Trans Character, Cis Actor

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In recent times, Hollywood has tried to get more Transgender or nonbinary roles in their stories. For whatever reasons, many of these roles are offered to cis actors instead of trans actors. This can be for several reasons:

1. Good old-fashioned transphobia. While the directors and casting directors are open-minded enough to be involved in transgender stories and portraying trans and non-binary people on screen, they are still ignorant/transphobic enough to not cast transgender and non-binary actors.
2. Star Power: Sadly, for a combination of reasons, there aren't a lot of openly trans or non-binary working actors who are also Household Names. The pressure to turn a profit might lead to the higher-ups of the project deciding to cast a cisgender, larger-name actor to help the project get greenlit.
3. The role is so offensive and stereotypical that no self-respecting trans or non-binary actor would take it.
4. The character was not written to be transgender or non-binary when they were first cast, or the character transitioning or coming out during the story would result in recasting, which would break continuity and immersion, or would make the show to go over budget.
5. It just so happens that the best people auditioning for the role happened to be cis actors, or there was a lack of availability of trans and non-binary actors that suited the role, especially more so if the character belongs to more minority groups other than being trans or non-binary.
6. In the case of dubbing to another language, their culture and country has a very different views and tolerance of gender and the queer community compared to the country the work originated from, resulting in most queer performers from that region and cultures staying in the closet or even actively being persecuted (Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, Koreans, and Chinese are the most prominent examples who consume Western media).
7. Somewhat related to the above, a number of conservative countries might ban a work with a prominent LGBTQ+ performer^note This has so far happened with, among others, Barbie, Talk to Me, and Steven Spielberg's version of West Side Story, even if the character they're playing isn't explicitly trans. Therefore, in order to reach as many markets as possible, the studio will cast an uncontroversial cishet actor and erase all evidence of the character being trans in the foreign dub.
8. For older works, a variant of #1 - casting cis actors as trans characters was the only option, since there weren't as many openly trans actors back in, say, the '90s and 2000s and coming out could result in career difficulties.
9. The work is about the character coming out as trans and out of necessity starts with them still presenting as the gender they were assigned at birth. Having a trans actor, even one who has yet to start medically transitioning, take on such a role could cause psychological issues. Also, casting someone in the process of transitioning could lead to problems with continuity, particularly if their surgeries meant they were often absent from the set and scenes were not being shot in chronological order. For these reasons, the casting director decides it would be more practical to cast a cisgender actor in the role.
10. The work takes place in a setting where medical transition does not exist or is unavailable to the character.

Among many more reasons.

This is especially unfortunate if the cis person in question plays the gender the character does NOT identify as (i.e. a cis man playing a transgender woman or, more rarely, a cis woman playing a trans man) because it is implying👁 Image
that trans people👁 Image
are just crossdressing. Cis women playing trans women and cis men playing trans men tend to be better received, but may still be criticized👁 Image
for taking the role from the pool of trans actors.

This practice was tolerated and widespread in the early days of Hollywood. Though the Aussie soap Number 96 cast trans actress Carlotta as a trans woman in 1973, in America, a transgender actor had not appeared on a small screen until 2001, with Jessica Crockett in "Out", an episode of Dark Angel, playing bit character Louise, who is also trans. This was because the transgender community wasn't as prominent and they figured that bad representation was still better than none. But due to transgender activism and progressing societal attitudes, there have been movements👁 Image
to reduce or stop this practice altogether due to the reasoning that transgender actors are struggling enough to get roles normally👁 Image
but now they have to compete against cis actors (who are usually more well known👁 Image
) playing roles that were written for and about their community. And that's not even mentioning the profit, accolades, and awards cis actors receive for playing trans roles, further perpetuating the imbalance in power between cis and trans performers. However, it should be acknowledged that this practice was what opened the doors for the trans community👁 Image
, offered visibility, and garnered sympathy and momentum for their cause by getting any transgender representation on-screen at all.

One variation of this trope is when a cisgender actor is cast to play a transgender character for scenes set before the character's transition while casting a transgender actor to play them post-transition.

Note: This is NOT a place for Complaining About Shows You Don't Like, complaining about the character or complaining about the performance of the cis actors in question. The show, the representation, the character, and the performance can be of any quality (some even won prestigious awards and became Star-Making Role for the cis actor) and still fit this description.

This is the opposite of Actor-Shared Background, Disabled Character, Disabled Actor as well as Queer Character, Queer Actor. Compare with Cross-Cast Role, where the actor plays a character with the opposite gender of themselves. Can lead to Cross-Dressing Voices if a man voices a transgender woman or a woman voices a transgender man.

Examples