The highly anticipated second season of Netflix’s hit South Korean thriller series Squid Game is being criticized for casting a cisgender man to play a trans woman.

On December 4, the streamer released a “Meet the Cast” video, featuring new cast members introducing fans of the series to their characters. In the clip, South Korean actor Park Sung-hoon describes his character, Hyun-ju, as “a former special forces soldier and a transgender woman.”

Related

Halle Berry apologizes & drops project where she’d play a transgender man
She said that the transgender man’s life was “a female story” and used the wrong pronouns for him before she apologized and said she wouldn’t take the role.

The 39-year-old actor went on to explain the character’s motivation for participating in the dystopian game at the center of the show. “She joins the game because she’s short on money for her gender-affirming surgery,” he says. “Even though she faces prejudice and tough situations, she shows incredible strength, decisiveness, and natural leadership. Through her resilience, she breaks down stereotypes and shines as an inspiring character.”

Never Miss a Beat

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

U.K. outlet the Independent notes that the inclusion of a transgender character in a South Korean production is “a big deal.” South Korea does not recognize same-sex marriage under the law, though earlier this year, the country’s top court ruled that people in same-sex relationships are entitled to the same benefits under South Korea’s National Health Insurance Service as heterosexual couples.

But critics on social media blasted Park’s casting as a transgender woman, with many questioning why the show’s creators didn’t hire an actual trans actress to play the role.

As them notes, actress Jen Richards, who is trans, has been a leading voice in arguing why it is inappropriate, and even dangerous, to cast cis men to play transgender women.

“Cis men play trans women in the media with the furthest reach, are rewarded for it, & tell the world trans women are ‘really’ men,” Richards wrote in a 2016 Twitter thread responding to out actor Matt Bomer’s casting as a trans woman in the film Anything. “When Jared Leto plays Rayon and accepts his Oscar with a full beard, the world sees that being a trans woman is just a man performing.”

Richards elaborated further in the 2020 Netflix documentary Disclosure, describing a “direct link” between cis men playing trans women and violence directed at trans women: “In my mind, part of the reason that men end up killing trans women out of fear that other men will think that they’re gay for having been with trans women, is that the friends, the men whose judgement they fear of, only know trans women from media, and the people who are playing trans women are the men that they know,” she says. “This doesn’t happen when a trans woman plays a trans woman.”

“For more than 40 years, Americans have sat down in front of their TV screens or in movie seats and seen male actors ‘pretend’ to be trans women,” GLAAD’s Nick Adams wrote in a 2016 op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter. “By casting Robert Reed, Terence Stamp, John Lithgow, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tom Wilkinson, Lee Pace, Cillian Murphy, Liev Schreiber, Beau Bridges, Jared Leto, Eddie Redmayne, Steven Weber, Denis O’Hare and Walton Goggins as transgender women, viewers receive two strong and wrong messages: 1. that being transgender is an act, a performance, just a matter of playing dress-up; and 2. that underneath all that artifice, a transgender woman really is a man.”

Rather proving both Richards’s and Adams’s point, many anti-LGBTQ+ social media commenters laughed off criticism of Park’s casting in Squid Game. “At least the casting acknowledges that trans women are men,” one anti-trans troll wrote.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.