Nominees - Best Actress Glenn Close Glenn Close With the Academy Awards this weekend, the media is buzzing about Glenn Close's new fil...

Nominees - Best Actress Glenn Close

Glenn Close

With the Academy Awards this weekend, the media is buzzing about Glenn Close's new film Albert Nobbs. Ms. Close and supporting actress Janet McTeer have both been nominated for their portrayal of women passing as men in 19th-century Ireland. Watching the trailer left me thinking about the lives of actual transgender folks today. I would like to be able to say that over the past 100 years, we have become a more accepting and trans-inclusive global community. But in fact, if Albert were alive today, his life might be much worse.

Last July, at noon on a Tuesday, two transgender women were walking down a main street in Antalya, Southern Turkey, when a group of 15 men descended upon them wielding iron rods. They were badly beaten, tied up, and paraded in front of a large crowd that had gathered, none of whom intervened or called the police. This was an attempted lynching, fueled by transphobic hate, and just one of hundreds of similar stories to reach the media last year. Transgender Europe reports that in 2011, 221 people were brutally murdered, on every continent except Antarctica, for doing nothing more than being transgender. In the U.S. today, it is still legal in 34 states to fire someone if they are discovered to be transgender.

Glenn Close spent more than a decade struggling to get the support she needed to bring Albert to the silver screen. She told The New York Times that the psychological effect of finally completing the film was a sense of joyous closure, stating, "[T]here came a point where I asked, 'Am I willing to live the rest of my life having given up on this?' And I said, 'No I won't.'" Ms. Close understands that this film's importance stretches way beyond winning awards for convincingly playing a man. Regarding reactions to the film, she recently stated, "Some people will change their point of view, and those who are either too old, or too blinkered, to accept the beauty of difference will just have to 'die off.'"

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