#to elaborate a lil on the cis people playing trans characters

[moredifferentthanusual]

I hate this attitude so much! This argument is stolen from disability and poc activists who have been asking for a long time for people playing disabled characters or characters from a particular ethnic background to actually be from these groups. You'll notice this actually makes total sense!

While not having scarjo play your poc is a good starting point, casting a chinese actor to play a vietnamese character because "its close enough for the white people in the audience" is still a problem. And casting accurately solves many many problems. Eg when your writer/costumer/set designer messes up the actor knows and corrections can be made. When they need to act vietnamese can.

Same goes for disability. So many autistic people hate shows about us because allistics are really bad at playing us! They can do stereotypes and act kooky enough to satisfy allistic audiences but like in the above example that means using us as objects while ignoring us as part of the audience. You have any idea how often we see mobility aids used dangerously wrong on tv? Or how often characters are supposed to have an illness but they don't have any of the symptoms! A disabled actor has symptoms! Their aids are real! And when things are depicted as real then we exist

But we don't have these same reasons for queer characters. Sure there is a queer culture, but crucially not all queer people are part of the community. There is no way to act queer the way there is to act muslim or italian, because the only thing we all have in common is being different. We come from everywhere, and we act every way. Some of us try to fit in with our communities of origin, some of us try to fit into the queer community. Neither way is right or wrong. Anyone can be queer and we can be anyone.

There are times when casting queer actors might make sense, like for a visibly trans character, but if they're not visibly trans cis people can do that. And I always like it when queer people are in things because give us money, but we can be anyone so anyone can be us