Guest post: A major life-changer that can’t easily be ignored
Originally a comment by Artymorty on And finally move on.
The corollary of the argument that only trans people should be allowed to play trans characters is that trans isn’t a neutral attribute that can be ignored.
Speaking to GQ magazine, Schafer said being known simply as a “trans actress” was “ultimately demeaning to me and what I want to do”. She continued: “I’ve been offered tons of trans roles, and I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
In a sense I get what he means, or what he thinks he means: something like how, say, Black actors were tired of playing “Black” characters, instead of just regular characters who happened to be Black. When Nichelle Nichols played Uhura on Star Trek, for example: here was a capable officer whose Blackness wasn’t front-and-centre in her character, and this earned praise from MLK and made Nichols a role model to many future Black actors.
Or perhaps it’s like how actors who were born with achondroplastic dwarfism might get tired of playing “dwarf characters” instead of just regular characters who happen to be dwarves. Peter Dinklage has broken that barrier somewhat, beginning to take on roles that aren’t explicitly written for dwarves, following his star turn in Game of Thrones.
But here we run into a bit of a problem: because dwarfism is kind of a major life changer, so it’s not easy to have characters who just happen to be dwarves leading films meant to have wide appeal, where their dwarfism never comes up in the story, or if it does, it’s mostly peripheral to the story.
I would argue trans is more analagous to the second than the first: a major life-changer that can’t easily be ignored in a story. This is in part because the transgender movement can’t decide whether transness is the most special thing in the world and must be advertised at all times, or if the movement’s goal is for trans-identifying people to integrate and settle into the population at large. Within the “transgender umbrella” there are members of both camps, the ones who are at least trying to move past their dysphoria via medical “transition” (however misguided they might be about the efficacy of that line of treatment), and the ones who live for their oh-so-special trans status and won’t shut up about it.
I think that tension, the inability to agree on whether trans should be highly visible or not so visible, is a result of the fact that the theory behind transgender doesn’t really work — that humans don’t really change sex, and trans people can never fully transcend their sex. Sex plays a huge part in their lives, in a fundamental, material way that isn’t analagous to having a minority racial or ethnic background that’s only an issue because people haven’t familiarized themselves enough with it.
But even the dwarf analogy isn’t perfect, and I would argue it doesn’t go far enough, because there’s another factor that makes “transness” different from ethicinity or disability or congenital abnormality: audiences cannot really see beyond sex, and most people are tired of being told they have to pretend that they can, and they’re only getting more tired of it. Choosing not to discriminate against women or men (or any other attribute) in, say, roles where their sex (or other attribute) isn’t typically represented, isn’t the same thing as pretending not to see what sex they are.
It’s not the same thing to appreciate Sigourney Weaver playing a strong, confident woman holding her own alongside a group of Marines in Aliens as it would be if we were instructed to pretend she was really a man all along. Her femaleness is integral to the character.
Likewise, when Jaye Davidson played the transgender character in The Crying Game, it wouldn’t have been the same if we were insructed to pretend he was a woman all along. His maleness is integral to the character.
When Hunter Schafer says he feels transgender roles are “demeaning to me”, he means he wants roles that don’t merely downplay his transgenderism, he means he wants roles that pretend he isn’t male with a transgender identity and a history of cosmetic surgeries, at all.
I feel bad for him, though. I looked at his Wikipedia entry, and he is among the cohort of gay boys who got infected with gender dysphoria after he immersed himself in teen trans social media culture.
If Hunter truly wants his trans status not to matter in the roles he plays, he has to acknowledge that he’s not an “actress” at all, and it’s not going to be easy to find lead roles for males who’ve undergone medical transition therapies, in which that isn’t a major part of their character.
Sounds like it’s going to be a while before he learns this.
It could be possible for him to find roles where the sex of the character is irrelevant. An awful lot of Hollywood, especially principal roles, seems to have a specific sex in mind for each of the characters, and changing those would be difficult. But I suspect he doesn’t want that, he wants specifically to get roles meant for women.
That Schafer finds it demeaning to play roles as what he is helps clarify that what these guys really want is to be something they’re not.
That’s a helluva dragon to chase.
To be fair:
I understand that to say that what he finds demeaning is “being known simply as a ‘trans actress’ “, that is, typecasting, being only cast in or offered roles as trans characters, as if that’s the only thing he could possibly play. Not that it’s demeaning to play those characters, but rather to be limited to playing those characters.
Sure, but what need does anyone have of a trans actor *except* to play trans roles? The character will be by default a trans character because they’re so damn uncanny valley they’re not going to get a leading role. If you want that sort of thing you have to be in a “queer” film that is essentially a sort of science fiction where such things are normal.
Voice acting *is* an option though.
Voice acting (as a male character, or a ‘trans’ one, of course), or perhaps only ever getting bit parts as an extra, where the character isn’t written as ‘trans’ (but the audience will notice, after all).
Just as males with missing limbs won’t ever get parts as male Olympic athletes, only Paralympic ones (and not as female Olympic OR Paralympic athletes), if a bloke voluntarily, or because he’s been brainwashed, cuts any bits off himself, he’s still a man and still can’t expect to get parts written to be performed by women. He should count himself fortunate to have the opportunity to act at all; it’s not like playwrights are falling over themselves to depict damaged dupes and narcissistic fetishists, because they’re not what audiences are desperate to watch. Rather the opposite.
Actually, tigger, a lot of playwrights ARE falling all over themselves to write those sorts of parts. They want to be virtuous, and LGB was always a huge part of the acting/writing community that the forced teaming of the T led them to believe this was the same thing. Also, they want to be able to enter writing competitions and hopefully get work performed; for a white woman, probably the main way to get your work performed these days is to write them for trans, or to declare yourself trans (or NB, or Aro, or whatever). Also, both theatre and movies were early adopters of TWAW; the extreme wokeness of the entertainment community stretches back a long time, back to when it wasn’t “woke” but just progressive, and when things like civil rights and apartheid were the concerns of the day.
Well they had a trans woman playing Nightbird, a “female” Deception in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. While I wted to find fault with that I couldn’t; voice acting is voice acting.
More jarring I think was the transman playing a female character in Borderlands 3 (well no problem there obviously), but when she played “Paladin Mike” in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands her character was un-ironically a woman with a mustache (in a game with “body types” instead of sexes/genders).
You lot (barring Nullius) haven’t seen the incredibly annoying tendency in videogames to pretend we don’t know which body “type” is which; you can’t even play as a gender if that’s your thing because it’s all body type 1 and 2 and voice type 1 and 2, though in Cyberpunk 2077 you can play what in all previous videogame terminology would be just be called a dickgirl but we must be all progressive and pretend it’s not a sexual fetish.
News at eleven – the entertainment industry type casts actors!
Actor appears in a sci-fi movie – they’re going to be cast that way forever. Female actor gets her tits out in one film – that’s the expectation forever. Etc etc etc. It’s a very rare actor, even amongst the big stars, that get to break the mould they are pushed into very early in their careers. Even fewer are successful doing so. Shit, some of the big names aren’t even wanted to act, they are expected to just be them. think Tom Cruise, Sean Connery, Scarlet Johansson and so many others. this piteous ‘what won’t someone take me seriously and give me the particular roles I want?’ is understandable at a personal level, but it’s not how the industry works.