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Billy Porter

CULVER CITY, California, March 4, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― Cinderella’s fairy godmother will be portrayed as “genderless” by a homosexual male actor in a remake of the classic fairytale by Columbia Pictures.

Emmy-award winning Billy Porter, who identifies with his same-sex attractions, will be cast as Cinderella’s magic-weaving godparent. Porter, celebrated in Broadway circles for wearing women’s clothing, told CBS on Monday that he thought it “profound” that he was playing the role. 

“It hit me when I was on the set last week, how profound it is that I am playing the fairy godmother — they call it the Fab G,” he said, without specifying who “they” were. 

“Magic has no gender,” he continued. 

“We are presenting this character as genderless. That’s how I’m playing it. And it’s really powerful.” 

Porter did not explain why he believes that erasing the female identity of the most famous godmother in European folklore is powerful. 

Novelist and pro-life women’s rights activitist Fiorella Nash told LifeSiteNews that there is a certain amount of power involved when male actors appropriate women’s roles.  

“It is so hard for female actors to get any roles after the age of 35,” Nash said.  

“It is powerful when men take over a women’s role because misogynists have been trying to erase female identity for centuries,” she continued. 

“They’ve just found a ‘woke’ way of doing it.”

Nash noted that the swapping of male and female roles is a “staple” of the British pantomime tradition, in which men still dress up as older women characters (including the Fab G in panto versions of Cinderella) and women used to dress up as the hero, but that there is no tradition of men playing women’s roles in film.  

If there were, there would be even fewer good roles for women, Nash said. 

“You already have a situation where there are, I think, seven strong male roles for every one female, and that’s partly because for so long theatre was a male-only domain,” she explained.  

“So if you take a really strong female role and give it to a man, you’re doing what has always been done to squeeze women out of the industry. There’s absolutely no excuse for it.” 

Nash said she wouldn’t take her children to the new Cinderella, which is scheduled to appear in 2021, because they would just find a man playing a “genderless” fairy godmother ridiculous. 

“There’s no such thing as a genderless human being, like it or not,” said Nash. 

British pantomime, a Christmas staple, often includes lascivious jokes and double entendres that are meant to entertain adults while going over the heads of innocent children. The appropriation of a strong female role by a man who identifies as LGBT may be an double entendre in itself, as a “fairy” is a slang and sometimes offensive word for a man who experiences same-sex attractions. 

The filming of the gender-erasing Cinderella follows a vogue in gender-bending entertainment for even the youngest children, notably the “Drag Queen Story Hour” that began in the United Kingdom and spread to Canada and the United States.