LEXIE CANNES STATE OF TRANS — The Oscar-winning animated feature film “Frozen” was made with the help of a special effects specialist who is also a transgender man.
Alex McAdams, a senior software engineer at Walt Disney Animation Studios, assisted with the production of “Frozen. He says his job at Disney is primarily in physics-based simulation for movie special effects.
McAdams has a Ph.D. in applied math from UCLA and has been at Disney for two years following an internship there.
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Congrats to Dr. McAdams! I took a look at some of his special effects research links and although I’m a filmmaker, everything was just way over my head!
(I think I have Char Inmi to thank here, right?)
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“Lexie Cannes” — an award-winning feature film about a transgender woman who is stalked, solves a mystery, saves a lost soul and finds love. Get it here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0963781332
LEXIE CANNES STATE OF TRANS is associated with Wipe Out Transphobia: http://www.wipeouttransphobia.com/
Read Lexie Cannes in The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/courtney-odonnell/
Categories: "Lexie Cannes" (the movie) and filmmaking, Transgender, Transsexual, Trans
LEXIE CANNES STATE OF TRANS 
This is Alex, the person on the pic. I go by Alex. Surely as a trans person, you understand the importance of using someone’s preferred name.
I can not believe that they did this to you. As someone who is transgender I would have flipped tables after I flipped out… As someone who also works in the media, this is horrible journalism at BEST… Congratulations on your Oscar by the way!!!!! I LOVED Frozen ❤
Don’t flip that table quite yet. Read my response to Dean Jenny below and you’ll see why flipping a table isn’t called for in this case.
Hi Alex. I fixed it, including picture. I’m sorry we didn’t get it quite right.
Good luck!
Congratulations Alex! May you have many, many more awards and great work ahead of you! 🙂
If you don’t even know this person’s proper name, then maybe you should not be reporting on this person without actually interviewing them or getting their permission. It looks apparent that the author had no idea about the person’s transition status or privacy preferences.
Great idea to celebrate and promote community exposure/pride, but maybe not at the cost of a community member’s privacy or choice to be reported on.
Well I’m glad The School of Journalism Dean checked in. However, in viewing my due diligence, you’ll find that I verified the name/pronoun preference from 3 different sources, including two that were the person in question’s own sites. Further, there is a photo of the person in question holding the Oscar, posted by the same person on social media on his own account using his former name with the new name no where to be found.
The very first thing I did was to confirm he was out and he said so on his very own social media page that was open to the public. Had I not found it, I would not have done the article.
So, Dean Jenny416, I still get that “A”? I think so. I believe you get a “F” for making this assumption about people who are doing their darnest to get everything right.
Thanks for your comments though.
I was not necessarily questioning the accuracy of the information reported, but rather the level of sensitivity in your act of reporting.
Is facebook a credible source in journalism? Even if so, I don’t know if it is a very public source since not everyone has access to a person’s facebook page nor its intentions always to announce things like the media.
There is that RadFem blog that posts pictures of trans persons for other intentions, which come from internet “public space” where they announce their trans status. Though the intentions are not the same, I think exercising more caution than usual would just be overall considerate when it comes to trans status information. Again there is no written rules, just sensitivity.
In a better world for the trans community, such things would be silly to worry about. However, disclosure related real life stress and aggression for trans persons are very real. Each individual person should have the power make that decision for themselves without it being accelerated or denied.
We will have to agree to disagree on Facebook. Facebook is a very reliable source for preferred pronouns and names. — especially of those that were murdered. Almost every instance I used FB (or other social media) the people were not “friends” with me but rather they had set their profile to “public”. If their own posts mentions their trans status, I believe they’ve waived a bit of privacy.
In a perfect world we would not need to make any reference to “trans”, but these days we must to gain rights and equality.
One other thing — role models — trans kids especially — need them, if only to keep them from committing suicide. The photo of a trans man holding an Oscar for the work he did on a Disney project will make all the difference in the world for some — especially on Instagram where I see the photo is getting close to 100 likes. Instagram swings young, and Alex is a true inspiration for these trans kids.