Claire Lehmann: belief

Transcript context

…In the past, as you know, there’s a long history of white actors playing black characters and putting on something like blackface. We just don’t do that anymore. It doesn’t seem many people are wishing for that to come back. In the history of transgender characters in movies, they’re usually not played by transgender individuals. It’s not that Scarlett Johansson is coming after a string of 20 transgender actors/actresses who played transgender characters. Is it not like white actors putting on blackface to play blacks, and we ought to do much less of it, or maybe none of it? What’s the difference between those cases? That’s an interesting comparison. I would just imagine that there’s fewer trans actors to choose from, and the whole idea of being transgender is that you can experiment with your gender. You can be gender fluid or nonbinary. Being transgender is in itself a performance. It’s a theatrical act. However, being black is not a performance. It’s not theatrical. I think the performative nature of transgenderism itself should allow a woman like Scarlett Johansson to play a transgender person. I have to say, the messaging around transgender activism is very confusing and contradictory. On the one hand, we’ve got this discourse around gender fluidity and being nonbinary. On the other hand, a woman can’t play a transgender person. It doesn’t make any logical sense to me. Let me try another example on you. I was reading the New York Times. There was an article by David Bowden, talking about superhero movies and how they’ve revised past myths. This was just from about a week ago. He wrote a sentence: “They [the superheroes] rival Mormonism for chutzpah.” Is that an offensive sentence? Should we be bothered? Should have editors insisted that he take it out? Because you might say, “Well, all religions involve strong claims. To single out Mormonism is unusual. It’s treating it as somehow especially weird.” There might even be a slight objection to the juxtaposition of Mormonism with chutzpah, a word associated with Judaism in some ways, and Yiddish—almost like a slap in the face that maybe the person writing this is probably himself not a Mormon. Offensive or not?…

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