There are a few more spoilers in this clip of the exchange:

Both characters are portrayed humanely, in the fashion of nearly all of the diverse individuals who appeared in previous episodes. But after the scene about trans issues was released, Vikram Murthi declared at The A.V. Club that it was “problematic”:

Let’s get this out of the way: It’s problematic for a cisgender writer/director to examine transphobia, especially without explicit participation of any trans performers or writers, even with the best of intentions; no matter which way you slice it, it’s an attempt to tackle a pervasive, deeply-ingrained issue from an outsider’s perspective. As much as I love C.K.’s comedy and writing, he’s occasionally guilty of over-reaching outside of his own perspective, not just with regards to gender, but also with race and queer issues. This over-reaching isn’t inherently troubling, and it’s almost always rooted in a working-through of his own cultural biases, but it can produce mixed, often cringeworthy results, this being no exception. Ultimately, there is little to be gained artistically from hearing C.K.’s opinions on trans issues simply because he doesn’t have the necessary lived experience to best explore them.

That’s a wrongheaded paragraph. It deserves to be rebutted, for the sake of good art, for the sake of wayward critics, and for the sake of trans people. Let’s take them in reverse order.

For the Sake of Trans People

The size of the transgender population is unknown, but one rough estimate puts it at roughly 0.3 percent of Americans. Many are closeted. The community as a whole shares something with gays and lesbians in the era before Will & Grace—it’s still something of a victory when pop culture shows treat trans people as fully human individuals with equal dignity, rather than freaks or caricatures. It is wildly counterproductive to append the stigma “problematic” to all treatments of transphobia by cisgendered writers, which is to say, perhaps 99.7 percent of writers. The likely effect is to dissuade the very writers most invested in the dignified treatment of that community from rendering such characters in television shows and movies.

And substantively, Murthi’s standard seems to imply that trans people share so little in common with their neighbors that cis writers shouldn’t attempt to portray trans issues even as they explore conflict with characters of different ages, races, classes, religions, sexual preferences, mental abilities, professions, personality types, and education levels.

That is unintentionally dehumanizing.

For the Sake of Wayward Critics

The label “problematic” is a crutch used by critics who ought to name an ostensible problem as specifically as possible rather than vaguely declaring that one exists.

It assumes objective, widely shared standards that are typically fabricated or illusory.