexa have reflected on creating the show’s first trans sex scene during a live podcast recording for Trans+ History Week.

The first-ever Trans+ History Week, which is a QueerAF launchpad project, is taking place from Monday 6 May to Sunday 12 May and will be a period of time dedicating to learning about and celebrating the history of trans, non-binary, gender-diverse, and intersex people.

To mark the inaugural week, a community event was held at Clifford Chance in Canary Wharf and featured a speeches, live podcast recording, panel with activists and networking.

Sex Education stars Felix Mufti and Anthony Lexa – who played power couple Roman and Abbi on season four of the hit Netflix show – were interviewed by Kenny Ethan Jones and discussed growing up trans, their careers and what it was like to portray a groundbreaking trans sex scene on TV.

Describing the process behind the intimate ‘trans for trans’ or ‘T4T’ scene, Mufti said it was “collaborative” between themselves, Lexa and the production team but noted it was a “learning process for everyone involved”.

Mufti noted that many large-scale shows aren’t created with trans folks in mind and whilst the teams behind them “want us and they want to do the right thing”, they sometimes don’t know how to go about authentically including trans experiences.

For example, whilst Sex Education had an intimacy coordinator, the pair asserted the need for a trans intimacy coordinator.

“The first sex scene they wrote for us we said ‘y’know, we aren’t sure about that sex scene, we don’t think that is how our characters would have sex’,” he explained.

This was echoed by Lexa, who said they drafted a trans sex scene in their hotel room that evening because “we wanted to do it right”.

“We just thought, how can we have two trans characters and not have a T4T sex scene?” she said.

Mufti said: “What I learned from that experience is that sometimes you feel like you’re being a problem by asserting yourself, but you have to because […] in the future when [production teams] work with more trans people they’ll know what needs to be done before we enter the room.”

“It made me realise how important it is to speak up when you see problems”, he continued, because it’s not just “helping your situation, you’re helping everyone else they will go and work with in the future”.

Alongside the community event, Trans+ History Week will also see a poetry night take place on Friday (10 May) and twenty emerging trans+ creatives – who have been supported, given audio equipment to keep, and mentored by QueerAF across multiple commissioning schemes – will also share their stories throughout the week.

Their work is set to spotlight global trans+ history including the Hijra communities of India, the first-ever transgender conference in the UK and the portrayal of trans+ individuals in TV and film.