Can A Straight Person Play A Trans-Person?

Last month I wrote a blog post about this topic and asked that question. Jared Leto did an interview on Huffington Post Live where he answered that question by saying,

That being said, you wouldn't want to stick a transgender person with only transgender roles. So it goes both ways.

I wrote that I could see both sides of the argument, however, since I wrote that he won the Golden Globes award for the best supporting character and it is his speech that persuaded me against a straight actor playing a trans-character. What he said in the Huffington Post interview is true; I don’t want a trans-actor/actress playing only trans-parts. However, that is a false argument; substitute a woman or a black person or an Asian person for the trans-person.

That being said, you wouldn't want to stick a “woman” with only “woman” roles. So it goes both ways.

But if the role is about a woman you wouldn’t want a man playing that role, but a woman can play a role for a gender neutral part, the same is true for a trans-person. If the character is about a trans-person than the character should be played by a trans-person, but if the character is gender neutral than there is no reason why it couldn’t be played by a trans-person.

In his acceptance speech according to Varity he said,

In actuality, his speech was quite lovely and entertaining. He talked about waxing his entire body, including his eyebrows, and added, “”I’m just fortunate that it wasn’t a period piece so I didn’t have to do a full Brazilian. Ladies, you know what I’m talking about though…and so do some of you men, I think.” On a more serious note, he added: “To the Rayons of the world, thanks for the inspiration.”

My thoughts about his speech is, is that all the character meant to you is that you had to wax your body? Salon put it this way,

In actuality, his speech was quite lovely and entertaining. He talked about waxing his entire body, including his eyebrows, and added, “”I’m just fortunate that it wasn’t a period piece so I didn’t have to do a full Brazilian. Ladies, you know what I’m talking about though…and so do some of you men, I think.” On a more serious note, he added: “To the Rayons of the world, thanks for the inspiration.”
[…]
For those who think I’m reading too much into his speech at the Globes and his “Fresh Air” interview in which he called his character “transgendered” and said the film had no political valence, I’d point to the fact that neither Leto nor his fellow winner Matthew McConaughey mentioned AIDS once in their respective speeches. These two men devoted months of their lives to a project specifically about the AIDS crisis, and then went off on tangents when accepting awards for their work about how goofy and weird it is to make your body like a transgender person’s (Leto’s speech) or about how your wife calls you “king” (McConaughey’s).

Compare that with Carmen Carrera and Laverne Cox interview on the Katie Couric Show or to Ms. Cox character in “Orange is the New Black” and that is the difference that a trans-person has over a straight person playing a transgender character.