eden, a single-named and intentionally lower-cased Denver actor, recently became the first openly nonbinary performer to be nominated for the Colorado Theatre Guild Henry Awards, which celebrate the year in live theater statewide.

eden is nominated as an outstanding supporting actress for playing a confidante to the first female Negro Leagues baseball player in the Aurora Fox’s baseball play “Toni Stone.”

The nomination was announced just two days after the Tony Awards made history when J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell became the first nonbinary people to win Tonys for acting. Like those winners, eden was given the choice to be considered as an actor or actress. But the truth is, when an actor doesn’t fully identify as male or female, either choice is not quite right.

How to respectfully include and fully represent trans actors in awards programs spanning the Oscars to the Henrys has become a national conversation, one with no obvious solution.

“I don’t ascribe to the binary category I was nominated in, so the conversation at a time like this is very interesting,” said eden, who specifically identifies as “nonbinary-transfeminine.” Simply put, that is a term for people who were assigned male at birth but align more with a feminine identity.

“I always try to be very specific about using this term to identify myself,” said eden, “and currently I use both ‘she’ and ‘he’ pronouns. I identify very heavily with my feminine and masculine traits, and I do identify as transgender.” 

The American theater is undergoing a sea-change in response to lessons learned from the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements. Producers have largely heard the call to create more performing opportunities for underrepresented actors spanning both race and gender.

2023 has been a whirlwind year for eden, who since March has played Millie – an older woman who runs a “gentleman’s club” – in “Toni Stone”; a male-presenting ensemble dancer in Town Hall Arts Center’s “Memphis”; and, currently, Benny, a biracial “and very much male-identifying” taxi dispatcher in Vintage Theatre’s “In the Heights.”

But opening up new opportunities – like playing a woman in ‘Toni’ Stone – does not come without its own controversies.

“There are folks out there who might suggest that, in my feeling more comfortable being nominated under ‘actress’ for ‘Toni Stone,’ I might be taking opportunities away from cisgender women or transgender women who have medically transitioned,” said eden, a 2022 graduate of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.  And while eden does not agree with these criticisms, the actor can’t help wondering, ‘If I were nominated under ‘actor,’ would I not still be ‘taking opportunities’ from male-identifying performers?

“I simply don’t fit these categories, so this argument can’t be applied. But evidently  – and pleasantly surprising to me –  I have produced work that others have expressed should be honored.”

So how to best honor exceptional members of all our communities accurately, respectfully, justly and authentically? Is that even possible with the existence of gendered categories?

“It’s an important conversation, and it’s a ‘right-now’ conversation,” eden said. “I don’t believe it’s the existence of gendered categories that causes harm, or discomfort to performers, but rather the requirement to assimilate for the sake of recognition. In order to remove the requirement to assimilate, we must accommodate.”

And how to do that? One possibility would be to simply create a third category for nonbinary identities, but considering that only about  1.6% of American adults identify as nonbinary, creating a third category might easily be dismissed as patronizing or tokenism.

Another would be to eliminate gender altogether and consider all actors equally, with their identities playing no part in the consideration. This, ostensibly, is how awards programs consider every other category, from directing to writing.

But given the overwhelming disparity in opportunities favoring straight cisgendered men in creative disciplines across the board, that approach would come with its own inherent inequities.

Still, eden is inclined to start by leaning in that direction, because the actor does not believe that gender has any correlation to merit.

“What I do know is that I’m very grateful to be nominated,” eden said. “I’m very grateful to know that I was received how I intended to be, without having to do any extra work. I was able to be honest and tell the story of a woman who lived a hundred times over without having a soul to give voice to her reality. To be recognized for showing the world that Millie was ‘somebody’ is incredibly special – and powerful.”

To simply be in the same conversation with trailblazers like Newell, and Ghee, even on a much smaller scale, eden said, “is an incredible honor.”

“These are small steps, but it is vital for me to recognize that however small they are, we step together. It is not lost on me for a moment that this is historic, and I am excited for, and intent on, the positive change that will come of this for our Colorado community.”

The Henry Awards will be presented July 24 at the Denver Center’s Wolf Theatre.