Some of you may have seen a fair amount of discussion online about the decision to cast Eddie Redmayne in the part of the pioneering trans woman, Lili Elbe, for a forthcoming movie, The Danish Girl. Paris Lees does her best to cut through the binary thinking here.

So yeah, it’s not simple. Here are some thoughts.

Before we go any further I’d like to dispense with the excuse being put about that the part has to be played by a man because they didn’t have hormone therapy back then. Bollocks. Magnus Hirschfeld, the German doctor at whose clinic Elbe was a patient, pioneered the use of hormones for gender medicine. Obviously Lili would not have been treated in childhood to save her from going through male puberty, as can happen today, but I’m pretty sure she will have had access to estrogen.

Anyway: trans actor, male actor, female actor? I’m not too fussed. I suspect that Redmayne will do a pretty good job. I would like to see more trans people get high profile work in acting. In fact I’d like to see them get to play cis people, because if we have a world in which trans women can only play trans women, and cis women can only play cis women, that plays right into the hands of the TERFS who insist that trans and cis women are two radically different things that should never be confused with one another. Maybe we have to get a start by playing trans parts, but I want to see us move way beyond that.

What concerns me far more is what Hollywood will do with our story. I have read a lot of books written by cis people that include trans characters. In many cases these are essentially voyeuristic. That is, the books are there to “explain” trans people to a cis audience. Often they exist to reassure cis people who might be afraid of us, or who might fear that their lives might somehow be destroyed if a friend or family member came out as trans. Even when the books are written by people who are supportive and sympathetic, sometimes even when they are written by my friends, the book can go wrong because the person writing it doesn’t have the experience to get inside the head of the trans character.

How much worse is Hollywood going to be? I think we all know the answer to that. Just in case we didn’t, here’s Bethany Black explaining why she didn’t audition for the part:

https://twitter.com/BethanyBlack/status/572382518302916608

So yeah, I would have loved for Saga Becker or Rebecca Root or someone like them to have gotten the part, but I suspect their reaction to the script might have been the same as Beth’s. What I want much more is for the film not to be awful. Could you manage that, Eddie, please?