At the start of 2024, Trace Lysette was feeling like she had reached the apex 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 spot among A-listers like Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain and Jeffrey Wright. She and her costar Patricia Clarkson had graced the cover of Variety and appeared on The Kelly Clarkson Show. She had landed a part in NBC’s Quantum Leap revival. Then everything came crashing down.
“I thought for sure I would have gotten some 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 “a full-on ego death.” As she watched her savings dwindle, it was if someone had pulled the rug out from under her. “It’s almost like nothing I did had mattered, like it never happened,” says Lysette, who had also made waves with supporting turns in the groundbreaking series Transparent and the Jennifer Lopez hit Hustlers. “Everything I’d built, it just felt like: ‘Just kidding. We’re gonna take all that away from you.’” She estimates that she has auditioned for about seven parts in 2026 – a slow year for her, she says – but for nothing since the end of spring. She hasn’t had a lead role or major studio project since Monica.
Lysette is hardly alone. Vico Ortiz, a Los Angeles based transmasculine, non-binary and genderqueer actor best known for playing the non-binary pirate Jim Jimenez in the HBO Max series Our Flag Means Death, has noticed a shift in the industry as well. “We all used to be booked and busy, and then it was like: ‘Oh shit, we’re all getting dropped like flies,’” they tell me over Zoom, adding that the only big-budget network and movie roles they’ve auditioned for in the past two years have been for white cisgender femme-leaning “lesbian light” women (Ortiz is Puerto Rican).
The limited amount of prospects beyond short films and smaller fare has forced Ortiz and their trans and non-binary peers to re-evaluate their options. “No one wants us any more, and that affects our healthcare,” Ortiz says, “and that affects our chances to get gender-affirming care, should we want that, and it just spirals.”
In late September, Jack Haven, the trans star of Netflix’s Atypical and the 2026 queer Cannes film festival darling Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, made a public plea for help to qualify for Screen Actors Guild health insurance for the upcoming calendar year. “I guess what I’m asking is if you, or if anyone you know, can hire me on a set or production and pay me $4,000, I will do pretty much any job,” they said in a video posted to YouTube. After Haven published a follow-up video thanking supporters and announcing that they’d received “a lot of offers,” Lysette responded on X that she had lost her Sag-Aftra health insurance two years ago and that she, too, could use some gigs.
Even Oscar and Bafta nominee Elliot Page, fresh off his performance in Christopher Nolan’s commercial and critical smash The Odyssey, recently admitted that he doesn’t have his next project lined up. (Page recently came out as non-binary and uses he/they pronouns.) When asked if Hollywood was beating down 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 that no, it wasn’t, before adding only half jokingly: “If someone wants to call me …” Earlier this year, Emmy winner Laverne Cox, arguably the most famous trans woman actor and advocate, told the Guardian that she had lost roughly 90% of her income in the past two years as acting opportunities, hosting contracts 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 they were looking for service work.
Just three years ago, trans actors popped up in a trio of summer movies with refreshing depictions that signaled progress. Transmasculine newcomer Zoe Terakes delivered a pivotal supporting turn in the A24 horror flick Talk to Me as a bully named Haley, whose gender identity was neither explicitly addressed nor initially apparent. In Greta Gerwig’s inescapable behemoth Barbie, trans actor and model Hari Nef portrayed a doctor Barbie with her transness not factoring into the part at all. And in Amazon’s adaptation of the bestselling queer romcom 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 transness was not.
Now, it seems, the tides have turned. The findings in the annual Where We Are in Film report published by the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Glaad in July were sobering. Of the 225 movies analyzed across the industry’s 10 major distributors – A24, Amazon MGM Studios, Apple TV, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount Skydance, Sony, The Walt Disney Studios and Warner Bros Discovery – zero included trans characters. The study called the results “unconscionable” and referred to major studios’ failure to spotlight trans stories as a misguided business decision “given that a supermajority of Americans (79%) agree that everyone deserves to be represented in media”.
“Gen Z represents the largest share of moviegoers in North America,” Glaad’s senior director of entertainment research and analysis, Megan Townsend, 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 (23 percent) of Americans under the age of 30 are LGBTQ. If studios want to stay relevant with younger audiences and bring in box office dollars, they can’t afford to ignore nearly one-quarter of their most enthusiastic ticket buyers.”
Glaad’s latest Where We Are on TV report, released this week, is equally shocking. The study – which analyzed scripted broadcast, cable and streaming television from 1 June 2025 to 31 May 2026 – found only seven transgender characters (six women and one man) among the 369 LGBTQ+ characters tracked, marking a 79% decrease from the 33 trans characters counted last year. Since the record-high of 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’s is the steepest drop that the media watchdog group has witnessed. In another alarmingly regressive twist, two of the seven trans characters counted were played by cisgender men.
Yet another blow to trans visibility: Because three of the characters tracked this year were on shows that had been cancelled and four were on limited series, none will return next year, effectively leaving no regular or recurring trans characters on television.
While the industry has been producing fewer TV shows since 2022’s streaming bust and the actors’ and writers’ strikes in 2023, that alone cannot account for such a severe downturn.
“About 10 years ago, you could feel that progress was starting, and then for it to just halt is very disheartening,” says Raina Deerwater, Glaad’s associate director of entertainment research and analysis and the lead author of the study. “There’s a complete absence in a way that there hasn’t been in a long time, and it’s scary.”
This plummet in representation arrives at a time when politicians and anti-LGBTQ+ activists are pushing misinformation and enacting laws and policies that threaten trans rights and safety. “Trans folks are being scapegoated,” Deerwater says, “and now they can’t even turn off the news and turn on whatever TV they watch for fun to get a trans story. The new stuff coming out is simply not inclusive of an entire population.”
Many in the industry argue that the dearth of parts for trans and non-binary performers is a kneejerk reaction to this post-Trump, anti-trans rhetoric and backlash.
“This administration has enabled people’s implicit bias – it’s been OKed by the masses,” says Lysette, who notes that not only are fewer trans stories being greenlit, but that transgender actors like herself who’ve scored both trans and cis roles now have little to no chance of getting either.
“There are reactionaries in the populace who don’t want to see any LGBT content for fear of their sensitivities,” says Rebecca Root, the trans British actor known for her leading role in the 2015 BBC Two sitcom Boy Meets Girl and her appearances in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit and the queer coming-of-age romcom Heartstopper. “So the studios think: ‘Well, the audiences don’t want to see trans things, so we won’t make trans storylines or have trans characters.’” Their fear of cancel culture leaves the decision makers in power paralyzed, she adds: “So they just say: ‘Well, we’d better not upset anybody.’”
Root credits The Queen’s Gambit writer-director Scott Frank for keeping her somewhat active in recent years by tapping her for two more roles, and she considers herself lucky for having been able to play both cis and trans characters over the course of her career. If she can barely fathom how much things have changed since she had her own series a decade ago, she has faith that the pendulum will swing back. “We’ve been here before, and we’ve got out of it before,” Root says. “We’ve come through on the other side, and we’ve lived through it. We will come through again.”
Standout performances from trans actors in projects this year that came out after the Glaad studies’ cutoff offer a silver lining: Josie Totah in Amazon’s new Carrie TV series; Yenesi in La Bola Negra; Miss Benny, Alaska Riley and Saturn Risin9 in Club Kid. Later this month, Euphoria star Hunter Schafer will lead Amazon Prime’s mega budget Blade Runner TV show.
Like Root, Ortiz remains hopeful about the future. While they’re hustling like they never have before, leaning on smaller indie projects and audiobook narration and voice acting, they, like many of their trans and non-binary friends, have developed a healthier relationship with Hollywood. “I’ve used this time to have a breakup with the industry, in a way,” they say. “I am seeing a lot more folks going independent and trusting their gut and still doing what they love to do, with or without these big networks behind them.
“We’re never going to be silenced,” Ortiz adds. “We’re going to find our spotlight. Whether you all like it or not.”
