Emmerdale star Ash Palmisciano has responded to the recent prejudice shown in Matty Barton and Claudette Anderson's story.
Matty and fiancée Amy Wyatt have been planning their upcoming wedding and decided to have the ceremony at the Village Hall. However, they were met with negativity from Claudette when she realised Matty is trans.
Talking to Digital Spy and other media, Ash Palmisciano (who plays Matty), explained the importance of working on such an "authentic" storyline.
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"What an amazing thing that this story has been highlighted in soap. I was really pleased to do it because it's real, it happens," said Palmisciano.
"Unfortunately there is a lot of judgement and opinion out there and I think sometimes we have this great bubble in Emmerdale where everyone is accepting of Matty and who he is, and in real life that's not always the case so to play that was really great and felt really authentic."
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Commending Flo Wilson (who plays Claudette) for her role in the storyline, Palmisciano expressed pride at being involved in Emmerdale's first trans wedding.
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"Seeing these things in our everyday culture can have monumental change. For me as a young kid growing up, there was nobody on TV that was trans and if they were, it wasn’t the best image of a trans person – a normal person with a normal job and a lovely relationship, a really positive representation so to me this has been a dream come true to be able to grow up and become the person that I needed to see.
"I think it's iconic and I think I've had people message me already with the Claudette build up stuff thanking me, saying 'my nan said this, and my family said that, I can't tell you how much it's helped'. So that, for me, it becomes more than a job. It's something a lot bigger."
He added: "Soap has an impact. Telling stories about every type of human is so important, we're not the same, are we?"
Emmerdale airs on weeknights at 7.30pm on ITV1, and streams on ITVX.
