Saw The Light… Change Can Happen

Back a couple of years I wrote about a cisgender woman cast to play the part of a trans woman and that  she backed out of the part, now they cast the part to a trans woman.

Scarlett Johansson’s infamous transgender film role will now be played by trans actor

But instead of a movie, the project has been turned into a television show.

LGBTQ Nation

By Alex Bollinger 

July 22, 2020

Actor Scarlett Johansson stirred controversy two years ago when it was announced that she would be playing a transgender man in the upcoming film Rub & Tug.

She withdrew from the film and people wondered if that meant that the story wouldn’t get told, but now Deadline reports that it has been turned into a television show and a transgender man will be cast as the lead.

In 2018, Johansson was cast in the role of Dante “Tex” Gill, a transgender man who ran massage parlors in Pittsburgh in the 70s and 80s, which caught people’s attention because she’s a cisgender woman.

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Film and television production company New Regency – which had already bought the rights to journalist and author Brendan Koerner’s research on the Pittsburgh’s “Massage Parlor War” – announced that the project will now be a TV series and that Our Lady J, who is transgender, is involved in the project as a writer.

New Regency is also reportedly committed to casting a transgender actor to play Gill.

“Tex’s life story is like no other, and the rich landscape of this unexplored moment in time has truly captured my imagination,” said Our Lady J, who has written for the TV shows Pose and Transparent and appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race as a pianist.

It is great that they are going to have a trans person play the part, I have always said that there is enough excellent trans talent out there and we just needed a chance to audition.