Well, hello Emma Watson

Not sure if I'd call them 'great Regency parts' 🤣 Just joking, I like it myself. It's trickier though with serious dramas..

Yes I take your point about period dramas.

That's what was so fabulous about Bridgerton. It gave actors of all ethnicities the opportunity to act these great regency era parts without needing to give two hoots about historical accuracy.

My mum gets really pissed off with ahistorical black representation and I don’t blame her, so there may not be any constraints in casting, but you will still annoy people if you put them into parts where it is completely unrealistic.

The limitation in the availability of trans actors is also problematic. As you say, there are relatively few trans people, so as with all positive discrimination, you run the risk of promoting poor actors with certain traits over those with skill. A poor storyline plus poor acting will cause most people to switch off. See Dr Who as the perfect example of the genre.

My mum gets really pissed off with ahistorical black representation and I don’t blame her, so there may not be any constraints in casting, but you will still annoy people if you put them into parts where it is completely unrealistic.

The limitation in the availability of trans actors is also problematic. As you say, there are relatively few trans people, so as with all positive discrimination, you run the risk of promoting poor actors with certain traits over those with skill. A poor storyline plus poor acting will cause most people to switch off. See Dr Who as the perfect example of the genre.

Nothing about the sonnets is on record. You can read some unbelievably long and tedious academic arguments about which sonnets are about what but there is not a neatly written up proof. Shakespeare left no introduction explaining how they came to be written and enabled him to explore … well, nobody agrees what.

I think it would be much more difficult to do this with trans characters because it's a sheer numbers game.

Black people, for example, make up a significant minority of people in the UK and the US. In localised parts of the UK and the US they may even be a majority. I'd be surprised if you could find an Oxford college or a police department or a law firm or a school in any urban area without any black people in it. In rural areas it may be a different matter, and yes, perhaps in a remote village in Scotland with a population of 60 a black visitor would be noticeable in a "you're not from round here" sort of way. So seeing a black detective in a crime drama or a black family in a soap opera set in the UK isn't likely to strike people as inauthentic, because almost everyone living in the UK knows black people in real life. (Same for other ethnicities.)

There just aren't that many trans people and many people don't know any trans people at all and have never knowingly met one. So it's much harder to just randomly stick them into TV programmes in the name of diversity, because people will quite rightly say, "In real life we're not running into trans people every five minutes so why is it like that on TV?"

And also, as previously alluded to, there are no particular plot constraints involved in casting a black person in a role. I suppose the only impact would be that if other characters are supposed to be their blood relatives you would need to cast people of the same ethnicity. But that's the same for all characters really.

I think it would be much more difficult to do this with trans characters because it's a sheer numbers game.

Black people, for example, make up a significant minority of people in the UK and the US. In localised parts of the UK and the US they may even be a majority. I'd be surprised if you could find an Oxford college or a police department or a law firm or a school in any urban area without any black people in it. In rural areas it may be a different matter, and yes, perhaps in a remote village in Scotland with a population of 60 a black visitor would be noticeable in a "you're not from round here" sort of way. So seeing a black detective in a crime drama or a black family in a soap opera set in the UK isn't likely to strike people as inauthentic, because almost everyone living in the UK knows black people in real life. (Same for other ethnicities.)

There just aren't that many trans people and many people don't know any trans people at all and have never knowingly met one. So it's much harder to just randomly stick them into TV programmes in the name of diversity, because people will quite rightly say, "In real life we're not running into trans people every five minutes so why is it like that on TV?"

And also, as previously alluded to, there are no particular plot constraints involved in casting a black person in a role. I suppose the only impact would be that if other characters are supposed to be their blood relatives you would need to cast people of the same ethnicity. But that's the same for all characters really.

Yes, but Shakespeare's female roles were played by men because women literally weren't allowed to act.
And the female characters dress up as men in furtherance of plot points because women wouldn't have been allowed to do the things they needed to do to keep the story moving.

Sure, but you can argue this the other way as well: trans identities weren’t acceptable in Shakespeare’s time, so it’s much easier to tell people you’re dressing as a boy to mourn your dead brother or have a job or go into the woods for a while and that you’ll stop doing it at the end of the play, rather than saying you want to dress as a boy because you feel male.

Lady Macbeth seems to have managed to keep the story moving without dressing up as a boy, so it’s not a catch-all explanation.

There's another aspect which is that many films are structured as love stories even if there's no overt sexual/romantic element. Your classic example is the mismatched buddy cop movie. It may not seem obvious, but any screenwriter will tell you that Lethal Weapon is a love story - Mel Gibson and Danny Glover clearly aren't getting it on with each other, but just as surely as in a romcom, what drives the story are these two characters who are thrown together, start off hating each other, and gradually grow as people through knowing each other.

You could just as easily replace the Mel and Danny characters with two women. It hasn't been done very often, but it's been done.

Obviously you could write the two men (or two women) in a gay relationship, but that would massively change the dynamics. And with an opposite-sex pairing it's almost obligatory to have sexual tension between them.

Of course the audience will pick up on the love story vibe whether it's overt or not, which is where fanfic comes in.

But even in this case where you're not writing a sexual relationship, I still think it would be difficult to put a trans character in there without it being all about them being trans. So if you want trans representation outside of a film that's about a trans main character and their struggles... really the only option is something akin to the "gay best friend" character in 1990s sitcoms. And it would feel very obviously shoehorned in for political reasons.

It might be that there's a talented writer out there who could script a movie with an engaging character who just happens to be trans, the way Hollywood moved from making worthy movies about racism to the place we're in where characters are just black and nobody cares unless you're trying to make a story about Vikings racially diverse. But as Scarlet has brilliantly explained, there are elements to transness that would make that really challenging.

I wonder what percentage of thrillers and dramas don't feature any kind of romantic storyline. I bet it's not high. For some reason humans like to watch other humans getting off with each other.

The point is that having a trans character introduces constraints that just aren't there when you don't have a trans character, and limits where the plot can go.

Say you've written a script for a crime thriller which isn't supposed to have a romantic subplot. One of your detectives is called Sarah Jones. Following an open audition, you decide to cast a trans woman in the role because there's no reason why Sarah Jones can't be trans. (Problem no.1, you've taken a role meant for a female actor and given it to a male actor.) You get halfway through filming and you think, "Hmm, this would be so much better if Sarah had a brief, steamy affair with her married boss." If Sarah is played by a woman, you can just write that in. If Sarah is played by a trans woman, it's not going to work. Or perhaps in order to get a crucial piece of intelligence, Sarah catfishes a key suspect on Tinder and goes on a date with him, during which she records their conversation and manages to secretly bug his phone when he's in the gents. That storyline won't work if Sarah is played by a trans woman, because in real life if a man turned up and found out that his Tinder date was a trans woman, he probably wouldn't be best pleased. Sarah also would be terrible at doing surveillance or going undercover, because most people would do a double take and immediately clock the trans woman.

It's just not that easy to cast a trans actor as a regular character. They don't pass. The only characters they can convincingly play are trans characters, and then you run the risk of the story becoming all about their trans identity instead of whatever it was actually supposed to be about.

I also think there is another big problem, which is difficult to talk about. There are undoubtedly people who are genuinely transphobic, and would turn the TV off or change the channel because they find trans people disgusting. But there are also a lot of other people who have no particular beef with trans people but are sick of hearing about them. They're sick of Pride Month and transgender visibility day and transgender day of remembrance and being asked to share their pronouns at work and all the constant DEI stuff that seems to focus disproportionately on the T at the expense of all the other protected characteristics. And a lot of those people, if they start watching a crime drama and realise that the only "female" detective is actually a trans woman, are going to be annoyed and think, "Oh for God's sake, I just wanted to watch a crime drama, not another lecture about inclusion" and change the channel.

To put it bluntly, trans inclusion isn't what most people are looking for in their entertainment, and production companies which prioritise this instead of giving audiences what they actually want are going to lose money.

"Re your second point: saying ‘you can’t put a trans character in Shakespeare’ is mildly hilarious, given that all his female roles would have been played by boy actors in his own time and several of his comedies feature female characters who spend most of the play dressed as men."

Yes, but Shakespeare's female roles were played by men because women literally weren't allowed to act.

And the female characters dress up as men in furtherance of plot points because women wouldn't have been allowed to do the things they needed to do to keep the story moving.

Far from proving gender fluidity, it's a stark example of biological realism. They knew fine well who the males and who the females were.

There's another aspect which is that many films are structured as love stories even if there's no overt sexual/romantic element. Your classic example is the mismatched buddy cop movie. It may not seem obvious, but any screenwriter will tell you that Lethal Weapon is a love story - Mel Gibson and Danny Glover clearly aren't getting it on with each other, but just as surely as in a romcom, what drives the story are these two characters who are thrown together, start off hating each other, and gradually grow as people through knowing each other.

You could just as easily replace the Mel and Danny characters with two women. It hasn't been done very often, but it's been done.

Obviously you could write the two men (or two women) in a gay relationship, but that would massively change the dynamics. And with an opposite-sex pairing it's almost obligatory to have sexual tension between them.

Of course the audience will pick up on the love story vibe whether it's overt or not, which is where fanfic comes in.

But even in this case where you're not writing a sexual relationship, I still think it would be difficult to put a trans character in there without it being all about them being trans. So if you want trans representation outside of a film that's about a trans main character and their struggles... really the only option is something akin to the "gay best friend" character in 1990s sitcoms. And it would feel very obviously shoehorned in for political reasons.

It might be that there's a talented writer out there who could script a movie with an engaging character who just happens to be trans, the way Hollywood moved from making worthy movies about racism to the place we're in where characters are just black and nobody cares unless you're trying to make a story about Vikings racially diverse. But as Scarlet has brilliantly explained, there are elements to transness that would make that really challenging.

I wasn’t trying to ‘prove gender fluidity’ (whatever that means), or say that you have to interpret those characters as trans. I’m just saying it would be really easy to do so.

Absolutely this, watch Shakespeare in Love if you don't understand this point.

Well you can play that game both ways - why are we saying Emma Watson or Daniel Radcliffe are reflective of Hollywood’s attitudes either? Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter are much bigger and longer established stars, they’ve appeared in lots of Hollywood movies and been nominated for multiple Oscars, in Ralph Fiennes’s case most recently for Conclave in 2024. HBC was married to Tim Burton who is a big Hollywood director and is mates with Johnny Depp who is a big Hollywood star. I’d say they’re as good a finger in the wind for Hollywood attitudes as any, and quite a bit better than some.

Quite! The anachronism makes my head hurt

women's lives in previous centuries were incredibly curtailed and yet TRA just slap 21st century views over the top and insist it backs up their argument eg deciding Joan of arc was non binary

Vitriol from who? Hollywood power players? Or anonymous people on the internet? Because if it’s the latter, it doesn’t really prove anything about what’s acceptable in Hollywood.

"Re your second point: saying ‘you can’t put a trans character in Shakespeare’ is mildly hilarious, given that all his female roles would have been played by boy actors in his own time and several of his comedies feature female characters who spend most of the play dressed as men."

Yes, but Shakespeare's female roles were played by men because women literally weren't allowed to act.

And the female characters dress up as men in furtherance of plot points because women wouldn't have been allowed to do the things they needed to do to keep the story moving.

Far from proving gender fluidity, it's a stark example of biological realism. They knew fine well who the males and who the females were.

"Re your second point: saying ‘you can’t put a trans character in Shakespeare’ is mildly hilarious, given that all his female roles would have been played by boy actors in his own time and several of his comedies feature female characters who spend most of the play dressed as men."

Yes, but Shakespeare's female roles were played by men because women literally weren't allowed to act.

And the female characters dress up as men in furtherance of plot points because women wouldn't have been allowed to do the things they needed to do to keep the story moving.

Far from proving gender fluidity, it's a stark example of biological realism. They knew fine well who the males and who the females were.

Have you seen the vitriol those actors have been subjected to for failing to participate in the daily hate of JK Rowling? And they haven't even said anything as shocking as "trans women are not women".

I'm not sure the views of 3 British actors is reflective of Hollywood's attitude

jumping on that bandwagon to denounce JK Rowling and her awful transphobic views… has been and still is the only acceptable viewpoint in Hollywood.

This is provably untrue.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/25/ralph-fiennes-defends-jk-rowling

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/nov/28/helena-bonham-carter-defends-jk-rowling-and-johnny-depp

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jun/09/harry-potter-tom-felton-supports-jk-rowling-trans-controversy

Re your second point: saying ‘you can’t put a trans character in Shakespeare’ is mildly hilarious, given that all his female roles would have been played by boy actors in his own time and several of his comedies feature female characters who spend most of the play dressed as men. Beyond that I’m not sure what we’re arguing about. I’ve already said I wouldn’t expect a large number of roles to be trans. My point was about Hollywood’s history of representations that significantly stigmatise trans people. You’ve said you think their inclusion is only lip service, so maybe we’re in agreement there. Though I’d suggest the success of a show like ‘Euphoria’, which has a trans actor Hunter Schafer as the love interest, implies the future of trans representation doesn’t have to be as negative as you’re arguing.

In general I think you’ve gone off on several tangents that don’t really have anything to do with my original point. Which was that it’s not convincing to claim that ‘all of Hollywood’ or ‘all of the media’ have until recently been captured by gender ideology (to use the GC framing). I think people who want to make arguments like that have got enough examples of actual capture that they could use, e.g. Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP. ‘All of Hollywood’ and ‘all of the media’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.