Actually, that’s not fair. Name any transgender actor you know of. Nah, don’t try Chaz Bono, he’s only famous for being Cher’s daughter and started his career as such. (Sorry if my using of pronouns is confusing!)
The reason I’m asking you to enlighten me on the subject is that I just read in the news that Scarlett Johansson has pulled out of ‘Rub&Tug’a movie project about a transgender mobster woman of the 1970-80. Sounds interesting, but I don’t really care if they make this movie or not. What triggered me is the reason - as you might’ve guessed, terrible backlash from the so-called transgender community. The part should be played by a transgender actor. We’ll just ignore the fact that acting is basically pretending to be someone else. That’s an actor job!
Well, I googled the subject and Wikipedia gave me a very short list of a handful of people, most of them considered actors for staring on YouTube videos or for being featured on some obscure LGBT documentary.
Scarlett Johansson and the mobster she was supposed to play
There are barely any transgender actors to choose from, yet God forbid a straight woman playing the part of a woman transitioning to a man.
Not only that, but Scarlett Johansson felt necessary to apologize for ever considering the part and announcing her decision to ‘respectfully withdraw’ from the project. I guess respectfully refers not to the studio or movie team, but of course to the mighty transgender community. Even more, she points out the terrible fact that ‘LGBTQ+ characters dropped 40% in 2017 from the previous year, with no representation of trans characters in any major studio release’.
I’ve been out most of the day and, since I was quite pissed with this nonsense, I looked very hard around me, see if I can spot these transgender that need representing in movies. I must have passed more than a thousand people, still I couldn’t see one. Must be because I live in a backwards country.
Since I did some research today, I came across this video debating the (non-)issue of transgender actors and their plight.
Just take a look and tell me if you’d like to see any of them in a movie!