Verily.

I think we all know that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was the “Up In Smoke” of the 16th century.

I agree! I saw a Helmut Newton exhibit at the MFA in Boston a couple weeks ago which was so fabulous and late 80s/early 90s. I was in college then and we used to get international copies of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and tear out the pictures and put them on our wall. I can’t imagine doing that now.

This. As an ally who spends a lot of time with people under rocks, the hardest point to get across seems to be that there is a “closet” for trans persons, similar to that of gay and lesbian persons. It’s a different “closet” and it is is more visible, because of socially gendered behaviors and appearances. But the…

This is a good point. While I know movies like these are important for cis people to see and help them relate to us, they often narrow a character down to where their only defining characteristic is that they are trans. This happens with other groups, as well, such as disabled people.

My mother raised me to believe that gay was for white people...I’d love to see her face if a movie like this had a trans person of color. Lawd. Never doubt the number of people living under rocks...

The more practical solution would be to tell stories about trans people lives that amount to more than gawking at mid-transition bodies.

The fundamental problem with this movie isn’t the casting of a cis actor to play a trans person. It’s this obsession with transition narratives and *THE CHANGE* that cis society has. People don’t really want to see trans people being their authentic selves: they want to see the trans version of blackface.

Oh, okay, so we need to find a teen FtM who identifies openly as FtM, who can act, who I guess hasn’t yet been through HRT yet so they can pass for untranssitioned for most of the film, who’s perfectly okay having this untranssitioned state documented and immoratalized for a purely fictional dramatic film, and they…

Agreed, though it may be harder to find one that young? Just speculation. Anyway it’s nice to see a female-to-male transition, in all the media I’ve seen it’s always the male-to-female transition shown. What none of them ever show (except maybe the TV show Transparent? I’ve never seen it) is the change in how people…

I suppose it’s progress that the LGBTQ community is finally getting mainstream movies that are just as generic, maudlin and hokey as the movies they make for everyone else. Personally, I prefer my queer movies a bit more, well, queer. But I guess this and Stonewall could be considered eye-opening and educational for…

I know there are problems with this but I still think it’s pretty cool this film is being made at all considering how things were only a few years ago. Yes, it would be great if they had hired a trans actor but I don’t know that they deserve to be torn apart if they make a great, sensitive film (which they might/might…

You asked a rhetorical question based on your default assumption that everyone involved was white and male, something you were so certain of you couldn’t even be bothered to do a quick google search to see if your biases had any basis in reality. And that’s the problem with these types of discussions. White men…

yeah what the hell, hollywood.

Or, OR, they could have cast an actual trans person.

You’re not American are you? Or European?

Because we’ve spent our whole lives learning to empathize with people who don’t look like us, so we’ll still watch movies we aren’t represented in. White blokes don’t have to learn that empathy because they’re still the cultural default.

EXCEPT, most American studio films are distributed to global markets. Almost none of the Bollywood or Hong Kong or Chinese films are. You are more likely to see one of those films on Netflix than in a theatre in America or Europe. Unlike most American studio films which are distributed worldwide for theatre viewing.

You’re literally implying men are incapable of enjoying films starring women. Do you not think that maybe you’re demeaning a whole gender a bit there?