This week's topic is about a discussion a lot of us might have seen happening every time a queer or trans character is depicted on screen. Whether it is a movie, a television series, a web series, or an ad, any depiction of queer and trans characters, especially of the latter, ends up reigniting the debate on who should play them on screen.
On one hand are those who believe that only trans people should play trans characters, and only queer people should play queer characters. There are indeed some examples, e.g. the latest edition of Tales of the City, where most characters are represented by an actor of the same sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and even physical ability, as that of their respective character.
On the other hand are those who believe that as long as the story is handled sensitively, it should not matter whether cis people play trans characters or heterosexual people play queer characters. Moreover, if having a famous cis-hetero actor helps draw a bigger audience for the story, then that is a better outcome. Also, it may not always be possible to find good queer or trans actors to play these roles.
Which of these opinions is the correct one? And even if trans actors are found to play trans characters, is that enough for ‘good’ representation? Let's have a look...
We don't discriminate...
A few weeks ago, some friends and I were discussing an ad of a chain of diagnostics labs, and our opinions on it seemed sharply divided. In this ad which can be seen here, a lab technician gets a call from his boss to go for a blood sample collection, just as he is picking up a cake for his daughter's birthday. He reaches the address and discovers that the home belongs to people presumably from a traditional transgender community.
The blood sample is to be taken from a little girl, and while he is talking to all of them, they tell him that they found the girl that same day, because she had been abandoned as she is 'just like them' ('hamare jaisi hai' in Hindi). The lab technician is taken aback but he quietly finishes his work and then leaves, but then comes back to give the cake, which he had bought for his daughter, to this little girl. The ad ends with him smiling as he rides away, with a voice-over naming the diagnostics lab chain and saying 'hum fark nahi karte', i.e. 'we don't discriminate'.
If taken only at face value, with no context or history whatsoever, this is a feel-good ad and one may appreciate them for it. However, it's really the lowest-hanging fruit – to say that 'hum fark nahi karte' or that 'we don't discriminate'. I know we live in a world where someone saying even that much seems like a big deal, but frankly they are not doing any favour. It is everyone's right after all. The trans adults in that ad presumably paid for the test, and sure that cake gesture is nice, but if you look at it not as a simple human story but as 'representation', then what exactly is it conveying?
That a cis-het guy and his company have some basic decency? Good that they do, but they are a little late to show up. And they have still not done their homework, because in one version of this ad, they show a caption on screen that '98% of transgenders are either abandoned or given away'. This caption and the depiction of the little girl show that the makers of this ad probably do not know the difference between transgender and intersex. Or that transgender is an adjective, not a noun, so they should have said 'transgender people' or 'transgender persons', not 'transgenders'.
Even if that caption was removed in subsequent versions, 'correcting' something as an afterthought doesn't help. The impression still remains that you didn't do your basic homework. And even if one looks at it as an ad only about intersex people and not trans people at all, or about traditional trans communities and not all trans people, the fact that it centers a cis-het guy and his company, and makes a big deal of literally the lowest expectation one can have, makes it inherently problematic.
Moreover, this ad was released this year in June, and given the history of brands pandering to queer people in June and forgetting about it for the rest of the year, it is natural for us to be a little more sceptical of it.
Getting the basics wrong... every time
The usual conflation between trans and intersex exists not just in this one ad – and yes, it exists even without that misleading statistic being shown – but also in most Indian 'mainstream' movies and ads that depict trans people.
Among ads, there was this one a few years ago, which used the news of India's first openly trans sub-inspector to make their point. But they did the same error of conflating trans and intersex, and I am not really sure if they took that police officer's consent.
Among movies, negative portrayals like in Sadak or Sangharsh are obviously horrible, but even the 'sympathetic' and 'sensitive' ones like in Daayra, Darmiyaan, Tamanna are all based on that same assumption, that someone is either 'born this way' (they mean intersex) or that something is seriously wrong with them which could make them even a serial killer. The same error can also be found in a Hindi TV serial called Shakti. And somehow, most of these intersex characters look and behave visibly non-conforming, which is not always true.
So... how to get these basics right?
First of all, there are intersex people of all kinds, ranging from those who look conventionally masculine to those who look conventionally feminine. Some of them are trans too, and many discover that they are intersex only as an adult.
Sure, there are babies and children abandoned by families for being intersex – to be specific, for having so-called ‘ambiguous’ genitalia, because there are many other kinds of intersex people who do not have ‘ambiguous’ genitalia, and who may discover their chromosomal or internal anatomical details much later in life or may never discover it. But how many such people exist?
According to Wikipedia, the "number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 0.02% to 0.05%". And the total percentage of intersex people with all visible and not-visible variations could be as high as 1.7%. The percentage of trans people on the other hand, is assumed to be around 1%.
So in short, when we talk of kids who are seen as intersex from birth itself, we are talking of a segment which is anywhere between 30 to 80 times smaller than the overall trans or intersex population.
Even among this small segment, do we know what is the biggest problem? It is not just abandonment by families. It is non-consensual surgeries performed on their genitalia, to make them conform to male or female phenotypes. They are non-consensual because they are usually performed on infants, so the infant obviously does not even know what is being done to them. It's just the doctors and parents who decide among themselves and do this. And in many cases, those infants are never even told about it... ever. Not even after growing up.
And no, these surgeries are not just an upper and middle-class issue, because they are performed by many doctors all over the country in all kinds of places. For most intersex activists, the biggest concern is to stop these surgeries. And they managed to get Tamil Nadu to ban them in 2019.
Even among those without ‘ambiguous’ genitalia but with other so-called ‘variations’, the bigger issue is all the silence and shame and stigma that they have to face most of all from their own families.
And the biggest problem for trans people is not just abandonment at an early age, but all the violence and abuse faced from older childhood onwards, once you are seen as too non-conforming for your assigned gender.
The same people who believe that surgeries should be performed without consent on intersex babies, are also the ones who oppose trans people choosing any medical and surgical steps for themselves even as adults. In both cases, it's about a basic denial of consent and agency.
Reducing all of these issues to a simple and paternalistic 'these people are born this way, we must take care of them' or that 'we don't discriminate' is not going to solve anything. Just like putting women on a pedestal or treating them as goddesses does not solve anything.
Is it enough to get the basics right?
The Tamil film Super Deluxe does not have this obvious conflation of transgender and intersex as far as I know, and instead shows, among other stories, the story of a trans woman who also has a child. However, it ends up relying on tired old tropes and stereotypes about trans people, and gets a cis man to play the role of a trans woman. Kaalakaandi was a Hindi film a few years ago which got a trans person to play a trans character in a minor subplot, but was problematic on many levels. Many Indian films do have trans characters in minor appearances and do not necessarily conflate them with intersex people, but in most cases that I can recall, the characters are played by cis actors, usually cis men playing trans women. Or they are reduced to stereotypes of being beggars or sex workers, or are a comic distraction, or a negative one.
Even in western films which do not conflate trans and intersex as frequently as Indian films, most trans characters are played by cis actors, in horribly exaggerated and stereotypical depictions. And as was said very eloquently by Jen Richards in Disclosure, when a cis man plays a trans woman, and then goes on to win awards for 'best actor' as a cis man, it reinforces the stereotype in many people's minds that trans women are just men in dresses, even if the depiction is sensitive, and not exaggerated or stereotypical.
For example, even in a seemingly sensitive portrayal like 'The Danish Girl', one can look at the actual story of Lili Elbe and her wife, and see how the complexity and nuance of a life over many decades was reduced to a simplistic story spanning just a few years. Sure, Eddie Redmayne put in a lot of effort and delivered a performance which few other cis male actors could have matched, but in the end it was just a performance which he could conveniently shed off screen, and which still relied on some convenient stereotypes and half-truths, the consequences of which are borne in real life by actual trans women.
Probably the only example I can think of, where a cis person played a trans role and I do not have any complaints about it, is that of Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry. Given the time in which it was made, and the real story it was based on, I am not sure how it could have been made better, except if they could have cast a trans man in the role. However, other opinions might differ from mine, especially of trans men themselves. And in general, it would be good to have more transmasculine representation on screen.
Should casting trans people for trans roles be an inviolable rule?
If any serious story requires that men play male characters and women play female characters, and if racially inaccurate depictions are increasingly criticized, shouldn't the same standards be applied to the depiction of queer and trans characters?
On the other hand, if Sonam Kapoor hadn't played the lesbian protagonist in Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To Aisa Laga, would the film have drawn as much attention? Many of us would have still seen it, and many never saw it anyway, but for a significant section of the population, the presence of big names does make a difference.
If trans actors can't always be found to play trans characters, I would prefer that at least it is played by a cis person of the same gender, i.e. a cis woman and not a cis man should play a trans woman, as was the case in A Monsoon Date.
Moreover, it can be difficult for a trans person to play their pre-transition self, as was the case with Laverne Cox. And we cannot always know for sure what's going on in an actor's mind as they pick what roles to play, Elliot Page being the most well-known recent example. In an ideal world, I would love to see trans people playing not just trans characters but also cis characters, their gender identity being immaterial to their role. And in that world, it may not matter who plays which role. But we are far from that world right now.
What we actually need
What we need is ads and films and serials which force cis-het people to look in the mirror and ask themselves what they would do if someone close to them – their child or partner or parent or sibling – were to come out as trans? Or if their own gender identity had been denied by everyone around them since birth? This ad of a diagnostics lab or the one depicting the sub-inspector are definitely nowhere close to it, and only serve to reinforce the misinformed and paternalistic assumptions of most people. Which in turn also leads to problematic legislation being passed in parliament in the name of trans rights, because most politicians don't even know the basics of this issue.
On the other hand, this jewellery ad or this Women's Day ad or this short film called Qaid or this music video – all of them are more nuanced depictions which do a relatively better job of representation.
And with every such representation, we have to ask ourselves that what purpose does it ultimately serve?
E.g. this ad about a new employee learning to use they/them for their new boss, learning to avoid terms like sir or ma'am, and learning to avoid even the slightest inadvertent mention of slurs... makes us all think what we would do in the same situation in a workplace. It changes the power equation compared to the stereotypical assumptions that most cis-hetero people often make when thinking of queer and trans people.
The jewellery ad and Women's Day ad mentioned above put the question of family acceptance at the centre. Of a trans girl being accepted as a daughter by her family.
The short film Qaid and the music video, are probably the toughest stories to tell because as a viewer, your heart goes out to both the transitioning partner and the (presumably) cis partner.
Even this Vicks ad put a trans woman and her adopted daughter at the centre.
These are the stories that we need to see more of, rather than rehashing tired old tropes about transgender and intersex people.
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