frankly i regret starting this conversation with this article i haven't watched a new movie in theaters in 7 years (deathly hallows pt. 2) and i couldn't give a shit about the goingson of the entertainment industry at large - this is just the only article i've seen in the big news sites i read (nyt, guardian, reuters, cbc) that talks about transgender issues in a way that isn't "such-and-such place fights over bathroom laws" or "look at these dumb college kids using weird neologisms" i'm not sure what i expected, i guess, but i'm not into having this conversation in this way
All growth is painful and societal growth is the worst. I don't think you should regret the post. You'll never know if it affected one person positively but, even though it may have been personally uncomfortable or painful for you, you may have made the difference for someone on the fence. Avoiding discomfort of some kind is not the way to change the world. My point is not to get discouraged because that leads to apathy and resentment and bitterness. Prompting discussion that may require you to self-examine is the way to influence the opinion of the ambivalent. Asking those questions and making a controversial statement rooted in that which you know to be true and righteously motivated is the way you change opinions. You're never going to reach the people committed to being firmly rooted assholes but that doesn't need to make you quit speaking up because you never know who's listening on the internet and you've approached this in a very mature way throughout your replies and I'd hate to lose your voice even if it's a voice spoken with tongue being bitten.
The reasonable argument at this point in history is to cast cis men as trans men and cis women as trans women if studios want to dip their toe in this issue without losing money by casting an unknown actor. Want to make a profitable Oscar bait project about a trans male pimp? Cast Christian Bale or someone like him. Cast a person who actually can display the secondary sexual characteristics that the role may require. If you're too afraid of your star not being a well-known cash cow to cast an unknown person who's is part of the community you wish to portray, at least don't offend the trans community by equivocating it with the drag community. It's a reasonable compromise. That won't make everyone happy because I've met some very bitter people in the T of LGBT, but it offers the greatest harm reduction. It also depends on the role. Smoking hot passable trans lady? Probably find one. Kinda passable in early transition? I'm not sure Felicity Huffman in Transamaerica is universally controversial. Jill Soloway got away with people laughing at dolled up Jeffrey Tambor because she's known not to be ignorant of the issue and she now regrets the decision. People who greenlight studio films aren't generally people with their fingers on the pulse of this topic
Indeed, Trans people are actively saying "Listen, if you won't cast a trans person in this role, at least cast a cis person of the appropriate gender in the role." We've been saying it for a long time. In the case of this most recent role, We even have a great option - Oliver Platt, a "name brand" actor, is a DEAD RINGER for Tex. The only problem is he's 6'3", but I feel like we can work around that. Platt's got a bunch of award nods, he's been in a bunch of notable films and tv, and he looks like the guy (unlike Johannsen). In regards to situations like Transamerica, and Boys Don't Cry, and other older films, we need to look at them through the lens of history. At the time, just making a film about a transgender person was groundbreaking. Just being represented, even though it wasn't by a trans person, was huge for the community after decades of being seen as nothing more than sex workers and murder victims on screen (of course, Brandon Teena was a murder victim, but at least we got his story first instead of just his dead body at the beginning of a Law and Order episode). Transparent had criticism from the trans community right from the very beginning, but it was hushed for the same reason - popular show with a trans main character, we should be grateful. Then it came out that Tambor abused the trans women on the set (as well as women on other sets, such as Arrested Development), and all of that criticism came back like a dam had broken. "We told you so," "why didn't you cast a trans woman in the role in the first place", etc. Basically, the trans community is sick of being the equivalent of Alec Baldwin playing Harriet Tubman. We get it, you need to make money to make a film, but there are so many better options than what you're choosing and it's like you (by you I mean the industry) are trying to be tone deaf.
All while balancing out the market forces that - lose their shit when the human torch is black - terrorize Leslie Jones for being a woman or something - goes batshit over a black James Bond I have no idea if these statistics are accurate, but if 0.58% of the population of the US is transgender, that means that less than half of one percent of less than half of the entertainment market is being misrepresented to everyone else. It also means that if more than one in 200 roles is transgender, then transgendered people are being over-represented in Hollywood. I'll bet that number is under 1 in a thousand.
I don't think they're intentionally tone deaf. It's my opinion that the rapid advancement of the trans rights movement compared to other civil rights issues makes it difficult for people who may be well intentioned to treat the subject with respect. As you point out it was a community that accepted crumbs like 20 years ago and now has the international attention that other LGBT communities gained over a longer time line. Public opinion on vanilla homosexuality changed slowly and at this point people who may still be against gay rights seem to feel like they've been tossed unwillingly into the deep end of an issue related to something they are at best uncomfortable with. Anyway I don't envy studio heads who have to make decisions about LGBTQIA topics
Or, ya know, cast the right person for the role, regardless of who they like to fuck, or what type of hardware they have between their legs. I know ... crazy idea. But I just spent the weekend with a theater director in San Diego, and the problems she has with casting are comically sad. Talent just doesn't show up when you need it, isn't available, or .... gasp! ... may be unreliable! (I know, ARTISTS, right?) It's easy, once a production is complete, to pick someone who would have been better / more appropriate for a role. But that's the finished product, which is about a billion miles away from the thing you started making 18 months, and 26 script drafts ago...
The problem with this is you end up with John Wayne playing Ghengis Khan, Joel Grey playing Chiun and Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi. Or Emma Stone playing Hawaiian Chinese. There's a middle ground but it will never be happy because nothing in Hollywood ever is. He effortlessly slides into perfect Spanish for a few seconds, then returns to being Anthony. "Why am I not being hired for Mexican or Latino roles?" he says. "You play my roles, but I can't play yours, and I speak Spanish just as well? Go fuck yourself." Anthony picks up my recorder. "Go fuck yourself, Jon Stewart!" he yells. "Have me on your show if you have the balls! You don't have the balls!" Jon Ronson, "You May Know Me From Such Roles as Terrorist #4"Or, ya know, cast the right person for the role, regardless of who they like to fuck, or what type of hardware they have between their legs.
Anthony carries on, turning his anger toward Jon Stewart's Rosewater, in which the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal plays the Iranian-Canadian reporter Maziar Bahari. "Man, if I saw Jon Stewart, you'd have to hold me back. How dare you hire a Mexican-American to play an Iranian-American, with all these amazing Iranian-American artists. I can't stand it. I'm sick of it. I speak Spanish fluently.…"
Well, I did say cast the right person for the role. At the time, of John Wayne playing Genghis Khan, it didn't matter what the movie was about... it was a John Wayne movie. They just grabbed the next script off the pile, and put Marion in the starring role. In that case, if you wanted a John Wayne movie, then he was the "right person for the role". If you wanted a Genghis Khan movie, then he was the wrong person. Again, Linda Hunt.
Aloha is an unmitigated disaster. Stone shouldn't have accepted the role. No one should have considered her. There are more layers of failure in this than one can count. And it bombed so hard the public forgot it so it doesn't even hold the level of shame it deserves in the minds of people who watch movies
That's a common misconception. The problem is that you're trying to sell something, not make a statement. The US film industry is about the least subsidized in the world and as such, its films reflect market forces more than any other. The difference between "the movie you want to make" and "the movie you get to make" is who's paying for it. That's why Hollywood gives so much of a shit about the Oscars: it celebrates the movies that everybody left Poughkeepsie for but that Poughkeepsie refuses to watch because they're too busy watching a goddamn Ant Man sequel. The whole of the prestige movie economy exists as consolation bait for people who never thought they'd spend all day in front of a green screen.People who greenlight studio films aren't generally people with their fingers on the pulse of this topic
I suppose I meant more of the on-the-ground opinion of people involved directly and the trans movement is gaining ground so quickly that that opinion is difficult to gage at best and maybe even nonexistent as a consensus. I'm not wholly ignorant of the studio process. Buying independent movies isn't a perfect solution because then the filmmakers have to foot the bill. Trial and error is maybe the best solution but it's pretty not ideal
choo choo here we go y'all comin to add to the burden of acceptance everywhere
the burden of acceptance is, generally speaking, the amount of energy you need to spend on not being a dick per day back in the day people had a very low burden of acceptance because you could discriminate freely - nowadays the burden of acceptance in the us is much higher because of different groups becoming more culturally and politically powerful trans people are the newest final straw, where people give up because it's too much of a burden to understand righties call the burden of acceptance "PC culture": weirdoes making things that used to be perfectly fine into things that make you lose your job or lose your friends, AKA the "why should I have to"s in MLK's letter from birmingham jail, the white moderates he was talking about were having a tough time with the burden of acceptance - a lot of the young wingies that are being indoctrinated nowadays initially fell into it partly because of the burden of acceptance
This. This right here. This is the problem. I really don't give a fuck. I don't. No fucks given. My five-year-old daughter is now giving clothes to a classmate who switched from "Nick" to "Nicolette" in March and it's whatever. I'm glad her mom is accepting and I'm thankful that the kid is in an environment where everyone's cool with it. But it's like k.d. lang or danah boyd or ee cummings deciding their name is somehow immune from the commonly accepted rules of punctuation. I mean, okay. We'll deal with it. But now every time I write the name "danah boyd" I have to go look it up and see if indeed she's the one that hates capital letters because some pencilneck on the Internet somewhere is gonna score points off me for miscapitalization and you know what? It's not worth it. We got a memo the other day because we have a contestant of diminutive stature. And we all knew he wasn't a dwarf because fuckin' hell, we're not savages. But he's also not a little person because - and this was made clear to us - he has no genetic markers of dwarfism ("dwarfism" is okay but "dwarf" is not) and therefore we're all fucked if we refer to him as "little." So I can refer to the 6'5 guy of Syrian descent as "little fella" and it's a joke but if I accidentally refer to this individual as "little fella" eyebrows go up and everyone looks to see if the door is open to make sure nobody heard. You sit there judging everyone because of the concept of "the burden of acceptance" and I get it: it fucking sucks to be an outsider, to have to play 20 questions with everyone you meet, to deal with the dysphoria of gender identity and whatever "burden" the rest of us might experience pales in comparison. But fuckin' hell we don't have to deal with it with anybody else. My boss (who used to cruise Boston looking for "queers" to beat up, I might add) isn't going to criticize me for calling a girl a girl or an African American an African American. Meanwhile I've observed in-the-room pissing matches between queer educators over wither or not LGBTQIAPK is inclusive or exclusive and us straight white dudes are sitting over here going "apparently I'm an asshole for using a four-letter rather than a nine-letter acronym." Meanwhile, the President loves taco salads. So here's my industry - being scolded for not firing Danny Masterson fast enough when Roseanne went from top of the world to bottom of the pile in about 3 hours. And you gotta admit: there's a lot less bandwidth burned when an industry is of white men, for white men by white men. Nobody pillories the coal mining industry for a lack of diversity.
i started writing a serious reply, but i deleted it, so then i started with an angry reply, but i deleted it, so then i started with a snarky reply, but i deleted it as a trans person, the circles i wander around in online are the accepting ones generally, and the thing about acceptance is that it's difficult to draw lines around it sometimes - an easier example of this is with a different community of weirdoes, furries furries are weird. most of them admit that. the thing about admitting your own weirdness is that it looks kind of hypocritical to start excluding other people for being too weird, which is why any community of furries is guaranteed to develop pockets of inflation and shit fetishists, no matter where you go a similar thing can happen when you get to the edges of gender and sex circles: i think i remember you or somebody else on here talking about "pansexuals" or "asexuals" or something (galen)? and how it was silly, but it gets even sillier than those not-silly concepts, i swear - there's people that think they're multiple people in one body (not skitsy people?), or people that think they're reincarnations of past people, or people that map out every specific aspect of their sexual and romantic orientations with like 10 different terms and i think it's silly too. i have different opinions about the legitimacy / necessary-ness of it all, but generally i just go "okay" and move on with my life because it doesn't particularly affect me and generally, going "okay" and moving on is essentially all i can do as a single person - i can't control the situation i was born into - all the social isolation and the stunted emotional development and undiagnosed mental illnesses and semi-literally having the wrong body, and things like that, and i think i can go out on a limb here and say you understand this feeling of deep frustration about everything being shit really well i don't claim to have a worse experience to the point that "nobody understands me, man!" because i understand that you can't compare people's lives like that, problems like that - it would be incredibly, incredibly presumptuous of me to make that judgement and comparison it does really suck. it sucks a lot. i know that from the outside, it probably seems like a bunch of fuss, or just something overcomplicated - that's what i meant by "burden of acceptance", behind the snark, because it's something that throws up more shit for people to have to deal with, like in your experiences with various stuff as a movie guy / with random educators, and i can see how it might seem ridiculous from the outside because i can see, because of pockets of edge cases within the GSM community, how ridiculous it can look from the inside. i got kind of pissed earlier at the phrase "sit there judging everyone", but i don't deny that that's what i'm doing - the alternative of rolling over and accepting another frustration is, in some cases, not something i feel like doing i kind of spent a while writing this, so i forgot whether i actually had a point i like using GSM (for gender and sexual minorities) because it seems like nobody could have a problem with it, and the letter-adding politics of LGBT-etc (aka legbutts) is something to be avoided given that it's one of the things that every two-bit culture warrior brings up to talk about how shit we are - i have no problems with anybody using any kind of acronym or whatever because i'm not an asshole, and like i said, water off the back or whatever bullshit i actually did say i guess if i do have a point, it's that yes, i am judging you, but i'm not judging you specifically and nothing is your fault - you're just unhappy because some people make you into an enemy and put words in your mouth because of something you have no control over which is exactly the problem on my end in the first place, so why would i want to do that the other way around? a lot of the things in the world are pretty shit and it's frustrating when the shit flies up and gets in your eyes, and your hair, especially if you have long hair
The problem, as I see it, is that other minorities have history and consensus. "Black history month" is a recounting of hundreds of years of overlooked contributions and suffering of a recognized minority. If you're Jewish you've got thousands of years of history and folklore. If you're homosexual you can go back to the ancient Greeks and beyond. You are this, not that, you are this, and that. The LGBT community has to be an umbrella of inclusiveness of everyone who isn't into straight sex with their original genitals. The LGB part? That shit's sorted. Everything else? That's your perspective, and I thank you for it, and I guarantee that if I assume the next trans person I meet shares it I'm fucked. Because everyone who's active in the community has an opinion and there isn't a lot of folklore or tradition to lean on. My wife welcomed and was sought out by the LGBT community in Los Angeles; she helped a lot of same-sex couples have babies. In Seattle she's in with a couple-three prominent LGBT educators and we ran the webpage through the Decoder Ring so that we used completely bias-free language. And I know what passes in LA wouldn't pass in Seattle, and I know what passes in Seattle doesn't pass in LA, and I know that the experience of an outsider attempting to reconcile everyone's chosen pronouns and acronyms is to be a punching bag for getting it wrong always. We got some paperwork that used "LGBTQQIAAP!" and I had to ask what the "!" meant. I was informed it referred to two-spirit individuals (but not third gender. Then I had to ask what two-spirit individuals were. Then I was told that two-spirit individuals are Native Americans who fulfill a third gender role in life or in certain ceremonial capacities. I said "oh, you mean bardaches" because fuckin' hell we studied Navajo gender fluidity in 8th grade because mine was a progressive school. You'd think I said "you mean faggots." No bonus points whatsoever for being familiar with Navajo culture as it pertains to transgender individuals. Because I'd used the term my teacher taught me 20 years ago in an attempt to be diverse, I was an unalloyed racist homophobe all of a sudden. I honestly believe that the homophobes have an easier time dealing with transgender issues because they just grit their teeth and pretend transgender people are sick and can therefore be disregarded. Those of us who try to get the terminology right are the ones who get lambasted for trying because if you can brow-beat someone into agreeing with your interpretation you've made it stronger than your rivals'. I put a social worker through grad school about 20 years ago. She got tested on transgender vs. transsexual... after being informed that whatever their preconceptions were, they were wrong by default because they weren't transgendered. Now? Now Facebook has 51 gender options. It's one thing to correctly address A or B. It's quite another when the alphabet doesn't contain your options. And I know not everyone insists on that much granularity, but if you assume that not everyone insists on that much granularity... ...you're a bigot. Especially if you're a straight white male.i like using GSM (for gender and sexual minorities) because it seems like nobody could have a problem with it, and the letter-adding politics of LGBT-etc (aka legbutts) is something to be avoided given that it's one of the things that every two-bit culture warrior brings up to talk about how shit we are - i have no problems with anybody using any kind of acronym or whatever because i'm not an asshole, and like i said, water off the back or whatever bullshit i actually did say
there are plenty of cultures with traditions of third-gender people, but they're mostly the ones that got killed off or pushed to the side - there's an interesting connection between siberian shamanism and third-gender people, for example you were unlucky there to stumble into the separate clusterfuck of "man, natives are kind of pissed about the whole misrepresentation and genocide thing and don't like their shit being called by european names" - "bardache" is an old french word for the "bottom" in a gay relationship and it seems to be eventually derived from an arabic word for "slave" there's a language that i'm really interested in in the canadian northwest that i knew as "slavey" or "slave" with or without an acute accent on the e - turns out the name literally comes from "esclave", or slave in french, which is a calque from cree - that's the problem with asking the wrong locals what everything is called, because the cree were like "we enslave these people, so we call them slaves" and now essentially all the academic writing about these people uses that name too they prefer "Dene" - fun fact: lots do, including Navajo - "Diné", right? i appreciate the fact that you're still trying to sort stuff out - despite that, i find it hard to pat you (or anyone) on the back too hard for the effort
You need to. Everybody needs to. Privileged and unempathetic, I know. But let's work from the assumption that in a free society that values diversity, you're 100% entitled to recognition and acceptance. I am obligated by the bounds of common courtesy to use your pronouns of choice without comment or complaint. If you sneeze, the polite thing is to say "bless you" or "gesundheit" or something similar. And in response, the polite thing is to say "thank you." The LGBT community is in no mood to say "thank you." I totally understand why and I empathize with the viewpoint. It's a pain in the ass to be gender-nonconforming and there's a whole bunch of gender-conforming people actively making it worse. But without social acknowledgement of the efforts made at acceptance, cis people will avoid situations where they're required to be uncomfortable. "Thanks for putting in the effort" is manners. Integrating GSM members into the broader community requires effort - by both sides, for sure. But it ain't a GSM society and things will go better if us assholes in the majority are allowed a few warm fuzzies every now and then rather than knowing our every interaction is subject to a secret eyeroll and venting somewhere on the internet.i appreciate the fact that you're still trying to sort stuff out - despite that, i find it hard to pat you (or anyone) on the back too hard for the effort
I just got off the phone with my mom and part of the conversation was how often I have to shrug off casual disrespect from family members caused by being a member of several groups that are unrelated to the topic at hand Thank you for explaining. I understand I don't look like this concept could apply to me so I'll try to use my education on it wisely
sigh I know that Hollywood has to take a leading role in promoting equality and diversity. And I know that the outside perspective is that it's a hidebound traditionalist nightmare of ossified gender roles. But I also know that nobody else ever has to go to a set meeting where you're told "you will all refer to 'Maybe' as 'Maybe', not 'he' or 'she', or you will be fired. We don't need any lawsuits." There are minorities in Hollywood. They get hired less than white people. Part of that is that nobody in Bumblefuck Oklahoma wants to see a narrative about transgendered Indian women ("'Ant-Man and the Wasp' marks Marvel's 20th straight No. 1 opening"). With the transgender community in particular though, part of that is that nobody in Hollywood wants to deal with the antagonism that automatically crops up when something as traditional and dependable as gender suddenly becomes non-binary. The entertainment industry is quite clearly on the front lines of transgender equality. The front lines are where the battles are. And when one of your requirements for employment is 'you have to learn my first name so you don't offend me' it's a battle most of us choose not to fight if we're given a choice.Maybe Burke, an actor who is agender (doesn’t identify as male or female and uses “they” pronouns), said directors would reach out, compliment their look, and then offer them offensive trans women roles: “It’s a homeless sex worker who gets murdered, and I’m like, ‘Thank you so much, I’m so glad you saw that in me.’”
Maybe we just need a remake of The Year of Living Dangerously, since Hollyweird is all a-flutter about retreads... erm... I mean, reboots.
"Haha! Hollyweird! Get it? Hollywood is weird because they want to give people the option to view it entertainment that may broaden their perspective on issues they know nothing about. Like movies can be art or something. Pfft. . I'll just keep using that putdown so educated people's know that I don't have a valid opinion on these kinds of topics. That'll show the libruls."
To what purpose? I used to live in LA, and people commonly call the place "Hollyweird" because it's a weird place. You aren't a local, and decided to harp on one word that you didn't understand. Really not much more to be said about it than that, really.
i understand perfectly well that it makes far more sense to avoid controversial things when you're trying to appeal to a lot of people - it's still unpleasant to have your existence be something that's brushed over / something that's just an inconvenience for normal people it takes a long time to make something socially acceptable - i see no reason to give up if the alternative is being viewed as a freak, regardless of any backlash or tolerance-exhaustion it provokes in people movie people are easy to pick on, though - it's not like it's the only kind of workplace where people get harassed either people care about actors more or journalists find it easier to write articles about them when it comes to discrimination
Movie people are the easiest to pick on. After all, our morals aren't your own, we lead decadent lives, and therefore the social failings of society aren't society's fault, they're Hollywood's. Nobody got an MFA from Cal Arts so they could shoot Toddlers in Tiaras. But that's what people want to watch, so that's what gets shot. And it doesn't matter that we had a transgender contestant on one of my shows four years ago, and it doesn't matter that Walter Carlos became Wendy more than 40 years ago without anybody saying anything - the reason the public is still generally uncomfortable around transgender people no matter how hard they try is because Hollywood isn't normalizing things fast enough. Actors are shameless self-promoters. They have to be. Actors with a grievance? That's literally every actor.
i was talking about "normalizing things" in general, not in an industry-specific way that was the second point of my comment