Three days ago (8.5) the Gotham Awards announced that their acting awards will be (a) gender neutral and (b) will focus on lead and supporting — i.e., one in each category. I suggested that it would be fairer to male and female actors if they would hand out four such awards — two lead, two supporting.
On Friday, 8.6, I came upon a hill.com report along similar lines. The headline read that that “AMA doctors, experts recommend removing sex designation from birth certificates,” adding that “the move would protect against discrimination based on sex.”
Yesterday (8.7) Indiewire‘s Ben Travers and Libby Hill posted a discussion in which they called for other award-giving organizations (Oscars, Emmys) to also adopt a gender-neutral mindset.
Why exactly? The idea, apparently, is to make acting categories less discriminatory as far as transgender and non-binary-identifying actors are concerned.
The fourteenth paragraph in the Indiewire article, written by Hill, reads as follows: “As our collective understanding of identity grows, more and more individuals are opening up about their own relationships with gender and identity. This year’s crop of Emmy nominees featured Mj Rodriguez, who became the first openly transgender performer to be nominated in a lead acting category for her work on FX’s Pose, as well as several openly non-binary performers, including Emma Corrin, nominated in lead actress in a drama series for their work on Netflix’s The Crown and Carl Clemons-Hopkins, nominated in supporting actor in a comedy series for their performance on HBO Max’s Hacks.”
Journalists are encouraged to avoid stating what I’m about to state, but outside of your elite big-city woke communities there are tens of millions of people who feel — perhaps unfairly, perhaps incorrectly — that there are certain indisputable, day-to-day, biological distinctions that line up with conventional notions about males and females, and that such men and women, which is to say those who are comfortable with their gender and who identify as binary (including L, G & Bs) constitute over 99% of the population.
That’s not to deny or ignore the rights of transgender and non-binary persons, but to offer a sense of proportion and perspective.
Many people who live outside the Kingdom of Woke earnestly believe that last April’s Steven Soderbergh Oscar show was irksome and bizarre and bore little if any resemblance to the Oscar telecasts of yore, and in fact seemed to exist on a whole different planet. These same Average Joes will almost certainly regard the shedding of male and female acting categories as curious, and the bulk of these head-scratchers will probably call such a decision deranged.
Due respect to transgender and non-binary actors, but the vast majority of the country thinks that wokeness is a form of detached thinking and wackazoid progressivism, and if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences wants to double down on the Steven Soderbergh effect, they should definitely adopt gender-neutral acting awards.
Please tell me what I’m missing here. I’m not trying to be dismissive or an obstructionist of some kind. It’s just that I seriously feel that progressive elites have lost their bearings.
