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.

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