Since trans characters started proliferating in movies and on TV
The Guardian took the bait. Eejits.
A production of Don Giovanni opening this weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma, stars a transgender woman in the title role.
While operas around trans themes are starting to emerge, Tulsa’s take on Mozart’s classic represents the first time a professional opera company in the United States has hired a trans person to sing the lead in a standard work.
But is it the first time a professional opera company in the United States has hired a man to play the male lead in a standard work? Well, no. But if you put it that way how would an opera company in Tulsa, Oklahoma get a story in the Guardian?
Lucia Lucas, the woman charged with playing one of the opera canon’s best-known protagonists, is a rising star. The 38-year-old singer has performed on major stages in Europe and Asia. Next season, she will make her debut with the English National Opera in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld. And all this using the dramatic baritone voice with which she launched her international career, before she transitioned, a decade ago.
In other words Lucas has a dramatic baritone voice and will be using it to sing the part of Don Giovanni. As one does.
Opera has long featured non-traditional presentations of gender. For hundreds of years, female singers have been playing young men and boys on stage in so-called “trouser roles”, from Hansel in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel to Octavian in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. And then there is the once popular, now defunct tradition of male castrati gushing out florid Handel arias in the upper echelons of the human vocal range.
Yet Lucas says she has encountered prejudice since coming out. “I have had opera administrators say to me, ‘It’s not that we don’t like you. But our public, what would they think?’”
She says attitudes towards trans people have become more open over the past five years, since trans characters have started proliferating in movies and on TV. It’s no accident that she only felt ready to make her transition in 2014. “If I would have come out before my audition for Germany in 2009, they probably wouldn’t have taken me,” she says. “Things have changed a lot since then.”
Quite so, but there’s more than one way to look at that. You can see it as a sudden surge in acceptance of an existing category of people, or you can see it as a proliferating fashion that people are drawn into via Twitter and YouTube.
Tulsa Opera’s Don Giovanni is an expression of that change. “The potential doors that this is now opening for trans singers is a very exciting step forward,” says Matthew Shilvock, the director general of the San Francisco Opera.
Why? What’s exciting about it? What’s even interesting about it?
One of the best experiences of her career so far, Lucas says, was playing Wotan in Die Walküre last autumn in Magdeburg, Germany. She feels a particular affinity for Wagner, and she loved playing the Norse God in a straightforward way.
“There was no extra story about being trans, or a female baritone, or anything like that. It was simply the story done as it is always done, in traditional masculine dress.”
Right. A man playing a male part in “traditional masculine dress.” But we’re supposed to see this as Special and Exciting because the man playing the male part tells us he’s a woman? Still not seeing the excitement here.
But..but….hang on a mo’. Wasn’t there a recent furore about non-trans actors playing trans roles? I don’t recall the character of Don Giovanni being transgender, just another boring, old-fashioned straight male (not cis! Retro-hetro?).
These things work both ways. If retro-hetros can’t play trans roles, trans people can’t play retro-hetro roles, because that would be violence.
AoS, bite your tongue. In trans-world, nothing works both ways. Trans get to be women but women don’t get to be women. Trans man having baby gets to be miracle, but woman having baby is no miracle. And since trans can play cis, and should, because, well, die cis scum is why. But cis playing trans is awful and offensive and must not be tolerated because, well, die cis scum is why.
You keep insisting on logic where there is none…
…’tis my Achilles heel, and ‘t’will be my downfall, I fear :-)
Yeah, dang, “These things work both ways” is about the wrongetiest thing anyone has ever said here. The fact that these things DON’T work both ways is the whole entire point. Narcissism 101: NOTHING works both ways, ever.
Well you see it’s just so rare for males to be granted roles written for males… Shut up and be excited!
Won’t it be exciting when transwomen athletes bust down the doors and actually compete against men?
No. That’s ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, Ben. Competing against males is INVALIDATING. Playing a male role written for a men is inspiring and empowering.
Shut up, that’s why.
The universal answer when you have no answers that make sense.
#6
Competing against men for a job requiring a male singing voice is fine, and in fact there would be outrage if Lucia was required to compete only against women for female roles. Possibly because a trans woman can only reasonably compete for male singing roles due to having a voice in the male range.
Competing against men in sports and races is not fine – dehumanising and a breach of human rights even – and there would be outrage if McKinnon / Mouncey etc. were required to compete only against men for male for positions within male leagues. Possibly because a trans woman can outshine women in terms of physicality, but not men.
Isn’t it fascinating that the issue turns solely on whether the trans person is advantaged or disadvantaged.