AAt the start of 2024, Trace Lysette felt like she had reached the peak of her career. She had just been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Performance for her title role in the acclaimed drama Monica, earning a place among stars like Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain and Jeffrey Wright. She and co-star Patricia Clarkson had appeared on the cover of Variety and appeared on The Kelly Clarkson Show. She had landed a role in the revival of Quantum Leap on NBC. Then everything collapsed.
“I probably thought I would have gotten offers for a series regular on a TV show, which would have helped me finally buy a house,” recalls Lysette, who is trans. “But it didn’t come.” Instead, the calls stopped.
She describes the drought that followed as “total ego death.” As she watched her savings dwindle, it was as if someone had pulled the rug out from under her. “It’s almost like nothing I’ve done matters, like it never happened,” says Lysette, who also made waves with supporting roles in the groundbreaking series Transparent and Jennifer Lopez’s hit Hustlers. “Everything I had built up was like, ‘Just kidding. We’re going to take all this away from you.'” She estimates she’s auditioned for about seven roles in 2026 — a slow year for her, she says — but for nothing since late spring. She hasn’t had a starring role or major studio project since Monica.
Lysette is hardly alone. Vico Ortiz, a transmasculine, non-binary, and Genderqueer actor based in Los Angeles best known for playing non-binary hacker Jim Jimenez in the HBO Max series Our Flag Means Death, has also noticed a shift in the industry. “Before, we were all booked and busy, and then it was like, ‘Oh shit, we’re all dropping like flies,'” they tell me over Zoom, adding that the only network and big-budget movie roles they’ve auditioned for in the past two years have been for white, cisgender “lesbian” women (Ortiz is Puerto Rican).
The limited number of prospects beyond short films and more modest fare has forced Ortiz and her trans and non-binary peers to re-evaluate their options. “No one wants us anymore, and it affects our health care,” Ortiz says, “and it affects our chances of getting gender-affirming care, if we want it, and it’s only getting worse.”
In late September, Jack Haven, the trans star of Netflix’s Atypical and 2026 Cannes Queer Film Festival darling Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, made a public appeal for help qualifying for Screen Actors Guild health insurance for the coming calendar year. “I guess what I’m asking is if you, or someone you know, can hire me on a shoot or production and pay me $4,000, I’ll do just about any job,” they said in a video posted to YouTube. After Haven posted a follow-up video thanking her supporters and announcing that they had received “a lot of offers,” Lysette responded on X that she lost her Sag-Aftra health insurance two years ago and could use some gigs, too.
Even Oscar and Bafta nominee Elliot Page, fresh off his performance in Christopher Nolan’s commercial and critical film The Odyssey, recently admitted he has no next project lined up. (Page recently came out as non-binary and uses he/they pronouns.) When asked if Hollywood was knocking on his door on a September episode of the podcast On Film… With Kevin McCarthy, the actor, who came out as trans and non-binary in 2020, said no, it wasn’t, before half-jokingly adding, “If anyone wants to call me…” Earlier this year, award-winner Laverne Cox Emmy, arguably the most famous trans woman. actress and lawyer, told the Guardian that she had lost about 90% of her income over the past two years as acting opportunities, hosting deals and corporate speaking engagements dried up. Meanwhile, Billions star Asia Kate Dillon, who is non-binary, wrote last month that acting opportunities were so scarce that she sought service work.
J.Just three years ago, trans actors appeared in a trio of summer films with refreshing portrayals that signaled progress. Transmasculine newcomer Zoe Terakes played a crucial supporting role in the A24 horror film Talk to Me as a bully named Haley, whose gender identity was neither explicitly addressed nor initially apparent. In Greta Gerwig’s classic giant Barbie, trans actor and model Hari Nef portrayed a Doctor Barbie whose transness is not at all considered in the role. And in Amazon’s adaptation of the hit queer romantic comedy Red, White and Royal Blue, trans actor Aneesh Sheth had a small role as Amy, a bodyguard who was written as trans in Casey McQuiston’s novel, but whose gender was never mentioned in the film. As the Guardian reported at the time, these characters felt remarkable because their transsexuality was not.
Today, it seems that the tide has turned. The findings of the annual Where We Are in Film report published by LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Glaad in July are sobering. Of the 225 films analyzed by the industry’s top 10 distributors – A24, Amazon MGM Studios, Apple TV, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount Skydance, Sony, The Walt Disney Studios and Warner Bros Discovery – none featured trans characters. The study called the results “unconscionable” and called the failure of major studios to highlight trans stories an ill-advised business decision “given that a large majority of Americans (79%) agree that everyone deserves to be represented in the media.”
“Generation Z represents the largest share of moviegoers in North America,” Megan Townsend, senior director of entertainment research and analytics at Glaad, said in a press release at the time. “Gen Z also has the highest percentage of people who say they are part of the LGBTQ community, with Gallup reporting that more than one in five Americans under 30 (23%) are LGBTQ. If studios want to stay relevant to younger audiences and make money at the box office, they can’t afford to ignore nearly a quarter of their most enthusiastic ticket buyers.”
Glaad’s latest report, Where We Are on TV, published this week, is equally shocking. The study – which analyzed scripted, cable and streaming television shows from June 1, 2025 to May 31, 2026 – found only seven transgender characters (six women and one man) among the 369 LGBTQ+ characters tracked, a 79% decrease from the 33 trans characters counted last year. Since the record 42 trans characters in the 2021-2022 season, the study has reported a year-over-year decline in the number of trans characters, but this year was the steepest decline the media monitoring group has seen. In another regressive and alarming twist, two of the seven trans characters counted were played by cisgender men.
Yet another blow to trans visibility: given that three of the characters followed this year were in shows that had been canceled and four were in limited series, none will return next year, effectively leaving no regular or recurring trans characters on television.
Even though the industry is producing fewer TV shows since the streaming crisis in 2022 and the actors’ and writers’ strikes in 2023, that alone cannot explain such a severe slowdown.
“About 10 years ago, you could feel progress starting, and then to stop is very discouraging,” says Raina Deerwater, associate director of entertainment research and analysis at Glaad and lead author of the study. “There’s a total absence like there hasn’t been in a long time, and it’s frightening.”
Tits drop in representation comes at a time when anti-LGBTQ+ politicians and activists are pushing misinformation and enacting laws and policies that threaten trans rights and safety. “Trans people have become scapegoats,” Deerwater says, “and now they can’t even turn off the news and turn on the TV they’re watching to have fun and tell a trans story. The new stuff that’s coming out just doesn’t include an entire population.”
Many in the industry say the lack of plays for trans and non-binary artists is a knee-jerk reaction to this post-Trump rhetoric and backlash.
“This administration has enabled people’s implicit biases — it’s been endorsed by the masses,” says Lysette, who notes that not only are fewer trans stories getting the green light, but transgender actors like her who have played both trans and cis roles now have little to no chance of getting either.
“There are reactionaries in the population who don’t want to see any LGBT content for fear of their sensitivity,” says Rebecca Root, the British trans actress known for her starring role in the 2015 BBC Two sitcom Boy Meets Girl and her appearances in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit and the queer romantic comedy Heartstopper. “So studios think, ‘Well, audiences don’t want to see trans things, so we won’t do trans storylines or trans characters.’ Their fear of cancel culture leaves decision-makers in power paralyzed, she adds: “So they just say, ‘Well, we better not bother anyone.’
Root credits The Queen’s Gambit writer-director Scott Frank for keeping her somewhat active in recent years by casting her in two other roles, and she considers herself lucky to have been able to play both cis and trans characters over the course of her career. While she can barely imagine how much things have changed since she created her own series ten years ago, she is convinced that…
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