Throughout the history of film and TV, trans people have existed on screen as an abomination: the butt of jokes for straight people to laugh at and for queer people to be ashamed of.
Hosted by Laverne Cox, Sam Feder’s documentary Disclosure – which premiered on Netflix in June – reminded us of a particularly tired trope: people throwing up at the mere thought of women being trans, most notably in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Hangover Part II.
On rare occasions well-meaning film-makers offer us a reprieve from ridicule, instead turning us into symbols of tragedy, with the most horrific moments of our lives broadcast as a plea for empathy in the name of entertainment. Films like Boys Don’t Cry and Transamerica have capitalised on our pain, and won swaths of accolades and awards.
As trans people continue to fight for our authenticity to be acknowledged, the casting of cis actors in trans roles – Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club, Jeffrey Tambor in Transparent and, most recently, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard in A Perfectly Normal Family – deepens the wound. For trans audiences, there’s no way to interpret it other than a pervasive refusal of the wider community to see us for who we are.
The insistence of directors to revise our identities has made me feel for years that there is no place in the industry for me. Important roles like Lili in The Danish Girl are given to cisgender actors like Eddie Redmayne, and all I am left with are exploitative opportunities that represent little more than humiliation.
Cisgender storytellers have for the longest time seemed only able to approach our lives as caricature, at the extremities. They laugh at us or they pity us. This is easy to do when we are not in the room. When we are excluded from creative processes, and when they neglect to think of us as the audience, mistakes will inevitably be made – no matter how positive the intentions.
When mistakes are made, it can be fatal: representation in pop culture offers a form of role modelling that can make or break a young person coming to terms with their identity, and it is estimated that transgender people aged 18 and over are nearly 11 times more likely to commit suicide. The world is hard for us, and what we think the world looks like is informed so much by what we see in media and the arts. That reflection of ourselves and our communities, on stage and screen, needs to be more thoughtful.
Disclosure was a landmark series because it revealed to a mass audience the dread that trans people too often feel when watching representations of ourselves. From the silent film era we have had to contend with storytelling that is disrespectful, hurtful, and soul destroying.
So what do we want when it comes to trans representation? We don’t always have to be portrayed in a positive light but we must strive to no longer see ourselves as individuals without agency. Neither can we afford to keep ingesting narratives that only portray us as perpetually suffering. Give us instead examples of trans people in control of their own lives, whose worlds are coloured by their unique experience but are not entirely defined by the challenges of being transgender. Show us what it looks like to be accepted by community. Show community what it looks like to be accepting.
The week the SBS Australian drama series Hungry Ghosts emerges from the darkness, in which women are at the reins. I play the transgender character Roxy Ling, who uses none of her substantial screen time to manipulate you with her sob stories. When you meet her, she is already a fully formed adult woman, at peace with the world and loved by her community. Within the supernatural genre of the piece, she is in her element, chasing demons around Melbourne, pursuing her metaphysical passions and living her best life. She is surrounded by young and old, white and brown, dead and alive – none give her a hard time for being trans. Some of them barely even notice.
This is a life that feels familiar to me because that is how my community now feels, by and large. It has been a long journey for me to arrive at a place of acceptance and it is refreshing, and important, that our storytelling follows real-life progress to this beginning of a new chapter.
I am grateful for the opportunity to present what I believe to be a new benchmark in trans representation but its tardiness does not come unnoticed. I cannot help but imagine that if I had grown up with characters like Roxy on the TV maybe my struggles would have been much gentler; that I would have found many people who knew how to offer support and love, because they had seen Roxy and had loved her.