Transgender representation in entertainment has made baby steps forward in recent years, but 2018 has seen a giant leap, with two movies involving trans artistes in the Oscars race.
Chilean actor 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.
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.
Stepping stones
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.
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.
