Originally a comment by Artymorty on No calls.
It’s also awfully hard to look past the fact that [Ellen/Elliot Page] is a woman pretending to be a man. She’d have to be a minor character for that not to figure in the plot. Otherwise, it’s just very, very distracting, so much so that it pulls the viewer out of the story.
Trans actors can only play major characters who are conspicuously trans — it’s got to be a stated aspect of the character — or minor characters where there’s just no time or plot necessity to address it. Or maybe they can only be cast in sci-fi/fantasy where the lines are a bit blurrier?
I can’t think of a single instance otherwise.
As for Page’s part in The Odyssey, I’m going to chalk it up to both the fantasy-adjacent milieu, and the relative smallness of the part.
Insufferable trans YouTuber Abigail Thorn was cast in House of the Dragon (the same show that cast, and then apparently dropped, our dear ally James Dreyfus), but Thorn’s transness was immediately addressed: he plays a crossdressing sailor who makes a ribald sausage joke in his first scene. There: he’s actually a man and everyone knows it. Now we can move on.
There’s a transman character in the Fallout series, but again, her transness is explicitly addressed immediately: she’s smaller than the other guys in the platoon, and shy about getting undressed, because she’s not a guy.
That’s the mold of pretty much every character played by a trans-identifying actor. Their actual sex is part of the character. They’re not cast in actual opposite-sex roles.
Cross-sex character acting was common in the past — from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare, but it’s virtually unheard of in Hollywood today. Linda Hunt played a man in The Year of Living Dangerously back in the ’80s and it was such a novelty they gave her an Oscar. Plus, she never identified as a transgender man in reality, so the Academy was free to openly celebrate her for convincingly portraying a man while not actually being one. When someone’s actually claiming to be the opposite sex in real life, you’re supposed to pretend they’re not even acting, which makes it all the more uncomfortable when you’re watching them act.
Felicity Huffman played a transwoman (a man pretending to be a woman) in Transamerica, so that’s a case of a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. (Reminds me of when Rock Hudson, a closeted gay man in real life, played a straight man pretending to be gay in order to seduce Doris Day in Pillow Talk: a gay man pretending to be a straight man pretending to be a gay man!) Huffman’s role was technically cross-sex acting. (The Academy once again went bananas for it and nominated her for an Oscar.)
Jared Leto, Hilary Swank, and Jaye Davidson all played transgender characters, and their actual sex was pivotal to the characters. (The Academy nominated all three, two of whom won the trophy.)
Hunter Schafer has been cast in the upcoming Blade Runner TV series, and we don’t know yet how his trans status will play out in the story, but already, we’re talking about a cyberpunk sci-fi future defined by artificial bodies and body parts… so it’s hard to imagine his real-life surgically-modified body won’t factor into the story.
If anything, the artifice of trans people’s identities is more apparent than ever when they’re put onscreen in fictional stories.
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