On Saturday, Halle Berry shared that she was preparing to play the role of a transgender man in an interview on Instagram Live hosted by a Santa Barbara hair stylist, Christin Brown. After her initial announcement and the ensuing backlash, she announced yesterday that she would pull out of the role.
The fact that she was cast for that role is evidence of Hollywood’s long and problematic legacy of hiring cisgender people play trans characters.
In the Instagram Live interview, Berry misgendered the character she would play by using she/her pronouns and referring to him as a woman throughout.
Some took to Twitter to pushback on this trend of cis people playing trans characters.
Hey @halleberry!
Assuming trans people didn’t need authentic media representation and weren’t killed because people think we’re “dressing up” like who we actually are…
if you were going to even *consider* playing a trans man, why the fuck would you misgender HIM? ♀️ pic.twitter.com/4x4b6CMHni
— Dr. Emmy Zje (@Emmy_Zje) July 6, 2020
Wow I’m SO GLAD that she treats “understanding the world” of transgender the same way she treats playing an MMA fighter pic.twitter.com/dD2faXlh5y
— Mia Moore ️ (@StopTweetingMia) July 6, 2020
Berry has consequently apologized and said “…that the transgender community should undeniably have the opportunity to tell their own stories.”
The issues with cis people playing trans characters are clearly described in the 2020 Netflix documentary Disclosure.
A clip from the film circulated on June 25 that featured Jen Richards, a trans writer, producer, actress and activist explaining why we need trans people to play trans characters.
“Having cis men play trans women, in my mind, is a direct link to the violence against trans women and, in my mind, part of the reason that men end up killing trans women, out of fear that other men will think that they’re gay for having been with trans women, is that their friends, the men whose judgement they fear of, only know trans women from media and the people who are playing trans women are the men that they know,” she said. “This doesn’t happen when a trans woman plays a trans woman….When you see these women off-screen still as women it completely deflates this idea that they’re somehow men in disguise.”
Richards provided the example of Eddie Redmayne’s role as Lili Ilse Elvenes, a transgender woman undergoing one of the first gender confirmation surgeries. The Danish Girl (2015) was a biographical romantic drama based off of the book, under the same title, written by David Ebershoff.
“…if I’m playing a trans character, I don’t have to play the transness of it. When someone like Eddie Redmayne, who admittedly, might give a really great performance as a trans woman, what’s remarkable about his performance is the transness, is the way that he’s been able to manifest those feminine parts of himself into a convincing trans performance…it reduces that person, in this case, who was a real person, to a performance of transness, to a performance of femininity, rather than as a whole person of whom transness is one aspect of.”
As Halle Berry has now recognized, trans people deserve the space to tell their own stories.
