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News > World

Hollywood Does It Again: No Trans Actor Cast to Play Trans Role

  • Bomer's casting has been met with much criticism.

    Bomer's casting has been met with much criticism. | Photo: Flickr / RTP

Published 31 August 2016
Opinion

LBGTQ community complains of whitewashing and the "Four P’s:” prostitute, punchline, psycho, and “poor thing!” 

In an ongoing issue for Hollywood, cisgendered actor Matt Bomer has been cast to play a transgender sex worker in the upcoming film adaptation of Tim McNeil’s play, "Anything."

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As a result, the LBGTQ community and social media is ablaze with complaints that the film industry has yet again mis-cast an actor often happens in the case of Hollywood whitewashing. A film casting the white actor Matt Damon as the hero of a movie on the construction of the Great Wall of China was the target of heated debate and criticism earlier this month by Asians who complain that it is both historically inaccurate and deprives someone of Chinese descent of a job.

Following the news of Bomer’s casting, Jen Richards, creator and star of "Her Story," who is trans herself, took to Twitter to express her disappointment, employing an argument she has had to make many times before.

Jamie Clayton, the transgender actress who stars in "Sense8," also wrote to Bomer in a tweet, encouraging him to do better by transgender people. Bomer responded by temporarily blocking her, a move that is being deemed as ironic, given Bomer’s own journey as an openly gay actor and his transgender advocacy of the past.

Countless trans actors and actresses have also criticized this recurring problem.

“Behind the 'Dallas Buyers Club‘s' Rayon character, we see Jared Leto. That’s who the audience knows. So when we see this beautiful woman onscreen, we think, ‘That’s really Jared Leto. That’s really a man.’ That’s the attitude that gets internalized,” Richards told CBC Radio One. “So when … a straight guy sees me, is attracted to me as a woman … that triggers a crisis in him … He thinks everyone else is going to think (he’s) gay because to everyone else this trans woman is really a man, and this, in certain communities, leads to violence.”

Laverne Cox of the popular Netflix show, “Orange is the New Black,” also spoke about this in the context of a music video, citing profitability as the reason for castings like this.

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“It’s about business, and we are in, as Bell Hooks calls it, (an) ‘Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.’ (Casting) ‘Andrew Garfield the Spider-Man guy’ in an Arcade Fire video is going to make headlines. And people are going to click on it and talk about it. And (you, the media, are) asking me about it, so that’s a business decision … If I were asked to do the Arcade Fire video, I don’t know if it would have the same kind of attention,” she explained in an interview with Bustle.

Shakina Nayfack, the Lilly Award-winning stage actress, has told the Huffington Post that simply having stories about trans people isn’t enough to change societal attitudes.

“So if you introduce trans characters that aren’t played by trans people, you’re not really doing any favors to further trans visibility. It’s not just our narratives that are on the line; it’s our bodies, our presence—our very existence,” she said. “This past year, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in hate crimes and murders of trans women of color, and it’s no coincidence that this uptick in violence comes at a time of increased trans representation in popular culture and political discourse.”

Beyond the issue of casting, many are pointing out how the film adaptation itself reinforces just about every stale trope regarding transgender portrayals on screen, as Bomer’s character is a sex worker, yet again.

A 2012 GLAAD study found that, in the last decade, 20 percent of all transgender characters on television were sex workers, while 40 percent were cast in some sort of victim role. Transgender actress Calpernia Addams has called these stereotypical characters as the "Four P’s”: prostitute, punchline, psycho, and “poor thing!” (aka the “noble victim”).

Surely there are more stories out there about trans people—that can be played by actual trans people themselves.

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