Dropout should hire more trans women.
That said, a couple things about the data set floating around showing disproportionality in casting:
1. 7 of the top 9 (those cast members who appear in over 100 episodes, everyone else has under 70 appearances) are members of the core dimension 20 cast, aka “the intrepid heroes”. This cast has been in 7 of the 22 seasons, with those seasons usually being 20-ish episodes long (the other seasons are between 4-10 episodes long typically). That’s approximately 140 episodes for each of the main intrepid heroes cast members just for these seasons (not including bonus content like live shows). Brian Murphy has appeared 154 times, which means almost all of his appearances were on D20 intrepid heroes campaigns.
2. The other 2 in the top 9 are Sam Reich and Mike Trapp, who are both hosts of long running shows (Game Changer and Um, Actually)
3. 198 of the 317 episodes that noncis “TME” people have appeared in can be attributed to ally Beardsley alone (there is some crossover where for example alex and ally have both appeared in the same episodes). Erika ishii has been in 67 of the 317 noncis “TME” episode appearances i don’t know how much crossover there is between them but i don’t think they’ve been on d20 together so i doubt it’s more than 20. It could be as many as 250 of the 317 episodes that have either erica or ally. Both Erika and ally are majorly skewing the results for the data
4. Over 3/4 of people have no listed gender identity in the spreadsheet - most of them have 1-2 appearances, but a few have 3-4 appearances. I’m pretty sure these people aren’t included in the data at all (some of them i’m p sure are not cis like jiavani and bob the drag queen)
5. The data collector has assigned “tme” and “tma” to various cast members.
TME: transmisogyny exempt
TMA: transmisogyny affected
Now, tranmisogyny can affect trans women, trans femmes, and nonbinary people, and occasionally masculine appearing cis women.
I personally do not believe that an outside person can assign you a label deciding whether or not you experience certain types of oppression- and yet that is what the data collector has done.
I think a more accurate label would be amab/afab, or more honestly- “people i think are amab or have said they are amab and then everyone else”
6. The data does not include many of their newer shows such as Very Important People, Gastronauts, Play it By Ear, and Monet’s Slumber Party, all of which feature trans people (MSP, Gastronauts, and VIP are all hosted by noncis people)
What I think the data more accurately shows:
- Dimension 20 has a “main cast” who have appeared in the majority of episodes
- Dropout has some “regulars” who appear on the majority of their content/shows (sam has referenced multiple times that brennan is one of the first people he calls whenever someone can’t show up for something since he’s nearly always down for anything) - none of these people are trans women
I think eliminating “hosts” and the “intrepid heroes” from THIS TYPE of data set would be more appropriate because they massively skew the data when crunching the numbers for dropout shows. Especially since I can tell from the excel sheet that there are shows missing. Examining d20 sidequests and the guests on the other shows will give a more accurate representation of casting. Hosts should be analyzed separately as that’s a different casting process.
Also imagine if we referred to men and women as “misogyny exempt” and “misogyny affected” when doing demographics. Or if someone did a data collection of the number of POC appearances in dropout episodes and sorted it by “racism affected” and “racism exempt” - so weiiiiird
TLDR: the data set has massive issues with its methodology and that should be considered. That doesn’t make what trans women are saying less valid.
In other words: spiders brennan is an outlier and should not have been counted
