The conversation has been ongoing for years, but only within the last few months have several awards bodies finally stepped up to make their acting categories gender neutral, abolishing decades of binary male-female views of acting and opening a door to performers who identify as nonbinary or trans and have felt invisible across the industry.
In August, the Film Independent Spirit Awards became one the most high-profile awards groups to join the trend, ditching separate Best Actor and Best Actress categories and combining them into one field populated with 10 actors. The move follows similar steps by the Gotham Awards in 2021 and the Canadian