And finally move on
Euphoria actress Hunter Schafer has said she no longer wants to play transgender roles. The 25-year-old transgender star shot to fame playing a trans character, Jules Vaughn, in HBO’s hit teen drama.
But Schafer said she felt she could go further as an actress by “not making it the centrepiece to what I’m doing”. She said: “I worked so hard to get to where I am, past these really hard points in my transition, and now I just want to be a girl and finally move on.”
That’s not going to happen. The entertainment industry is about making money, it’s not about showing off one’s trans-allyship. The people who make movies and tv dramas aren’t going to choose a man instead of the thousands of eager women available to them.
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.”
Then don’t. Find a different line of work.
And yet there are complaints when a “non-trans” actor plays a character who identifies as trans. Even when the story begins before the character makes that decision.
If being known as a “trans actress” is “demeaning” then isn’t being known as a “trans woman” also demeaning? It’s role playing all the way down. Might as well get paid for it, ingrate.
If they think Hunter Schafer will be a draw—and I couldn’t tell you one way or the other, for all I know, a Hunter Schafer is a species of beetle—then they’ll cast Hunter Schafer. Elliot Page hasn’t done all that much acting since coming out though, except keep a pre-existing role in Umbrella Academy.
But isn’t transness always the centrepiece of being trans? Isn’t it the no-trick-pony demand for reward without effort, accomplishment, or talent? For simply being? Maybe there’s not as big a market for this kind of celebrity or notoriety as you’d hoped?
Moving on might happen; that’s up to you. “Being a girl” is never going to happen. Nobody can help you with that. You are male, and that’s a life sentence. (He’s 25 years old; interesting that he’s aspiring to be a “girl” and not a “woman.” Maybe this is a hint of the delusional, fantasy aspect of his mistaken self image, or maybe he’s just watched too much Dylan Mulvaney. He’s a 27 year old “girl.”)
You bought yourself a ticket to nowhere and you’re surprised that there’s no room reserved for you? No hotel either. They might have had brochures in the travel office, and posters on the wall, but they were for a destination you can never reach. “Being a girl” is not the sum total of a shopping list of procedures, accessories, and poses, but a state of being. You can’t attain, acquire, or achieve it; no amount of practice or training will help. You have to be born there. If you’re not there already, you’re out of luck. You can’t get there from here. You can’t get there at all. Anyone who told you otherwise was lying. A little research could have told you that. Carving up your body and ruining your life in pursuit of a shiny, glittering lie is sad, particularly when the mundane truth of the impossibility of your quest was there to see all along.
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.
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.
Hunter Schafer should be grateful Harvey Weinstein is no longer the one making decisions. Things could have got a tad uncomfortable on the “casting couch”.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on And finally move […]
Honestly, I suspect we’ll have more cases of women being cast as transwomen than transwomen being cast as women, because Hollywood does love performative social justice, and casting a woman in that role makes it easier to sell the idea that the character is ‘no different’ than any other woman.
When audiences don’t buy into their delusion that they’ve changed sex, because it’s always obvious what sex they are, why would they be cast as anything else? This bloke is only being cast at all because it’s currently prudent to include a ‘trans’ character in everything, in order to avoid being targeted by baying mobs. When the society switches to a new insane fad, he’s going to be out of work.