Trans actors say roles have dried up as representation declines on screen

Asia Kate Dillon, the actor who played the first non-binary main character on a major North American TV show, says they are now looking for work in the service industry. Dillon shared the news last week, citing diminishing opportunities for trans performers nearly a decade after their groundbreaking role on Showtime's Billions. Their post follows a similar plea last month from non-binary actor Jack Haven, who sought casting roles to qualify for union health insurance. Canadian actor Elliot Page also said earlier this year that he has stopped receiving casting calls. Actors and experts tell CBC News this reflects a trend in Canada where complex trans stories are vanishing from screens.

"I can count on one hand the number of auditions I've had this year for film and TV work," said Asher Rose, a non-binary actor who chairs a gender diversity subcommittee at ACTRA Toronto. Rose said major networks and streaming services are yielding to a conservative cultural shift. They "consider trans stories, trans actors and trans characters to be too specific, potentially too alienating, as opposed to just part of human experience," Rose said. Actor Izaiah Dockery said the volume of his auditions has plummeted, and the few roles offered to him as a Black trans man now rely more on racial stereotypes. When he pitched a series with a primarily trans cast, he said "the feedback we kept getting from broadcasters was that it was too in-your-face."

Data from GLAAD shows representation for 2SLGBTQ+ characters in film rose through the 2010s but has begun to fall after a peak in the early 2020s. The decline is steeper for transgender characters. The group's latest report, released in July, noted there were 12 films with transgender-inclusive content in 2022. That number fell to two films in both 2023 and 2024, and then to zero in 2025. Among 225 films from major distributors last year, seven included a non-binary character and none included a trans character. "I feel like we've done a kind of 360 in the last 12 years, where there was very little representation of trans people and then we grew to a more encouraging place ... [and now] we've gone back to the start of that circle, only worse, actually," said filmmaker Shelley Thompson.

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Thompson directed the 2022 film Dawn, Her Dad & the Tractor, which follows a trans woman returning to her Nova Scotia hometown. She believes it would be much harder to make and distribute that film today. Thompson argues large studios treat diversity as a passing fad rather than an integral aspect of storytelling. "And the trend of the trans storyline, I think that's underwater at the moment," she said. On television, representation is more common but remains unstable, according to GLAAD. While the total number of 2SLGBTQ+ TV characters increased as of May 2025, about 41 percent were scheduled to disappear due to series endings, cancellations, or character departures. For trans characters alone, that figure rose to 61 percent. Only four trans characters were on shows that had been officially renewed.

This pattern led fans to coin the term "Cancel Your Gays" in 2024, echoing the earlier "Bury Your Gays" trope where queer characters were frequently killed off. Several series featuring trans and non-binary characters ended or were cancelled over the past two years, including Heartstopper, Umbrella Academy, 911: Lone Star and Star Trek: Discovery. Asher Rose pointed to the cancelled HBO Max series Our Flag Means Death as having a deep impact on queer viewers. The show featured a non-binary pirate played by Vico Ortiz and a central gay romance. "For this silly, wonderful comedy, it was kind of life-changing in a lot of ways," Rose said. While new shows like Crave's Slo Pitch, co-produced by Elliot Page, provide some representation, they do not offset the losses from cancellations.

Overall television production has decreased, according to data from Luminate, but Madelaine Rose of ACTRA National's Progress Pride Committee said that does not account for the disproportionate drop in queer characters. "Why are the queer ones the first [characters] being cut?" she asked. Experts link the decline to a rise in anti-2SLGBTQ+ and anti-trans rhetoric in both the U.S. and Canada. Last October, a U.S. Pentagon spokesperson disparaged the Netflix series Boots, about a gay Marine, as "woke garbage." The show was cancelled by December despite outperforming other renewed Netflix titles, according to the company's data. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Variety the cancellation was a business decision and "absolutely not" connected to political backlash.

With files from CBC News