GLAAD, the organization dedicated to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gay equality, has released its annual Study Responsibility Index for 2020, which covers movies released in 2019, and found that for the third year in a row, there were no characters transgender in major Hollywood movies.
GLAAD publishes this report every year for the purpose of analyzing conventional American films for the representation of LGBTQ characters. The index takes into account most of the major Hollywood movies, as well as certain smaller movies released by art labels from major studios, such as Sony Pictures Classics and Focus Features. Beyond determining whether a movie features lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer characters, GLAAD uses its index to analyze the type of inclusion present, and rates the studios and their production based on how they handle LGBTQ characters.
While overall industry representation increased slightly by 18.6% from 18.2% in 2018, GLAAD found that there were no transgender characters in any of the 118 films that were included in this year’s Index. It is worth noting that the report discusses characters in John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum, Spider-Man: away from home, Hustlersand Queen & Slim that they are portrayed by trans actors, but these characters are not counted as trans for the purposes of the index because it is not explicitly stated that they are transgender in the films themselves.
GLAAD also notes that while this is the third consecutive year without transgender characters in Hollywood movies, television continues to have more transgender representation than ever. The index mentions programs like FX Pose and the CW Supergirl, as much as 9-1-1: lone star, The word Iand Work in progress, as having transgender representation. GLAAD also pays special attention to the recent Netflix documentary Divulge, which focuses on the representation of trans characters in film and television.
For more information on GLAAD’s findings on media representation, see the organization’s full report.
