Transgender representation in entertainment has made baby steps forward in recent years, but 2018 has seen a history-making giant leap, with two movies involving trans artists in the Oscars race.
Chilean actress Daniela Vega has won acclaim for her turn as Marina, a young waitress and aspiring singer who falls prey to the prejudices of society, in A Fantastic Woman, the overwhelming favourite in the best foreign language film category.
Yance Ford is also shattering glass ceilings for his intensely personal documentary Strong Island as the first openly transgender director — or trans man in any category — vying for a statuette.
An emerging pattern
Mr. Ford is only the third-ever openly transgender nominee, after Anohni — formerly Antony Hegarty of experimental U.S. band Antony and the Johnsons — lost out for best original song in 2016, and composer Angela Morley, known as Wally Stott before a sex change, was nominated twice in the same category in the mid-1970s.
“It’s a pattern happening in the last few years, since Transparent or Laverne Cox in Orange is the New Black... and now the Oscars,” said Larry Gross, a social media and communications professor at the University of Southern California.
The history of transgender representation at the Oscars is predictably threadbare — but not completely nonexistent.
The Crying Game (1992) examined race, gender and sexuality against the backdrop of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, while Oscar-winner Hilary Swank starred as an American trans man who falls victim to a brutal crime in Boys Don’t Cry (1999).
More recently, Jared Leto won an Academy Award for his acclaimed performance as an AIDS-stricken transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club (2013), while Eddie Redmayne was a losing nominee as a pioneer of the transsexual movement in “The Danish Girl” (2015).
On television, Transparent, starring Jeffrey Tambor as a Californian homemaker, has been an outlier in the movement for greater representation of transgender characters in entertainment.
‘Seismic moment’
But that conversation quickly developed into a call for more actors who are transgender in real life to be hired for these roles, traditionally given to the “cisgendered” — people whose sense of gender corresponds with their birth sex.
“I hope I’m the last cisgender man playing a transgender woman,” Mr. Tambor said when he won his second Emmy for the hit Amazon show in 2016.
When the Academy Awards take place on March 4, that breakthrough will truly be felt.
