Just one night after Pretty Little Liars revealed that a mysterious sociopathic tormenter is a transgender woman, the gender identity of a non-passing transgender woman of color scarcely even registered on Mr. Robot. The USA series' vigilante hacker protagonist, Elliot (Rami Malek), assumes that the head of a powerful Chinese hacker group is a man, and refers to Whiterose (B.D. Wong) as "he" moments before meeting her. When Elliot sees Whiterose, he seamlessly switches pronouns: "She's trolling me," he thinks to himself.

Mr. Robot's creator and showrunner, Sam Esmail, is matter-of-fact about it: "There are obviously people on all different [points] on the spectrum of gender and sexuality that make up this world, and I just try and portray that reality, as sort of — I don't want to say the word 'casually,' but be as up front as possible," Esmail said in a phone interview. It is not remarked upon in the show because it should be unremarkable. "We display it full-frontal, without any apologies."

The head of the dangerous hacker group the Dark Army was always going to be a woman, Esmail noted. "We want to subvert those expectations," he said. "One of the things, especially in technology, that we play with is that it tends to be a man's world, and we want to destroy that concept. … In walks Whiterose, and she's not the man everyone thought she was gonna be." For reasons he could not explain, he always pictured Wong playing the role. "He was perfect for the part, he just wasn't the right gender," Esmail recounted. "And then I realized, 'Well wait a minute, that's faulty logic.'" Gender identity doesn't have to be limited by that kind of logic.

Whiterose's scene is only a handful of minutes long, but it leaves a mark. She is ultracompetent, intimidating, deliberate, controlling: seemingly the opposite of unstable Elliot. However, this wasn't intentionally subverting the stereotype that binds transgender identity to insanity (for an example of the cliché, see Pretty Little Liars).

"I never checked the rule book on what tropes there are with trans, and then tried to do the opposite," Esmail said. "We just thought about the character … What was her path like? What if she was a very controlled person? What if she was incredibly ambitious? What if she had leadership skills? And then that's sort of what formulated Whiterose."