She’s not saying “Only Xs can play Xs.” She’s made a very specific claim about a specific harm caused by this action.
You might disagree that this movie will cause violence against trans women. Great, disagree.
But disagree with the claim being made not with the claim rattling around inside your head.
ya I know, I was reading on mobile and I just saw the first few things and decided to stop reading because I didn’t want to think about it then 
sorry for the rant, I know lots of people already know what I’m trying to say
anyway, hi fellow transes!! 
i hope somebody got something out of my rant…
Oh, it’s a common enough narrative for many people, but certainly not for all of us. Thanks for being willing to learn about it! Heck, I’m still learning what all this means for myself, so talking about it helps that process.
Three points, in increasing relevance. Apologies for length.
One. Gay and straight men look the same. Cis men and trans women usually look very different – Jen Richards looks more like any woman in Hollywood than she looks like Matt Bomer.
Two. The vast majority of cis people receive almost all their information about trans people from media written, produced, and acted by cis people. Because they don’t see accurate depictions of trans people, or depictions are biased towards showing trans people as poor, overly sexual, mentally ill, a walking joke, mannish and nonpassing, etc, that is what they think all trans people are like. Unfortunately this has political ramifications in a world where laws are passed restricting things like where people can go to the bathroom. When trans people who pass for cis ask social conservatives just where they’re supposed to pee, conservatives are utterly flummoxed because this person does not even exist in their imagination. How would they know what trans people look like? Trans people flee conservative towns and so all the conservatives know are what they see on TV or at the movies. Even if they want to see a supposedly more positive show, they might get directed to something like Trans Parent where the lead actor is so grotesquely mannish, just the previous year in Arrested Development they played him becoming transgender for laughs.
(As an example of just how distorted transphobes perceptions of trans women are, a short anecdote. I know a trans woman who works at a competitor to Target, and when some people decided to boycott Target due to their pro-trans policies, they also visited this store to ask the manager what their policies were. So she’d go out to talk to them, and explain that men weren’t allowed to use the bathrooms – by which she meant self-identified men, of course. The boycotters never once seemed to figure out they were talking to a trans woman describing a policy functionally identical to Target’s, and it struck her sense of humor to never bother telling them.)
Three. I really need to write this up in a longer post sometime, if only to clarify it to myself, but much of the particular type of misogyny faced by trans women seems to come from certain patriarchal men’s horrid desires to: first, make sure the entire world knows in no uncertain terms that they are straight; and second, use sexual partners as markers of social status. If such a man finds out a woman he’s been ogling is trans, and he decides this woman is “really” a man, it directly challenges his self-perception as straight. If he dates a trans woman and knows other men might think he’s dating someone who looks like Matt Bomer, this could threaten his status. In a world of toxic masculinity, men often react violently when their self worth or straightness is questioned. Courts have sometimes even accepted as a defense, that men who killed trans partners did so in an “understandable” rage at being “tricked.” In fact, only one state has explicitly banned this “trans panic” defense. I think this is more or less what Jen Richards is getting at when she says just the depiction of a trans woman by a cis man might increase the murder rate.
It helps to understand that the central trans holiday, TDoR, is everyone getting together to read a list of all the trans people who were murdered during the year and the circumstances of their murder. You do a lot of thinking about race, class, misogyny, and killer’s motives in those hours, as each name is read and candle is lit, and you also worry a lot that this year there’s just too much fire and the church is gonna burn down around you.
Earlier this year, I attended a performance of “H.M.S. Pinafore” in which the role of Captain Corcoran was played by a very dark-complected gentleman of African descent.
The role of his daughter was played by a young lady of apparently pure Nordic origin.
They did a great job. I immensely enjoyed the performance.
Actors everywhere, just do your best to put on a great performance. It’ll sort out in the end.
Saying “Cis men playing trans women leads to death.”
rather than
“It was a bad idea to cast Matt Boner as a trans woman.”
is close enough to saying “only X’s should play X’s” as to make no difference to me.
Awhile back, I was the art director of a series of epic stage adaptations of the Lord of the Rings books. Gandalf was played by a woman (not with a beard), as were Gimli, Merry, and Smeagol. It was terrific. (edit: I should clarify that our Gandalf was played as female, as was Merry, but Gimli was played ambiguously and Smeagol was, well, Smeagol)
A truck driver isn’t an actor, nor are truck drivers a category of people regularly denied basic humanity by our society. So, no, not the same thing at all.
That’s a complex issue that lead me to some genuine questions :
Can you just blame the actor ? Is the performance an issue or the writing/directing ? If Leto did a bad job isn’t it because the writer and the director did a bad job at directing him in the good path ? Is it a case of bad acting or poorly written character ?
Can you forbid actors to be cast in some role ? how do that work ? Where do you put the limit ?
Cinema is art and not all director have a “naturalistic” approach. Some characters are not realistic and can be “wrong” on purpose. Is it bad ? I guess my point here is cinema ≠ reality.
I agree the lack of representation and even more the bad representation is harmful. Cinema (has much as over media) have a huge responsibility, and a good start may be to include trans people in the writing even more than in the acting.
Orlando is also a fantasy film. The character changes gender over the course of several centuries… it’s sort of magical realism.
Which @the_borderer mentioned above…
Thank you, I didn’t see his post. Hopefully not a problem to also express a similar opinion.
Not at all, just wanted to give it signal boost.
Ooh ooh, how about Morgan Freeman as God? Everyone knows that dude was historically white.
Fine but Jen Richards is saying one of those models is killing people.
I suppose it depends on what story you are trying to tell. For example, LaVerne Cox is the perfect choice (I daresay the only choice) to play her character in Orange is the New Black because both her appearance and personal experience bring authenticity to that role. But you couldn’t cast an especially feminine-looking trans woman for Jeffrey Tambor’s character in Transparent because the whole premise of the show is that the character spent her whole life living as a man and only comes out as trans around age 70. So for that particular part you’d have to cast either a cisgendered man or a trans woman who could easily “pass” as a cisgendered man.
That makes some sense in the beginning stages of transition. It’s harder to say that this casting would be appropriate after someone has been on estrogen for two years, has electrolysis etc.
That early transitioning is a very short time of our lives. But it seems to be the only thing focused on - it’s as if every story with a gay person in it was about coming out or every story with a cis person was about their first sexual experience. It really limits our view to the public and ourselves to what for us ends up being a small fraction of our lives.
That this is the only way artists who aren’t trans can seem to perceive us is a very real distortion and a very real failure of imagination coming from ignorance. That ignorance leads many to fill in the blanks with stereotype and projection. Or using us to make some statement about others.
It doesn’t do us any favors. And of course if Tambor could play this period with make up and prosthesis - a cis woman or trans woman could just as well with breast binding and faux beard stubble.
I appreciate you hunting up the numbers.
