TV’s biggest night isn’t all about the best “actors” and “actresses” anymore.
On Tuesday, the Television Academy announced on its website that, as of the 2021 Emmy Awards season, nominated stars will be able to drop those gendered titles and request that their nomination certificates and statuettes use the gender-neutral term “performer” instead.
This small first step toward inclusion follows years of advocacy from nonbinary performers, who have long pushed to have their talents recognized in ways that don’t invalidate their gender. Back in 2017, Billions star Asia Kate Dillon — the first nonbinary actor to play a nonbinary character on a major television program — asked to be entered into the “supporting actor” category after asking for clarification on the Television Academy’s gender distinction.
Last year, after Dillon was asked to take part on a nominating committee for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, they penned an open letter (published by Variety) encouraging the institution to do away with gender-specific categories first.
“Separating people based on their assigned sex, and/or their gender identity, is not only irrelevant when it comes to how an acting performance should be judged, it is also a form of discrimination,” Dillon wrote at the time, adding that gendered categories “serve as an endorsement of the gender binary at large, which actively upholds other forms of discrimination, including racism, the patriarchy, and gender violence.”
Although the update published on the official Emmys website insists that “no performer category titled ‘Actor’ or ‘Actress’ has ever had a gender requirement for submissions,” both the terminology and the nomination conventions have functionally served as obstacles for nonbinary awards-seekers.
Notably, the MTV Movie & TV Awards and the Television Critics Association’s TCA Awards already feature non-gendered categories, while the Berlin Film Festival announced last year that it would be handing out gender-neutral acting awards for the first time in its history. For its upcoming Dorian TV Awards, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics also nixed gendered categories, as Deadline reported.
This is far from the only step the Television Academy and other awards-granting organizations could take to level the playing field for nonbinary performers.
In a February interview with the Washington Post, nonbinary star Jacob Tobia, who voiced Double Trouble on Netflix’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, suggested that more institutions could follow the lead of the Grammys and institute a best new artist award.
“It’s not fair to ask someone who’s been in the industry for two decades to compete against someone who’s the new debut,” they said. “[This way], the competition would be based in something that actually impacts your ability to do your job.”
As time goes on and Gen Z continues to eschew traditional gender norms, awards ceremonies will have to adapt or risk being outdated.
As Dillon noted when they presented the first gender-neutral acting award to Emma Watson at the MTV Movie & TV Awards in 2017, “the only distinction we should be making when it comes to awards is between each outstanding performance.”
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