Apparently unsatisfied with cripping up for an Oscar in The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne is charging ahead in drag as Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl, a film purporting to be about the life of one of the pioneers of gender confirmation surgery. Yet again, audiences are being subjected to a cis actor in a trans role, and yet again, the usual parade of defenses are being trotted out. This naked instance of transmisogyny will no doubt net Redmayne a new shelf of awards — it seems likely he’ll pick up another BAFTA at the very least, and possibly an Oscar nomination as well, since ‘diversity’ is trendy in Hollywood at the moment, and ‘edgy’ films featuring minorities get critical attention — so long as they don’t actually star those minorities.
Telling that in both The Theory of Everything and The Danish Girl, Redmayne is playing ‘problem’ characters within the context of romantic relationships. First he’s the disabled man who poses an insurmountable burden to his long-suffering wife, who attempts to cope with his tragic debilitation. Next, he’s a husband who turns into a wife, breaking up a marriage.
Lili Elbe lived at the turn of the 20th century, an era that wasn’t particularly friendly to transgender women. Although different forms of gender expression and less rigid forms for women were starting to develop, women like Lili straddled a dangerous divide — they could be attacked as effeminate homosexuals and face very real legal consequences for it, or they could be condemned as fake, misleading women (if that sounds familiar, it should demonstrate how far we’ve come socially in terms of acceptance for trans women).
In addition to presenting as a woman to some friends and family and slowly initiating a more public transition, Elbe ultimately pursued gender confirmation surgery as well. At the time, it was rudimentary, dangerous, and untried — in fact, her death was the result of transplant rejection after surgeons attempted to transplant a uterus so she could bear a child.
For the transgender community, Lili Elbe represents an important historical figure and turning point, along with women like Christine Jorgensen, who popularised the needs of the trans community in the United States. Thus, a film about Elbe is bound to attract unusual scrutiny because it’s not just a biopic, but a discussion of a socially sensitive and incredibly historically important subject.
To see a man in drag cast in the role of Lili Elbe is a slap in the face.
Producers often like to claim that men need to play trans women to draw box office attention. Redmayne, they’d tell us, brings in the box office because people want to see the Academy Award-winning actor. They’ll also tell us that they need someone who ‘looks masculine,’ because they are obsessed with pre-transition appearance and transition stories instead of the lives of trans women. Evidently, it is easier to make a cis man look like a woman than it is to put makeup on a trans woman to make her look like a man for segments of the film in which this is necessary — though producers might want to ask themselves why they’re so fixated on this aspect of Elbe’s life in the first place.
They’re also going to claim that there are no trans actresses or that they didn’t even think of casting anyone trans in the role — evidently, when one is making an entire film about trans people, it doesn’t occur to think that trans people possibly exist, and maybe to ask around a bit to see if one can dig a few up. Laverne Cox is a widely known trans actor in the US, and while she might not fit the desired physical type since she’s a Black woman, she’s not the only trans actress available. There’s Bethany Black, who recently appeared on Banana. Candis Cayne, who has a similar facial structure and the striking eyes of Lili Elbe. Stéphanie Michelini, who is nearly a ringer for Elbe, with a haunting, sad expression and a cloud of hair. Michelle Hendley, with a youthful, wry appearance that fits in beautifully with the aesthetics of the 1920s. Victoria Elizabeth Day would be another superb fit for the role.
The producers were even willing to stoop to a cis woman — Nicole Kidman was originally on the table for the role. They were so determined to avoid casting an actual trans woman for a trans role that they combed the Earth for replacements when a perfectly good series of options lay right in front of their very eyes.
It’s not as though there aren’t any trans actresses available — someone making a film about a transgender woman should perhaps research the trans community and explore trans talent before delving into production. Certainly casting directors should be tasked with finding trans talent, putting out calls to a variety of agents and through alternative media, if necessary, though trans actresses don’t exactly hide.
Or, they say, they had to be ‘true to the time’ and what Elbe, who didn’t receive HRT, would have looked like, so they’ve got to cast a man to capture that special testosterone feeling. Well, we know what she looked like. She looked like a woman. So possibly a woman should have been cast in her role. Hormone levels don’t matter — what matters is identity. Not all women choose to pursue HRT, some pursue low dose, and some are born, as Elbe likely was, with naturally low levels of testosterone. Such excuses effectively suggest that trans women are teeming with androgens waiting to leap out when you least expect it, and that all trans people should pursue HRT into order to be valid human beings — ‘HRT didn’t exist at the time, so Lili Elbe wasn’t a real woman!’
We’re also told that it’s fine for a cis man to play a trans woman because ‘that’s the whole point of acting’ and ‘acting is about being something you’re not.’ Except that there is a very significant difference between taking on a minority identity and, say, playing a banker. Being trans is not something people can take on and off, set down at the end of the day. You can’t suddenly switch careers. It’s part of your intrinsic identity and personhood. Playing at a career or life is not the same thing as depicting a minority identity when you don’t share it — Black women should be played by Black women, disabled men by disabled men, trans women by trans women, including in especially in biopics like this one.
Conversely, it’s time to push back on the normative — if a role calls for a woman, that presumably extends to all women, not just cis women. If a role doesn’t specify race or disability status, it could be played by someone of any race or ability status. When it does, it’s time to evaluate why.
Eddie Redmayne has appropriated minority experiences for attention twice now, and this isn’t a reflection of his dynamic range or ability to push the limits, it’s just an expression of bigotry and an adoring film industry that will happily cast him in apparently any role in the name of box office proceeds. They’ll claim he was the ‘right actor for the role,’ and it’s likely they didn’t look very hard to determine if that was really the case.
What we hear with castings like this is that men in drag as trans women are okay — and that, by extension, trans women are just men in dresses, a very old and very dangerous stereotype. Elbe wasn’t a man, or a man who wore dresses. She was a woman. She pursued the treatments available to her and she died doing it, and Hollywood is choosing to commemorate this by casting a clonking cis man in her role — but don’t worry, he assures us, he’s prepared for it.