Then what do you do for an actor portraying a nonbinary character?
I think this is the obvious solution, and I don’t see it as fraught with peril. You aren’t going to see men requesting to be considered for Best Actress because they consider the competition easier one year. Or if they do, the people who make the nominations can say “nah, we’re not going to do that.”
If Elliot is being considered for an award for some future non-binary role, ask them which category they want to be in. Or the nominating board can pick one. This is a (mostly) reasonable group of people making a decision, and there isn’t some great peril where putting Elliot in the Actor or Actress category suddenly requires them to make a non-reasonable choice in the future.
The peril being not that someone will pick an easier gender group to compete in, but it forces a non-binary person to “choose” which gender they are.
Linda Hunt won a Best Supporting Actress Award for playing a male role In The Year of Living Dangerously.
And Cate Blanchette was nominated for I’m not There
I was talking about the definitions of “deadname” - every one I’ve seen says something like this :
Deadnaming is the use of the birth or other former name (i.e. a name that is “dead”) of a transgender or non-binary person without their consent.
or this
the name that a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses upon transitioning
Neither of which would include a name change unrelated to gender
Ah, I didn’t think of it that way, but you’re right.
I have a friend who suffered some pretty nasty abuse from her stepfather as a child, and who changed her name as an adult as part of getting the fuck out of that situation and excising him from her life. She’s referred to her childhood name as her “dead name.” I don’t know how common that usage is, though.
Asia Kate Dillon garnered nominations three years running for “Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series” (Critics’ Choice Television Awards) for their performance in Billions. So that’s how one award is handling it.
Here are the Academy Awards rules (PDF). They don’t define actor or actress that I can tell. But the awards are based on the gender of the performer, not the gender of the role.
It’s equivalent to picking a bathroom that best fits your needs. Any place that has multi-user bathrooms segregates them by gender, and every trans/nonbinary person knows this and should be prepared to choose if it becomes necessary. I think it is settled that the “kinder” position to the needs of trans/non-binary folks is to let them choose which bathroom to use, rather than have strangers choose for them.
We can say that kinder still would be to add single person genderless bathrooms, how does that work for awards? I suspect the answer is to add a non-binary category, assuming we eventually get enough worthy performances by non-binary actors to choose from, and actors would be welcome to choose from the 3 options the category that best fits them.
It’s still awkward. Historically, there have been two “best acting” awards each year. There aren’t so many trans actors that it makes sense to bump that up to 3.
Agreed, but I figure we have only so many options for acting awards:
- Keep male and female awards, but Trans/non-binary actors are not eligible. We’ll just call this awful and speak of it no more
- Keep male and female awards, and let the Academy choose. Not as awful, but problematic.
- Keep male and female awards, and let the actor choose. Better, but still imperfect
- Add a third non-binary award and let the Academy choose. Requires enough non-binary actors to make a third category interesting, still has strangers picking people’s genders.
- Add a third non-binary award and let the actor choose. Requires enough non-binary actors to make a third category interesting, but is, I think, the fairest and most considerate option.
- Eliminate separate male and female awards for a single acting award. Also fair and considerate to non-binary actors, but the blame game would be out in force, and nobody needs to have the trans/non-binary community blamed for “wrecking the Oscars”.
I think #3 is trivially easy to implement today, and #5 possible in the future, and the others are substandard at best.
It seems like either all awards should be gender specific or gender neutral. It doesn’t make logical sense to have some awards arbitrarily separated where some are gender specific and others gender neutral. I think it makes most sense for awards to have single categories and say that gender does not matter when recognizing excellent accomplishment. I’m sure that would cause a lot of conflict, but it would be a progressive step forward. Say the the Best Actor is the best actor regardless of gender, sex, sexual orientation, etc.
Option 3 is good. If Mx Page doesn’t want to make a choice then ze can say ze jossed a coin and the coin said “Best (suppoting) Actor”. Next year ze can toss another coin.
Then what happens if (as is quite possible) 80% of nominations for “Best Actor” go to men? The majority of awards in most non-gendered categories go to men in any case (e.g. all but one “Best Director”).
In the real world, there are never going to be enough non-binary actors to make a meaningful separate category. The best realistic option is to let non-binary actors choose the category they want to compete in.
This does open the door for Page to be the first person to be nominated for both Best Actress and Best Actor.
Lots of ugliness. Female actors will (understandably) blame the trans/non-gendered community for ruining their chances to be recognized for their achievements. It’s a possible choice for “solving” the problem, but is likely a terrible choice. Similar to how changing all Marriages into Civil Unions for SSM purposes would fuel the “gays are destroying marriage” narrative.
Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant. So the rot will be more exposed than it currently already is, and a backlash will soon follow.
Unlike Cheesesteak, I don’t think it’s the trans actors who’ll be blamed.
The Academy is already on shaky moral ground with the whole Oscars So White thing, and the after-effects of #MeToo, not to mention the backlash to streaming from old dinosaur farts like Spielberg.
Sticking with a clearly sexist slate of noms will just further their slide into irrelevancy.
This whole conversation about the Oscars seems so left field. The amount of non-binary actors that even exist is minuscule, the percentage of those who would be in roles and give performances that would even be in consideration for Oscars is going to be a way smaller percentage of that. You’re basically talking about either creating a new category or changing the rules to benefit a tiny, tiny handful of people. “Actor X, you were the Best Non-Binary performer out of the 3 performances that existed this year. Here’s your Oscar.” 
I think if they did consolidate to non-gender specific acting awards, it might help expose the gender biases that exist in industry, as male leads outnumbered female leads ~2:1 over the past decade in theatrical films, according to this source. Interesting, according to that source, men and women had roughly equal share of leading roles in TV in 2011/2012 but that has diverged to closer to a 60/40 split since 2013 for some reason. I don’t think it’s unlikely that nominations would come in close to the proportions of the genders of actors in leading roles. It is not overly surprising that only one woman has ever won best director, when 95% of directors are men. Fortunately according to the linked report that trend is starting to change, but there’s a long way to go.
Back to Elliot Page, I’m glad that they feel comfortable going public with what they feel is their true gender identity. I am confused as to why they would choose to use “he/him” pronouns in addition to “they/their” pronouns though if they do not identify as a man - given that the vast majority of people associate “he/him” with male gender identity, wouldn’t that make it confusing if Elliott didn’t actually identify as a man? That being said, I don’t think it’s been confirmed that Elliott does NOT identify as a man, either - at least, my understanding is that identifying as trans and non-binary does not preclude them from also identifying as a man.