Tag: About Ray Reblog

sleepytea-rs:

ritzyhallow:

Honestly, it’s starting to hurt every time I see someone shitting on About Ray. Like..the trailer wasn’t out for two hours before people started acting awful.

“Cis people don’t see what’s wrong with this!!!!”
And I, a pre-transitioned transgender male, don’t either. The phrases used were ACCURATE to a trans person’s experience with family. “She’s not a lesbian, she’s a boy”/“I’m a boy born in a girls body”…those are very, very real things that are said! And, in context, saying “I’m a boy born in a girls body” is the easiest way to explain being transgender to a young child. That isn’t transphobic, it’s accurate. As is another line from the trailer, “Prolonging this isn’t going to keep me a girl, it’s just going to keep me from being who I already am.” The writers aren’t making this a “trans boys are still just girls” movie, they’re making it a realistic movie based on the struggles of transgender males.

“But the writers are both cis!! They wouldn’t be able to capture what it’s REALLY like to be transgender!!”
That’s why writers consult people. A good writer will do a million hours of research before writing a script for a topic like this, and after that they will consult hundreds of people, REAL PEOPLE, and ask about their experiences and ask them for advice to make sure that the screenwrite isn’t horribly misinformed or offensive.

“They should have gotten a transboy to play Ray!”
Okay, I don’t know how many times I have to say this: The plot of About Ray is a transboy trying to get his father’s consent to start Hormone Replacement Therapy due to a legal snag. They hired a female bodied actor to play a transboy who was still in his female-passing body. They were not going to hire a post-transition transboy to play a female bodied character. In order to have an accurate representation of what it is like to be a pre-transitioned transman in a female passing body, they would have to hire a female passing actor. Character attributes aside, even if they hired a transmale actor for the role, he would still be taking testosterone through the movie. That means deeper voice and more masculine features as filming for the movie goes on. This would be counterproductive, since About Ray is about a transman trying to START testosterone.

“They should have hired a trans boy actor who hasn’t started HRT yet!”
Okay, how many of pre-t transmale actors do you think are in the world? For real? And of them, how many do you think are going to put off starting HRT just to make a movie that could cause them massive amounts of dysphoria? Are you seriously trying to make this a valid argument?

“They could have hired a trans girl to do it!”
No???? NO. No. You’re wrong. Do you have any idea how traumatic that could be? How much dysphoria that actor would go through, to finally be in the body they tried to hard to get, only to spend months or years (depending on how long the movie takes to film) pretending to want to be a boy? Do you not understand how terrible that idea is?

GIVE THIS MOVIE A FUCKING CHANCE. The trailer came out a week ago and there are people already planning on boycotting the film, which is a bad idea for an entirely different reason: IF YOU BOYCOTT PROGRESSIVE MOVIES HOLLYWOOD IS GOING TO ASSUME THAT PROGRESSIVE MOVIES AREN’T GOING TO MAKE MONEY AND THEREFORE THEY’RE NOT GOING TO GET MADE. It doesn’t matter how “problematic” you think a preview of a script is. You remember the last movie we had about a transboy? How many of you have seen “Boys Don’t Cry”? Probably not very many of you. You wanna know what Boys Don’t Cry is about? A non-fictional story about the r*** and murder of a transman. You really want that to be the ONE movie that we have? About the hate crimes that we face on a daily basis?

ABOUT RAY IS GOING TO BE A GOOD MOVIE. Don’t base what you think on a few lines and an actor that you don’t think is right for the part. Please. Please go see this movie.

Thank you for changing my mind about it. This is for real. Fuck.