Trans people in the media industry
This debate has been addressed since many years ago, but as the LGBT movement and special the trans one grew, so does the controvery created when a cisgender person accepts a role to play as a trans person. Some people think it’s irrelevant, but it really isn’t. First, it’s important to definy the concepts ‘transexual or trans’, which refer to a person who identifies with the opposite gender and ‘cisgender or cis’, which includes those who identify with the gender they have.
The main problem is that trans people are a minority which is highly discriminated, specially in the cinema and television industry. Finding a job is more complicated when people look at you as if you were an alien, and the fact that someone who doesn’t suffer contempt wants to be in your skin without taking into account that, they are not only not helping you grow as an artist, but they could also help you pay your monthly rent, that’s outrageous.
What’s the relation with artistic quality? That argument is frecuently used to say that a famous actress will be better than a transexual woman. Obviously, there are different cases, but those people are formed, they have studied, and let’s not talk about talent. The obstacle that they face is the lack of experience due to the difficulty of finding job that I mentioned before, and that doesn’t make them worse, genuine stars are eclipsed by cisgender straight normative and white actors.
There are many clear examples, I’ll highlight ‘POSE’ because it doesn’t have an almost full trans cast (same as ‘Veneno’), but they also have black people who live an even bigger discrimination. ¿Are those actresses worse? Not at all, they make roles worthy enough to be in Hollywood, and thousands of viewers can agree with that. Who is better to play a trans role than someone who has lived it’s difficulties in first person? Actors and actresses like Paco León in ‘La casa de las flores’ Eddie Redmayne in ‘The danish girl’ or Belén Cuesta in ‘La casa de papel’ have been brutally criticised for accepting those roles and, as always, they have just posted an statement to get out of the drama without really committing to the cause and understanding the problem that they are supporting
Getting deeper in the issue, it isn’t just bad that trans people don’t get those roles, but they even get less roles when it comes to interpreting cis people, such as Jamie Clayton who in ‘Sense 8’ plays a women whose life doesn’t revolve around being trans, being that one of the few examples. We could discuss if, when we say that a cisgender person shouldn’t play a trans one… Why can it be the other way around? I think the answer to that question is pretty simple: trans women aren’t men with wigs, they are women. Same as men, but in television and cinema, it’s more common to see women. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t trans since they weren’t born with the gender identity that they identify themselves with, unlike cis people.
Although there is still a lot of controversy when a trans person (also anyone LGBT, black, chinese, indian of from any minority) gets into a cast, but there is also a big public that enormously appreciates it and who look forward to that being done naturally in order to keep evolving as a modern society and that hundres of people, specially children who don’t understand why they are ‘different’ get to see that they are absolutely normal. That’s why it is essential to have the maximum amount of representation that we can get in our media and stop distinguishing people.
