A new kind of blackface

In the absence of the recent meltdown over ENDA, a few things that would normally garner a lot of outrage have understandably been absent from the internet.

When word got out that actress Candis Cayne was going to be playing Billy Baldwin’s love interest in the new ABC series Dirty Sexy Money, a lot of people were excited. A big reason is that Cayne is transsexual; sadly, any time a transsexual person gets a job, its still cause for celebration. As Cayne discusses in an interview for Television Without Pity, roles have been few-and-far between since her transition. Not only was Dirty Sexy Money a big break for an up-and-coming actress, but Cayne’s performance would represent, as far as most people can remember, the first time a recurring transsexual television character would be portrayed by, curiously enough, an actual transsexual performer.
How could ABC possibly squander this opportunity?

When I sat down to watch, I was impressed. In general, I’m not a big fan of television drama, but this show looked like it might have actually lived up to the hype. And what about Cayne, and her character? Well, it would be nice if her character would do something other than sleeping with Baldwin (although, baby steps…). Peter Krause’s character certainly let the phrase “tranny hooker” fly with disturbing regularity (although again, it’s not an unrealistic portrayal of the bigotry trans women often face).

Aside from those issues, I was curious to see Cayne act– I hadn’t seen any of her previous work. And frankly, I was confused. She was great, but I couldn’t get past one thing: her voice. Here was an actress who had publicly commented on her desire to play non-trans characters. Yet, with her booming voice, there was just no way. I was baffled. Most trans women work very hard training their voices to avoid sounding like, well, men. It’s embarrassing to have a low voice– it’s something some of us have struggled with since puberty. It seemed inconceivable that an actress of all people, would so neglect her voice. And she wants to play non-trans characters? All I could think was that Candis Cayne must be delusional.

It turns out she wasn’t. As reported by Blogger Justin Van De Kamp back in August, ABC digitally lowered her voice

Is it true that your voice was digitally lowered for the pilot episode in post-production?

Yes, but if they want to lower my voice for shock value, fine. They asked me to lower my voice, but I couldn’t bring myself to do something that was completely unnatural for me. It’s really important for me as a trans actress to be in situations that I’m comfortable with, because there’s a lot of weird stuff thrown at trans actresses that we’d never do. So you have to pick your battles, because there are trannies with lower voices, but no tranny would ever stand to pee, for example. As soon as that happened in Transamerica, the movie lost me. With my role in CSI: NY earlier this year, they had a lot of stuff like that written in-like going into a men’s room-and I said, “I won’t do that because I would never do it in real life.”

What was ABC thinking? It’s as if they wanted to have a transsexual character, but didn’t see the point unless the character seemed, um, transsexual. Which is to say “not really a woman”. I mean, if they wanted Carmelita (Cayne’s character) to be a woman, they could have just hired a woman to play the part, right? What would be the point of hiring a transsexual actress if she was indistinguishable from any other actress?

Here’s the problem with all of that: transsexual women are women. Transsexual women are, by and large, indistinguishable from non-transsexual women. Aside from issues of personal history, the categories of “transsexual women” and “women” are one in the same.

Would ABC use makeup to make a performer-of-color darker, so as to make it clear what role said actor or actress was performing? Doubtful. That would be almost like blackface, which, provided your name isn’t Carlos Mencia, is widely frowned upon in this day-and-age. Granted, blackface traditionally involves the use of makeup to allow non-black actors to portray highly offensive, cartoonish African-American characters. In the case of Cayne, ABC is simply making sure a trans actress looks sufficiently cartoonish, presumably to entertain the audience. That’s not much comfort.

Spare a thought for ABC