When a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, But You Don't Get to Pick the Words (Patreon)

Good morning, dear patrons!

As promised, here's the first piece of long-form writing living within the universe of what I'm thinking about, scribbling about, unravelling, burying myself deeper in, for Le Numéro Barbette. (For my new patrons – Hi! Hello! Welcome! You might want to check out the 2nd last "update" post, discussing the overview of this Canada Council for the Art's supported project of mine).

As a refresher, these monthly longer writings are not about Barbette herself, or the act creation process, but rather deeper dives into subjects that hold relevancy for me and my experiences as a trans artist who was been creating, networking, working, and seeking medical-transition/gender-affirming care in somewhat public/visible ways for the last few years.

Some of these stories will be about circus, some of them will be about film & television, some of them will simply be personal anecdotes.

I am considering these long-form writings to be living/evolving documents; I'll be revisiting them, hacking them up, adding to them, scrapping them, re-fashioning them, into the writings that will eventually be housed in the second edition of SLOW CIRCUS sometime towards the middle or end of 2023. 

To that end, I'm definitely not satisfied with where the following piece of writing is sitting, so if you'd like to share thoughts, constructive criticism on structure and order, flow, prose, and what have you – please go right ahead! 

Or, if you'd like to just quietly enjoy and reflect without comment, maybe tap that little heart at the bottom so I know how many of you this has reached (I know sometime Patreon emails get buried in inboxes!).

Today's essay is something that I took about a month to write back in March 2022, when I had to re-do my headshots for the coming year of work in film and television and felt a strong drive to articulate the tension and difficulty that I felt (and feel) around this process.

It's generally a wise idea to know what audience you're writing for; to know what forum you'd like the writing to be ideally presented in (a journal? a magazine? a book?) and adjust your style accordingly. I have done none of these things. It's just . . . writing. I've shared it privately with 3 or 4 readers to help me shape it a bit more into what you have here to read today. As the Great Rachel Strickland said in an early round of edits: "It has too much broccoli and not enough junk food"; meaning, it had a lot of dense discussion of what it all means, but not a lot of storytelling, prose, or personal moments to keep the reader anchored in the story with me. I've tried alternating between 'broccoli' (unpacking meaning) and 'junk food' (stories that contextualize the meaning-making), but I'm still not satisfied with its structure. That's okay. It's a work-in-progress.

Today's essay is about 6000 words; the internet tells me that that's about a 20-minute read for the 'average reader' (what even is the 'average reader'? huff). As a content warning/heads-up, there is also some discussion of body-image and industry expectations related to that subject around the halfway point. If you're not in a good place to be reading about those subjects today, consider coming back to this post another time.

So, grab yourself a cup of your favourite hot or cool beverage, or just some peace and quiet (be it through a good pair of headphones, or an empty room), and enjoy.

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“I’m nervous about today,” I announced as I walked into Denise’s studio this past March. It was a mild afternoon, and my arms were laden down with no fewer than eight different wardrobe options. I was there to re-do my headshots with her, so that my materials were up-to-date for summer and fall projects.

Denise is the photographer who did my first headshots, in 2018. She also shot the cover of my book, SLOW CIRCUS: VACUUM (along with many of my favourite images inside it). She was the only person I wanted to recruit to help me tackle the unique quandaries of updating my headshots now, in 2022.  

“What the hell are you nervous about?” Denise called back across the room as she adjusted a light in the far corner, delightfully blunt as always. 

“I have no idea what we’re fucking shooting today.”

“Your headshots, dummy.”

“Har har. NO, I mean– I have no idea what look we’re going for today.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean …" I took a breath, slowly unloading all the bags I was carrying into a pile on the floor. "I’ve got 30 more pounds of muscle on me, my voice has dropped an octave since we shot our last headshots, and I’ve been getting “sir” instead of “miss” on the daily for the last 6 months, but I’m still reading for trans non-binary roles. So . . . what the fuck do we do with that?”

Denise blinked. Then,“Take your jacket off!” she demanded. 

 I did.  

“Well, shit," she laughed. "Alright, let's play!"

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It has never felt like a straightforward thing to get my headshots done.

We all change over the years of our lives, but my appearance has changed (and continues to change) quite rapidly. It’s a loaded subject, fraught with considerations and calculations that I’d otherwise do my best to skirt around with a wide berth.  When it came time to re-do my headshots with Denise last week I was confronted with the uncomfortable task of having to be strategic in my consideration of how I’m externally perceived, or ‘read’, by others.

I’ve been using the words ‘transgender’ and ‘non-binary’ to describe myself for the last few years now. Language is an imperfect vehicle for all the ineffability that each and every one of us encapsulates, but these words work well enough for me, for now.

In recent years, there has been something of a push within the film industry to have more transgender, non-binary, and GNC representation on camera. At the same time, it remains an industry that is very much still tied up in visual tropes and aesthetic stereotypes that we attribute to very particular binary notions of gender (i.e. very specific / narrow ‘types’ of women, and very narrow/specific ‘types’ of men).

How does one navigate or makes sense of this if you’re non-binary (and being hired accordingly), but working in a heavily visual industry that decides who gets what roles based on whether you ‘look’ like the ideas they (the director, the casting agent, the producer, the show-runner,  whomever) have in mind for those characters?

My ruminations on the matter have fluctuated between anxious pessimism and strategic optimism, but they are not based purely on the theoretical; these preoccupations come from my lived experience working within this industry as someone actively in transition for the last half decade. Even though I landed a guest starring role on a TV show as a non-binary character and worked on that production for the last 2 years; despite reading for many more non-binary roles in self-taped auditions over the pandemic; and regardless of the fact that I am (increasingly) more at ease with myself than I have ever been in my life – these questions are no less challenging to answer, even if I have become used to asking them.

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In 2018, I was still mostly making my living in the film/TV industry as a stunt performer (this is, perhaps, a generous statement, to be fair –– I was never an in-demand performer; I made enough to pay for my rent, and my circus training, and save up for gender-affirming surgery, and that was fine with me).

One day, a stunt coordinator called me asking if I’d feel comfortable with a bit of acting along with the scripted action: the project was an indie superhero movie called Code 8, and it was my first Stunt-Actor role.  

(If you’re understandably unfamiliar with the minutiae of Canadian/ACTRA on-camera roles, that’s a performance category where they need you to do something physical that an actor can’t [or shouldn’t] do, and act *in addition* to the physical performance. In general, stunt performers and stunt doubles only have to do a few beats of acting before getting ‘shot’/falling down the stairs/getting hit by the car/etc. Stunt acting roles are very few and far between; they’re not a common performance category and, in my experience, came up very rarely).

The director of that movie, Jeff Chan, offered strong encouragement to me on set. I couldn’t recall a time that I had been praised at work in such a meaningful way. I was used to sparing “good job”s  from the occasional stunt coordinator before they jumped into their car at the end of a long filming day and zoomed off; if I’d done something particularly dangerous that day or something particularly straightforward, the response was rarely different. Jeff’s high praise sparked something in me.

“Couldn’t hurt to try,” I thought. “What the hell.”

But actors* needed headshots.
(*Stunt people need headshots too, but oftentimes you’re just asked by the coordinator for a taken-on-the-day selfie, for the most accurate/up-to-date image of you to present to production).

I didn’t have headshots.

Denise Grant was one of the names that came up as highly-rated and well-respected when I looked for a headshot photographer in Toronto; I took the leap, sent the email, and scheduled my appointment with her.

But I was nervous.  

Not about the acting part – that part I was going to figure out as I went along. 

Not about the photography part, either – that part, I had plenty of experience with from my (very brief) stint dipping my toes into professional modelling (a bad fit for me, for a variety of reasons). 

No, I was nervous because I was fully living multiple gender identity performances in different aspects of my life at that point, and getting headshots done meant trying to reconcile those things into a static image.

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A headshot is a first impression. 

It needs to be followed up with an excellent audition and a lot of luck if it actually ends up going anywhere, but –as they say– first impressions are important.

Headshots, as I’ve come to understand better over the years, aren’t just a well-lit, accurate photo of your face. They should be photos that let a director or casting person imagine you as the kinds of characters you want to get auditions to play, or –if you’re established already– that you get cast to play, typically.

This requires you to know your “type”: do you most often get cast as the villain? The hero? The ingenue? The nerd? The bad boy? The person/girl/boy-next-door? etc.

I have to imagine that the person looking at my headshots for a potential role is a cisgender, middle-aged casting director who knows that the industry is leaning in the direction of improving transgender representation on-screen. I have to remember that those roles that might not be written by, or reviewed by, any transgender or GNC people. I have to do the mental gymnastics of separating myself from who others think I am, and if that’s marketable or not.

So: what’s my ‘type’?

Broadly speaking, I’m probably grouped into a typecasting category that is simply … ‘non-binary’. Except – non-binary doesn’t have a visual ‘type’. If they think I look non-binary, this is only possible if they’ve made the mistake of assuming that non-binary people all look androgynous (they don’t; nor do non-binary people all use ‘they/them’ pronouns, while we’re on the subject of  people not being a monolith).

So, more likely, they’ll be trying to figure out if I’m a man or a woman.

More specifically, given my appearance:
Do they think I’m a young man?
I don’t pass as a mature one;
Do they think I’m a woman?;
If so, do they assume I’m a masc/butch lesbian?;
If so, what assumptions come with that visual presentation?

While queer and trans communities are light years ahead of such reductive mathematics, I know that the way I looked in the headshots that I first took with Denise back in 2018 probably resulted in casting directors reading me first as “young woman”, followed closely by something like, “Oh, wait, no, the agent said she– I mean THEY, shit– are non-binary, right, gotta remember that. Okay, well, it checks the box, send the self-tape request.”

I’m aware that this is how a lot of cisgender people start trying to be understanding of, or accommodating of, trans/non-binary/GNC people (and that's not meant as a criticism). 

I’m aware that for a lot of people, conversations around pronouns feel like a memorization challenge – because they don’t realize that what’s really being asked of them is to do the (not insignificant) internal examination of how they personally relate to gender, and how it’s socially and culturally been constructed for them.

While I look forward to the former ‘memorization’ hiccup being replaced by the more meaningful and rewarding work of deconstructing our assumptions about gender as a wider collective (and, nihilistic optimist that I am, stubbornly step forward making the assumption anyways  of people’s best intentions when it comes to conversations about gender and pronouns in my film and TV work), I’m patiently aware that it takes time for these things to change. To be participating in the film industry at this point in time means that a disposition that leans towards a wide margin of tolerance and willingness to engage in conversation or education is helpful in terms of retaining one's happiness, self-esteem, and/or mental wellbeing.

Regardless of how much my friends, my partners, or even some of my coworkers (in circus moreso than in film, currently) have done the work to deconstruct their relationships to gender, I’m still unable to turn off the part of my brain that KNOWS that someone who looks at me is going to try to figure out if I’m a young man or a woman, first.

 These aren’t important questions to me, personally; but professionally? It’s felt like if I avoid considering them, avoid engaging with even the possibility that this is what’s happening in people’s minds and production meetings – it’s to my own detriment.

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In 2018, I could count the trans-inclusive and gender-affirming experiences I’d had at work in the film industry on one hand and have some fingers left over.

Ironically, my first ever stunt gig was one of those limited instances. I was brought on specifically because the writer on 11.22.63 (Steven King TV show) badly wanted a "gender-neutral looking character" for a scene in a dystopian flash-forward (the ‘genderless future’ trope). 

The stunt coordinator who brought me into the union looked at me and my shaved head at that point, told me that none of the men looked androgynous enough and none of the women would be willing to shave their heads, and asked if I’d ever thought about doing stunts. My answer that day was, of course, “Uhhh … no”– but the rest is history. I even wore a binder under my wardrobe that day. The ADs and background people thought I was a young teenage boy.

My job that day was to jump on James Franco’s back underneath the crushing downpour of a couple raintowers (on a chilly September day in Guelph, ON, I might add).  I remember a distant glow from that day that I was unable to articulate at the time; I think I’d chalked it up to a novel and successful new work experience, an unexpected new avenue of life to explore. 

That buoyancy sharply plummeted (within the next few contracts) when I realized that this experience I'd had was an anomaly, and that many of my peers in the stunt community at the time were skeptical at best and vitriolic at worst when it came to transgender people.

This was what was playing in the background of my mind when in 2018 I made an appointment with Denise to have my headshots taken for the first time.

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If I accept that navigating the film industry as a non-binary performer means that separating who I am from who I think I might be most effective at pretending to be could be an effective strategy, we arrive at another sticky aspect of this conversation, which is: 

What kind of ‘look’ for male and female bodies do we prioritize being on camera?

We all know the answer, and it's an ugly one.

There have been pushes for more realistic and varied representation on screen when it comes to the size of bodies on camera, but there’s still immense, quiet (or not-so-quiet) pressure to be thin, if you’re a woman, and/or to be muscular (or at least lean), if you’re a man. It’s an uncomfortable thing to discuss when you actually have to attempt to articulate what's happening, clearly.

Nearly all the women I know and have worked with in my 7 years in the industry (be it in stunts, or acting) are constantly monitoring their diet, their fitness levels, their body image. There is privately expressed *STRESS* about not being thin enough. 

Men who are in acting that I have had similar conversations with are privately stressed about what happens if they have to do a shirtless scene, about how they’ll crash-course their diet, their gym routine, dehydrate themselves leading up to the shoot, etc.

I don’t know that I have enough experience to say much more specifically about actors, but I can say that when it came to stunts, there was a very clear connection between these two things: if you weren’t thin enough, you weren’t working. Period. Why? Because you had to be the same size as an actor you were doubling. It was outside of your control. You either accepted that you had to find a way to be as tiny as you can (yet somehow healthy/athletic/capable of doing challenging physical stunts), or faced the reality of your phone never ringing for work.

People in the writers’ rooms, in production offices, behind the camera, are all part of working towards a version of the industry where we have better representation of body types and sizes on-screen. But –problematic, ongoing aesthetic stereotypes aside, this still leaves one in a difficult position if your main priority is … well … getting work. You can want the system/industry to change, while still navigating the reality of it in all its difficulties and contradictions. My deeply ingrained stunt performer mindset of “there’s no arguing with this; you’re the right size, or you aren’t” is something that I have not yet managed to shake when it comes to my (very new) acting career. 

So now, the question becomes more complicated: if I am being 'read' as a woman, am I being read as the 'right kind' of woman? If I am being 'read' as a man, am I being read as the 'right kind' of man? 

For better or for worse, I have to start with the messy, Sisyphean task of creating a working hypothesis of what the rest of the world might currently be interpreting me as (in terms of my gender); and layered on top of that comes the considerations of what is aesthetically prioritized for whatever gender I’m being ‘read’ as.

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[2018]

Denise Grant’s studio is located on Davies Avenue in downtown Toronto, Canada.  
To get there, rode the sparking, clattering rattle of the Queen St East’s 501 streetcar to the other side of the Riverdale Bridge – a journey that feel more momentous than any of the other routes in the city because you have to cross the Don Valley River in the process. Greeny-blue riveted steel trusses arch over the streetcar tracks that carry you and your fellow swaying passengers over this muddy ribbon of water, and something mundanely transformative feels secreted away in the act of crossing it. 

Cozied up on a quiet side street overlooking the dull roar of the Don Valley Parkway, Denise's studio is a rare example of the old, true hard lofts that have long been bulldozed everywhere other than Davies Ave, to make way for the glossy, skyscraping condominiums that now speckle the neighbourhood.

This is, perhaps, a fitting way to describe Denise Grant herself, too: a woman whose photographer’s eye is as sharply attuned as her tongue is; who gives with an immense creative generosity but suffers no fools and takes zero shit; and who is –to put it simply– damn good at her job. She does all this while simultaneously managing the not-small hat trick of being, as far as I can tell, a Very Good Person. She has been a discerning eye behind a camera for more than forty years, working with musicians and artists from homegrown to megawatt status: garage bands, to Celine Dion; local kid actors, to Drake (yes, that Drake – back when he was on Degrassi).

In a 2017 interview with James Strecker, she listed her important beliefs as follows:
“That passion is beautiful. That creativity is admirable and should be documented. That photographing the essence of a person is so much more important than taking a picture of a beautiful face. That money means nothing. That having time to do what you want is power.” 

She seemed like she was going to be my best bet at having an experience that wasn’t … awful.
I was –wonderfully, happily, spectacularly– correct.

I knew all this because I had anxiously Googled everything that was Googleable about her before making my way to her studio.

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While I’m happy and at peace with my body in a way that I did not know could exist prior to top surgery in 2020, I’m still exposed to very blunt conversations about body size and appearance because of working in both circus *and* the film industry. 

I am inescapably aware of all the ways that external perception tries to categorize my body, in terms of both gender and size/appearance. I am not immune to how the above conversation has distorted my own body dysmorphia, the unwelcome whispers in my own head about how I look, and how that relates to paying my rent as an artist working in primarily visual performance mediums:

In stunts, conversations would happen all around me, all the time, commenting on the size (weight, stature, height) of fellow stunt performers. It’s impossible not to think about what people are saying about you when you’re not present, and it’s foolish to think you can ignore it and that it won’t affect whether or not your phone rings with a job offer: 

"Did you see how big her shoulders got? I can't use her anymore!" 

"125 lbs?! Ha, yeah, sure – maybe 20 years ago! She's unhireable."

"Thighs are too big." "

Hips are too wide." 

"Arms are twice the size of the actress's."

When I was working in stunts, I was fully leaning into a lifelong history of disordered eating in the name of ‘succeeding’ as a stunt performer (see: above discussion). I was acutely aware of how slender the arms of the actresses were that I might be considered eligible to double, should the opportunity arise; I didn't need the coordinators or my co-performers to tell me that. I was consumed with thoughts of coordinators commenting on my own stature, and with doing whatever I could to avoid them building muscle in the way that they naturally want to. On set, I'd make sure I held myself in contorted postures that minimized the width of my shoulders; sucked my stomach in all day; stood in positions with my arms held away from my body to minimize the look of the size of my triceps.

These perceptions are something that I get the chance to play with, to question, to poke fun at, to examine and re-examine, in my work as a circus artist. I’m able to cultivate play and curiosity and dialogue on this subject, with myself and with my audience. This is (somewhat) possible for me in circus only to the extent that I have some ability to control what work I make, how I make it, and where I might try to present it. I have a small degree of self-determination, in that I’m not trying to work for large companies (e.g. Cirque du Soleil) where casting choices are sometimes made on the basis of who fits the costume and who doesn’t.

The film industry is a very different arena. While I have felt like acting releases me from some of the stresses of stunts (I don’t have to pretend to be a girl anymore), the overall structures of binary gender and narrow aesthetic standards remain. Compared to what I do in my circus work, the film industry is one that I have very limited control over. 

Worrying about these things is the furthest thing from a unique experience, as well: if you know any actors, you might be (painfully) familiar with the constant, stressed-out navel-gazing that happens about the minutiae of their appearance. My personal theory is that this is because in an industry where you have VERY little control over your career, many of us turn to fixating on, and controlling, our own bodies and appearances in order to assert some semblance of feeling of control in lives and careers that otherwise feel like being on the wrong-end of a marionette string (as in, you’re the puppet, not the puppeteer). 

Film work (on-camera film work, at least) is not a meritocracy; the ‘best’ actor (whatever that means) doesn’t automatically get the job. It’s a hearty mix of nepotism, aesthetic, charisma, professionalism, and – yes – doing a good audition.

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[2018]

I walked down the long, plain hallway that leads to Denise Grant’s studio, taking very shallow breaths. I was hoping that this strange new person I was paying to take these headshots of me was going to be receptive to what I had to tell her, and filled with the painful hesitancy of knowing I might need to white-knuckle my way through the shoot with a smile if she wasn’t.

I needed to tell her that yes, I knew what I looked like; that, yes, I know what other people thought about me when they see me; but that I was non-binary. That the gender-affirming surgery I’d had the year prior had helped me a lot but meant I still read as female to the general public. That I wanted to transition more but I was scared it would end my career if it did, so I was trying desperately to balance between two worlds.  And that I really, really wanted to try to capture something that day that would show me even remotely closely to how I hoped a casting director might see me.

I was hoping that she’d be receptive to me explaining that non-binary –if she wasn’t familiar with it– didn’t have one ‘look’. I was hoping she’d be creative with me when I explained that I knew this information didn’t really help us when it came to translating that to the whole ‘type’ thing at this exact moment. I was hoping she’d be able to hold some space for how uncertain and conflicted I was about how to present myself in these headshot images accordingly.

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As I have accumulated more and more experiences over the past year of being assumed to be male instead of being assumed to be female (a novel experience), my dysmorphic anxieties have also shifted towards the stereotypical worries that I’ve heard my cisgender male costars whispering to one another. So, now, I catch myself worrying about how my stature and muscularity translates on camera in relation to all the criticisms I’ve heard on film sets and in production meetings over the years:

Am I lean enough? 

How does the muscle I carry on my frame translate in comparison with my height? 

How does my height compare with cis male actors who look like me? 

How does my height compare to ciswomen actors that I might be cast alongside? 

What kind of muscularity stereotype do I fit into? 

Do I look ‘healthy’ on camera? 

Overly fit? Bulky? Tough? Youthful? 

I don’t have a 6-pack. Am I supposed to have one? 

What about facial hair? 

What about my haircut? 

What about my voice?

I’m holding myself up against the standard that male actors are held up against, regardless of the fact that I’m transgender, that I’m non-binary, and that I think all of these things –in real life, anyways– are utterly unimportant.

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[2018]

Warm, golden wood floors walk you into the expanse of Denise’s studio, polished with the silent stories of 70 years-worth of footsteps.  Upon crossing the threshold, my eyes were greeted with the usual accoutrement of the professional photographer: tall rolls of paper line the wall vertically to your right and the studio stretches away to your left. Backdrops and props assembled in front of a small army of different c-stands and lightboxes. Denise’s desktop computer and monitor were towards the back, packed in amongst the gifts, mementos, and odd paraphernalia that she or her clients have collected for her over four decades of work. Above it, the wall is filled up to the high ceilings with framed photographs of some of her favourite images and famous clients.

I scarcely called out a “hello” and exchanged basic pleasantries before launching into the speech I'd been rehearsing in my head for the entire streetcar ride.

Denise stared up at me through her brows, arms crossed thoughtfully, through my entire rapid-fire babble. She asked me direct questions about all of the above, not sugar-coating, not mincing words, but genuinely aiming to get to the heart of this paradox that lay out before us in our session.

“Well, I’m nearly 70 years old,” she said in slow, measured tones–almost a drawl. I hid my surprise – she looks easily 20 years younger than that. “But my ex-spouse is a trans woman. My daughter Hailey talks to me about this stuff and gives me books on pronouns and shit. I’m gonna mess it up, but I’m gonna try.” 

I could feel my shoulders drop, just a centimeter. Maybe this is going to be okay. 

“Let’s start and see what we get,” she said, grabbing her camera.

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When it comes to a headshot (your first impression), there’s no discourse or dialogue to have with the casting director, the showrunner, or the producer. It’s just - ‘do you look the way I need you to look, or not?’  

The contradicting considerations that come with trying to answer that question have been heavy to carry. I needed to be in the fray in order to be eligible for work; but I need to try to not lose who I am either. I needed to be aware of, and control to the best of my ability, what gender and typecasting is ‘read’ onto my body; but I needed to maintain internal boundaries between that bizarre work requirement and my actual experience of gender, identity, and self. It’s a meta-level of acting I didn’t consider having to perform in an ongoing way at the intersection of my career and my life.

I think that I was better able to handle this because of how I came into the industry: through stunts, and through a period of 5 years or so of knowing who I was and intentionally staying ‘in the closet’ so that I didn’t tank my career, so that I could make the money and gain the experience I wanted in order to pursue circus (and, accidentally, acting) in the way that I was determined to do. 

For me, personally, a massive shift happened in terms of my ability to maintain these internal separations better after I had top surgery. Years ago, as I entered the industry, separating my self from this work felt far more delicate and tenuous than it does now. Now, I feel confident and secure in who I am, in the body that I live in. Having gender-affirming surgery ended my stunt career even as the door opened to an acting career.

I know that new questions arise from this body I’m in, now–questions that don’t occupy my mind, but that I’m aware  might show up in the minds of others in the context of film/TV work and that I must therefore be cognizant of:

What does my body ‘look’ like to the cisgender casting director?
What does my face ‘look’ like to the cisgender casting director?
Does my top surgery make me “boy/man” to them?
Does my face keep me “girl/woman” to them?
What’s the sum of these visual parts?
What do I add up to?

Maybe I’ll grow out of thinking about these things as my career continues; but for the time being, this preoccupation and unpleasant, unceasing awareness of how I am visually perceived … persists.

Worrying about these things was a survival mechanism during my first years in the industry – when I was a stunt person. Worrying about these things was a constant presence from my adolescence through to my mid-twenties as I struggled to figure out my gender identity.

Many trans, non-binary, and GNC people –at least from what I observe in online communities in the last couple years– reassure and build each other up by reminding one another that these external perceptions do not change or invalidate who we are. We are deeply familiar with the duality of figuring out who we are (and finding family and peers who support that) vs. the harshness of an outside world that judges quickly and brutally. Nobody WANTS to engage with the latter more than they have to: we do what we have to do, and then retreat to the safety of our communities for peace, for reassurance, for healing. Cyclically.

As far as my experiences have dictated so far doing on-camera work in TV/film, there’s no avoiding any of this. Instead, you have to wade in ferociously, cheerfully, confidently– over and over and over again.

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Something magical happens when you’re in front of the lens of a human who has held a camera for the better part of a half-century; some of the very first frames that Denise snapped that day ended up being the ones that I would use for the next four years.

An experience that would’ve been painful and raw with someone who couldn’t look past the difference between gender *identity* and gender *presentation* was instead a rewarding, explorative experience with Denise. It’s easy to be brave in her studio, when elsewhere in the industry –in auditions, in conversations with agents, or even on set– it isn’t always easy to maintain.

Those 2018 headshots did us good. I’ve landed some roles since then:
Beyond that first stunt-acting role in “Code 8” in 2018 that started this whole adventure, there was “Cindy” from Season 2, Episode 6 of The Boys (a small but mighty presence that took up an outsized footprint in the digital conversation when that episode aired in 2020); and then, most recently, “Motherland: Fort Salem”– which picked me up to guest star as “M” for last season (S2) and the third and final season (currently in production).

But regardless of how at-home Denise can make me feel in front of her camera, how well she captures me, Ess, the person –this experience (and the resulting headshots) is only armour for the realities of the industry that await you beyond those moments. 

Finding a wide range of visual presentations of myself to ‘cover my bases’, so to speak, is a practical approach to a problem that I don’t have the answer to.

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This conversation is one of the biggest reasons that I often feel that I don’t know what to say when other trans and non-binary people reach out to me to ask for feedback or advice on starting out in the film and television industry.

I wish I had more reassuring things to say to young actors who ask me these questions, but the reality is that my experience thus far has been one where I’m grappling with willingly and repeatedly putting myself in a position where who I am must always be packaged, interpretable, translatable, and ultimately consumable for cisgender people in the positions of creative power who make decisions about who ends up on camera and who doesn’t.

Many of the decisions I made in the first part of my career were consciously and intentionally not about what I felt like looking like; it was about trying to pinpoint what others thought –or demanded– I look like, and forcing myself to the best of my physical capacity to fit that mold. This approach that places practicality and earnings over happiness and personal comfort isn’t something I can blithely spout off to some other young person who is also navigating their shifting, evolving sense of self. It was damaging to me, even as it allowed me to pursue the things I wanted to pursue (i.e. a circus career; affording top surgery; etc).

Everyone is in the midst of a learning curve, and I’m a willing part of their learning curve. I think (hope) the kinds of conversations that happen on set, in the hair and makeup trailers, with producers, after table reads, in production shuttles, through email chains, between transgender cast and crew members to their cisgender peers are slowly moving the needle in the right direction.

I think it’s also important to note that this is not necessarily a degree of emotional and educational labour that every trans, non-binary, or GNC person has the ability, or interest, to do; the imbalance between who you are and what you can tolerate with a professional smile and an easy shrug grows larger as you move farther away from privileged identities like the ones I occupy as a white and relatively able-bodied person on set. The ability to ‘perform’ in the way I’m describing is not without relevant consequences: social missteps in this industry can quickly label you as a ‘problem actor’, ‘unprofessional’, or simply unpleasant to work with.

I am immensely fortunate to have found in Denise Grant a photographer who was capable of, and deeply committed to, having these conversations with me when I walked in the door of her studio 4 years ago, for my first headshots, and again last week, for the update of them. In Denise, I found a fellow artist with whom I was able to have the above conversations with, and with whom I was able to lay out the need to play into potentially reductive visual stereotypes when it came time to creating new headshots. To try to create images of myself that must be used as currency in a world that is struggling to recognize, make space for, and include people like me.

But I don't think there are a lot of Denise's out there in the world.
She's a pretty fantastically unique lady.

So, in equal measure to the happiness I feel looking at the images that Denise captured for me in 2018, and again most recently in March of 2022, I feel an uneasiness that I can’t easily dismiss: an unsettling feeling that the only solution that I’ve been able to think of as a non-binary performer navigating a still-very-binary world, is a solution that feeds back into the very same issues of representation that my presence onstage or onscreen is –ironically– hopefully helping to shift. There is an anxiety in being aware of having to play into, and trying to skilfully play into, stereotypes that are harmful to your community, even though this is what the process of, the pathways of, change looks like.

In the end, practically-speaking, we acknowledged that all we could do was try to portray the widest range of “me” possible –from masculine to feminine– while falling back on visual cues associated with characteristics that aren’t necessarily restricted to gender (‘villain’ vs ‘hero’, for example).

It’s an imperfect approach to a complicated problem. It doesn’t save me from thinking about all of the above, but it does give me the material things I need to continue moving forward in my career in whatever direction it unfolds.

Time will tell if we struck the right nonverbal, all-visual ‘notes’ that will make a casting agent / director perk up in their chair and go “Yeah! That one. I want that person to read for this role.”

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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