I hate the argument that acting is just acting and no actor is who they play so you can’t blame cis actors for playing trans characters because they’re just playing them not saying they are trans or anything.

And that’s such a tonedeaf fucking reasoning. It’s not like fucking…… changing your accent or putting on a wig. What an absolute fucking asshole do you have to be to be able to ignore trans people’s situation in real life and in the media as well (cis, you have to be cis, basically). Hiring cis actors for trans roles puts cis actors in positions that could be incredibly useful for trans people to be able to fight the stigma and the stereotypes and the harmful representation already present (done by cis people yOU SEE WHERE I’M GOING WITH THIS). Trans actors barely ever get the roles of trans people how the hell are they supposed to get any role if they can’t even get the roles of themselves?

Maybe if the world was as it should be and there was no hate and prejudice and we were all actually equal and there was no hurt in being different then casting a cis actor as a trans character wouldn’t be such a problem. But that will never happen because even if we reach that point there’ll always have been this long history of transphobia and trans exclusionarism that nobody can ignore or treat lightly.

White actors used to get in blackface all the time back in the dawn of cinema but you’d be hard pressed to find a movie that can do this today and be critically acclamed and not bashed even by morally ambiguous reviewers. Most people just know it’s bad even if they can’t grasp why for some reason. Whitewashing is still a very serious problem but I’m talking about white people actually pretending to be black now. That’s because thankfully black people’s situation in Hollywood and in the world changed for the better since those days but even if we’d managed to eradicate all racism (*whispers* press X to end slavery) you couldn’t ignore that it was a legit problem once and white people doing blackface has an incredibly harmful racist history so you wouldn’t do that.

Cinema doesn’t exist in a vacuum. What Hollywood does, what movie companies do very much effect real lives. And to be able to say that the outrage over cis actors playing trans characters is overreacting just means you have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.