Well, hello Emma Watson

[crumpet]

www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-15130209/Harry-Potter-Emma-Watson-treasures-J-K-Rowling-trans-rights.html

It probably is easier to say that. But you cannot possibly look back 500 years and say that's what Shakespeare was doing. There simply weren't the same cultural references and it's pointless to try to put 21st century sensibilities onto people so distant from us.

Lady Macbeth doesn't need to dress up as a boy because her entire schtick is being a wife and mother who actually has to plead with the gods to take away her lovely delicate female sensibilities in order to allow her to do the murdery things she needs to do to put her husband (not her) on the throne. So (a) a completely different type of story and (b) one that's very very clear on who's male and who's female.

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.

Yes, exactly. Similar for gay people : most people know one in some capacity, maybe less likely in some areas but I think it's more likely than not.
Trans people are less likely.

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.

Some sonnets are clearly about a man, though, due to pronouns. Not Sonnet 18 but other ones such as Sonnet 20.

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.

I would argue that black actors in a historical film are OK if it's colour blind. Otherwise black actors are excluded from most UK-based historical dramas before 1940s, unless they play a slave/servant or a figure like Dido Belle or Olaudah Equiano.

Les Missrables, David Copperfield & Mary Queen of Scots with Gemma Chan worked fine- Bridgerton too, though that was its whole shtick.

What isn't OK is pretending people were black who were not or that there were far more black people at a time than there actually were.

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

I mean they're great in the sense that you get to wear the fabulous costumes. Which is the thing I'd be most excited about if I were an actor.

There aren't many parts for black women where they get to wear dresses like that.

Yes so you acknowledge that ‘she needed to dress as a boy to keep the story moving’ is not in fact a totally comprehensive or satisfactory explanation for why those characters decide to dress as boys. Again, I’m not saying you have to interpret them as trans. I’m just saying you can. Contrary to the poster who claimed it would be unthinkable and impossible to have a trans character in a Shakespeare play.

I’ve had a long day and I’m not really sure I’ve got the energy to argue with someone who wants to claim that transness, however you phrase it, is a twenty-first century invention. Obviously the term itself is not a Renaissance term. There are published histories that address this question, look them up if you want, not if you don’t. Until recently I think a lot of people liked to argue that there were no gay people pre about 1960 either.

A few years ago I happened on a podcast (can't remember which it was now) where gay actors were talking about the roles on offer. It was really interesting because it cycled through the different ways that historically oppressed groups are represented - so you start with the tragic victim portrayal (the Holocaust or slavery or the AIDS crisis); you move onto comedy (the flowering of black comedy with Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy, or the ubiquitous gay best friend in 1990s romcoms); and eventually you get to the point where a minority can just play any character.

This would have been in the aftermath of BLM, because they were pointing out that it was the best time ever to be a black actor if you just wanted to get hired, but it wasn't that good if you wanted to play an interesting character instead of a tragic victim or soulful saint.

The point the gay actors came back to was - actors love to play assholes. Jack Nicholson and Bill Murray have built stellar careers on playing characters with no redeeming features. So the gay actors were saying, we're tired of playing Gordon Goodbrother, we're tired of being the female lead's non-sexual gay best friend, when do we get to play assholes?

(Kevin Spacey of course has been doing this for many years, but he's exceptional.)

So the movies I know with trans characters usually have them as a villain or a comic punchline, and I can see why trans audiences would hate that, especially if it's a numbers game and that's their only portrayal. But, assuming we want to move past heroic/tragic trans characters towards rounded characters who happen to be trans (I suspect lots of critics want to stop at heroic/tragic) then you'd need to have, let's say, 10% of actors being trans, and as a pure numbers game, that looks really artificial.

When you artificially inflate the numbers, even for the best of motives, it's really obvious. We're currently at a point where normie American TV viewers who watch detective shows are asking "how come three quarters of the detectives are gay all of a sudden?" And that's a much bigger minority.

On this point, has Kevin Spacey played gay? I'm not sure how much he figures in this issue given he wasn't out for a long time & aren't his most famous roles straight?

I see what you mean, yes. I'm a bit obsessed with 18th century history & I did feel a bit cross the buzz was over a totally made-up program, but I get most people would feel differently! 🤣

I didn't say it was unthinkable to have a trans character in a Shakespeare play. I said you can't really do it without queering the whole thing, which is what you are doing when you decide to reimagine a character as trans.

You're not going to cast a trans woman as Juliet or Lady Macbeth in an ordinary production of Shakespeare. And you're particularly not going to cast them in any role where the female character disguises herself as a man, because then what you have got is a male actor wearing men's clothes and the whole plot device doesn't work. It only works if you can see with your own eyes that this is a woman pretending to be a man and suspend your own disbelief that the other characters in the play couldn't see it too.

It’s on record that they were first published in 1609 and ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ was in the grouping of poems addressed to a fair youth. It’s on record that Shakespeare died in 1616, so he had seven years to complain about that publisher’s ordering if he wasn’t happy with it.

I'm saying that where female characters in Shakespeare are dressed as boys it's a plot device and not an expression of deep internal identity. Where they're not dressed as boys, it's not a plot device because it's not needed. I don't know why you keep conflating the two.

For clarity, I'm not saying no individuals in history have wished to be the opposite sex. That would be silly.

I'm making the same point as the many historians who will acknowledge that same-sex attraction has existed as long as humans have - but our cultural concept of homosexuality has not. So Emperor Hadrian, for example, seems to have been exclusively same-sex attracted but was married to a woman and would not have known what you meant if you asked him whether he was proud to be gay.

Girls wanting the choices that boys have or men wanting to be women for whatever reasons will have existed historically - but they won't have 'identified as' because they didn't have the vocabulary or the cultural concepts and it's pointless to try to lift and shift ours onto them.

But there's one huge difference between gay actors and trans actors, which is that gay actors aren't limited to playing gay characters. Straight actors can play gay characters (such as Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain) and gay actors can play straight characters (such as Jonathan Bailey in Bridgerton).

But trans actors can only really play trans characters. Which is a huge limitation.

Exactly, arguably Kevin Spacey also a great example.

Exactly, and women wanting the same choices as men is arguably a dangerous thing to conflate with gender dysphoria, which seems to have been much rarer.

I always like to joke that the Memoirs of Hadrian is highbrow literary slash fiction (also Mary Renault). But yes,,the whole point is that, as those books show, men who only liked men were conceptualised differently then.

BTW, ARE there that many gay characters in detective shows? I had a look & while many have a gay supporting character or in ensemble cast, I can't find very many in leads. Generally supporting only has one or two characters,, as makes sense, not heaps.

Oh yes, Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy! I adored those.

Love affairs with two male characters (one a eunuch and not through choice or WPATH before JNic jumps on the bandwagon) but got through a couple of wives at least and no-one blinked an eye about any of it. A few mutterings about shagging barbarians, but no shits to give about whether they had a winkie or a fanjo.

No, Hadrian & Alexander weren't people you could boss about anyhow 🤣 Wonderful books.

I was thinking that both Mary Renault and Marguerite Yourcenar were in LTRs with women when they wrote those books. I wonder if this was maybe partly an aspect of why they wrote them : to explore same-sex dynamics without getting too personal/drawing suspicion . Obvs their motives were much more than that, bit I wonder if that was part of it.

Whereas modern slash/yaoi writers just seem to want to portray 2 hot guys without much depth or realism.

Sorry, a bit off topic!

Yes, I've heard so many say eunuchs are a trans thing. I don't doubt ones in voluntary sects may have had dysphoria, but for most it was a barbaric procedure they had no choice in.

I don’t know why you keep claiming to have total objective and unassailable knowledge of the motivations of fictional characters. That isn’t how fiction works.

Characters like Rosalind and Viola aren’t real people, they’re made out of words. So there isn’t any final truth about why they ‘really’ dressed as boys. There are interpretations, and I don’t think it would be difficult to build a trans one if you wanted to.

Of course Emperor Hadrian wouldn’t have said he was proud to be gay, as the word gay didn’t have that meaning then, but that doesn’t mean the concept of pride (as opposed to shame) in same-sex attraction in the face of social condemnation didn’t exist before 1970 and the first pride parade. I’m not an expert on Ancient Rome so I can’t tell you about that period specifically, but there are certainly examples of expressions of what we would now call gay pride in pre-20th century materials.

Similarly, yes of course someone in the Renaissance wouldn’t have said ‘I identify as a woman’ because that wasn’t the phrasing then, but that’s not the same as saying that no-one in a male body ever saw themselves as a woman prior to about 2015, or whenever you want to set the arbitrary invented boundary.