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QC: Behind the Scenes

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Valdís:

--- Quote from: WAYF on 10 May 2013, 21:13 ---"I'm not actually trans in real life either, so it was pretty surprising for me."
--- End quote ---

So not even in webcomics are trans people played by actual trans people. :roll:

Carl-E:
And Artie in Glee isn't really confined to a wheelchair, either.  That's how TV works, and I always took the conceit of this thread to be a "what if QC were a TV show?" sort of thing. 

But I agree - the line, "Just keep doing what you're doing" would have worked better if the actress playing Claire was trans* in real life.  And not being told her character was also trans until the last minute just would make it more brilliant. 


It does, however, remind me of some of the early gay characters on TV, where the actors went and said, "Of course, I'm not really gay" (whether they were or not), to make them seem "safe".  You may think we've come a long way, but in reality?  Not so much. 


(And now I'm remembering an interview with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane about The Birdcage where he said something about "a straight man playing a gay man, and a gay man playing a straight man" to which Nathan replied, "Please, I'm a comic, not a straight man!")

K1dmor:
 Daniel Radcliffe, in "Kill Your Darlings" movie interview, been asked "What it’s like to play a gay character":
 "You never see a gay actor getting asked what it’s like to play straight - to my knowledge, at least, there is no difference in how heterosexual and homosexual people fall in love."

Valdís:
But Cisgender people don't have gender dysphoria, so that actually doesn't apply, K1dmor. The point is just that most things dealing with it are narratives written, directed and played by people who aren't Trans. Of course that doesn't make good portrayals impossible... but they usually aren't.

I don't find anything novel about a "reveal" that another one isn't, because they practically never are. If anything I'm not sure how to feel about casting a cis person and actually needing to tell her to just continue "being a woman". That should tell you why it'd be a problem with portraying actual trans people in the first place.

Or that there'd be something clever, rather than insulting, in casting a cis woman as "right for the part" to achieve her only being viewed as a woman [who happens to be trans].

WAYF:
Despite all appearances, many parts of my above post were typed in a hurry (cause I had this idea and I just HAD to type it out before leaving for university), so I'm sorry if bad wording made my point sound a little bit wrong.
I have plenty of time now, so
The thing I was trying to get across was actually exactly like what k1dmor said: Were QC a TV show played by real actors, there'd be a whole media storm surrounding this issue and the actress playing Claire would get inundated with questions about "what's it like to play a character who's so ~trans~ and so ~different from us~ that we WANT TO KNOW"
*media beat-up*
The point is of course that trans women shouldn't be seen as any different from cisgendered women. (that word still sounds wrong to me...) In my hypothetical Behind the Scenes I decided to make Claire's actress born a woman because Claire is a lot more than her body parts. She has a whole personality, you know, just like everyone else. And it'd be far more important to look for someone who could properly respect those personality traits than just look for someone who was trans themselves, because at the end of the day, whether you're trans or not probably doesn't have any impact whatsoever on your ability to act.
God, this is getting long-winded... :P
I do get your point about needing to tell her to continue "being a woman" as it were, but here's where I was coming from:
(click to show/hide)As I said, or heavily implied, Claire being trans has little to no impact on her personality, which is what we see most of in day-to-day QC. Except when it does in other media.
When Willow Rosenberg, and by extension Tara Maclay, were revealed to be lesbians in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, it was great. They had a relationship which was full of all the good times and the bad times of any other relationship, and it really set the standard for other people wanting to write homosexual relationships (not just teasing it for ratings purposes). Except that since the reveal, Willow seemingly had to keep stating that she was gay when discussing attractive males the particularly egregious example being when Anya discussed the possibility that she might be attracted to Xander, and she simply responded "Well, hello? Gay now." Except that she HAS been attracted to many males during the run of Buffy: In chronological order of attraction, Giles, Xander, Oz (long-term boyfriend, yet), Count Dracula and RJ Brooks. Being a lesbian fundamentally changed the way Alyson Hannigan played the character of Willow. In the latter case, instead of simply accepting her attraction to him, she plots to turn him into a girl just so that they can be together, just because doing so would apparently violate the "lesbian" clause of her character which wasn't at all present for the first three seasons.What I was trying to get across with the "continue being a woman" thing was this idea that playing a trans character shouldn't make a fundamental change in the way that character is played, and I'm sorry if that came across badly.

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