It’s clear to anyone who’s watched television in the past year that great strides are being made for transgender awareness in the media. Transgender actors such as Laverne Cox from the Emmy-award winning Netflix comedy/drama Orange is the New Black and transgender characters such as Rayon from the Oscar-award-winning drama Dallas Buyers Club are exposing the face of the trans community.
Representation matters. Maybe if film-makers and tv producers were to cast more transgender actors and write more transgender characters, every non-cis person wouldn’t be compared to Hannibal Lecter.
It’s incredibly important for people who feel as though their gender does not coincide with their chromosomes (gender dysphoric) to see what it’s like to identity
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Is that representation accurate? No, not really. Actually, transgender characters are the villains in the plot more than 40% of the time. Nip/Tuck featured an entire season about a psychopathic transwoman depicted as a baby-stealing sexual predator who has sex with her son. CSI has this nasty habit of portraying trans people as serial killers. It’s ironic that screenwriters are so desperate to make transgender characters the killers when it’s actually transgender people, namely transwomen, who are more often the victims of cruelty and intolerance- being raped and murdered for the pronouns they use.
The transgender community only makes up about .5% of the population, so some would argue that representation isn’t that important. To be representative of the population, only .5% of actors and characters should be transgender, right? Wrong. The stakes are so much higher. There are people who live their whole lives without personally knowing a transgender person, so what they see on television and in films is all they can draw their impression from. Only 9% of people ever personally know someones who is transgender, so it’s of the utmost importance that what they see is an accurate portrayal of the