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Where The Words "Actor" And "Actress" Fall Apart

Nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon’s take on the gendered acting awards might be the leading charge of an industry change

As you’ve probably heard by now (if you’re a regular reader on the queer clickbait circuit), Showtime recently submitted actor Asia Kate Dillon for consideration at the Emmys. They’re a non-binary actor with a recurring role on Billions, where they play Taylor. Taylor has a shaved head and unflappable affect. They take no shit. Now, Showtime’s been very careful—and classy, for my money—about how they’ve handled featuring a non-binary character, and when the time came to submit their cast for Emmy nods, they asked Asia how they’d like to be submitted. Actor or actress?

I won’t try to hold you in false suspense. Here’s what happened. Dillon wrote the Television Academy a letter, excerpts of which were published in Variety, asking hey, how do you guys wanna handle this? “I’d like to know if in your eyes ‘actor’ and ‘actress’ denote anatomy or identity, and why it is necessary to denote either in the first place,” Dillon wanted to know. Worst case scenario, of course, is that the Academy was going to ask them to submit to some kind of weird pervy test to figure out what was in their pants. Cis people are really into that. This didn’t happen, thank goodness.

But still, as Dillion points out in their letter—“if the categories of ‘actor’ and ‘actress’ are in fact supposed to represent ‘best performance by a person who identifies as a woman’ and ‘best performance by a person who identifies as a man,’ then there is no room for my identity within that award system binary.” They decided to submit themselves as an actor, pointing out that it’s a gender neutral word anyway, right? But their point stands—this is a temporary solution to a problem that’s even bigger than it seems.

Awards shows have decided that “actor” is a man’s word, because under patriarchy, men are a neutral and unmarked gender. We get to walk around pretending gender is the sole business of women. Simone de Beauvoir wrote a really incredible book (The Second Sex) about this in 1949. “It’s on my list! Just haven’t gotten around to checking it out yet. I’ve been crazy busy,” said men.[image src="wp-attachment://503025" title="Showtime's "Billions" Season 2 Premiere" alt="NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 13: Actress Asia Kate Dillon attends Showtime's "Billions" Season 2 premiere held at Cipriani 25 Broadway on February 13, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Brent N. Clarke/FilmMagic)"]

Why do we judge acting this way anyway? It’s completely possible to have a conversation about the relative merits of excellent actors and actresses of our day—say, John Goodman and Meryl Streep. You could say, well, John Goodman a naturalistic style to him that’s both moving and appealing, and his timing is always perfect. But Meryl Streep brings a baroque showiness that always differentiates her particular performances, with plenty of accents and verbal tics—some people prefer that. See how easy that is? I didn’t have to bring gender into it once.

On the other hand, it's clear that award shows like the Emmys require different skill sets from actors and actresses. For example, they don’t require that all male stars have “dieting” as one of their primary skills, especially not those better known for their grasp of the method than the action sequences. Google last year’s Emmy nominees in their respective gendered categories and you’ll see a profound disparity in what you might call “conventional attractiveness.” (You will also see exclusively white people. Ew.) These differences are clearly an effect of patriarchy. We can simply name these as sexism and say, fuck it, let’s get rid of that. But how?

If you ask many a gay man, he’ll tell you that Jessica Lange or Kristin Chenoweth hold a charm no male actor ever could. I’ve spent my life as a consumer of culture worshiping actresses, over and above actors. Show me Viola Davis delivering a monologue and I’ll show you a grown man crying (the grown man is me). The ways in which acting is gendered are subtle but intense—not least because gender itself is a performance, and we require a much higher level of rigor from its performers who aren’t men. To be cute about it, I might say that as performers of gender, men get as many takes as we want, and our trailers are stocked with much higher quality snacks. It’s in the contract. You can look it up.

So what’s the solution? Funnily enough, MTV seems to be leading the way—their upcoming Movie and TV Awards features “Best Actor in a Movie” and “Best Actor in a Show” and that’s it. You’ve got Taraji P. Henson facing off against Hugh Jackman, Gina Rodriguez going head to head with Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Now, that’s pretty neat. And they’ve found an interesting way to spread the love around, too, so that this doesn’t reduce the amount of cute gold statues professional Let’s Pretend players get to take home. Men and women are also competing for “Best Hero” and “Best Villain.” That kind of category is a little more relevant as far as performance goes than gender, right? Or at least, we’d like to live in a world where it was. Maybe Asia Kate Dillon’s opening salvo can lead us into a conversation about that.

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