Alas, the Oscars are behind us once more and with them the end of the awards season – or at least, the season of awards people care about.

But though the gongs are gone there’s still time to pick over the carcass of the glitziest gathering in Hollywood and, hopefully, learn something.

On the face of it, this show was a victory for feminists. Seth McFarlane and his idiotic boob song were banished and Ellen DeGeneres, one of American TV’s pioneers, hosted with wit and humour. Her selfie with Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper, Lupita Nyong’o et al became the most retweeted tweet ever overnight. The people have tweeted, and they loved her.

But there were some uglier undercurrents. Steve McQueen became the first black man to win Best Director, which is fantastic, but this is 2014. The Academy doesn’t get a pat on the back for that and neither do we. A Woody Allen film won an award – let’s not even go into that clusterbomb of awful. And in the 21st century, the Academy still found it necessary to divide actors on the basis of gender, as if a gender-binary wasn’t medieval and out dated, as well as exclusionary.

One might argue that at least the other awards aren’t divided that way, but since only one woman, ever, has won Best Director, that’s not the strongest claim.

However, the biggest upset was one the vast majority of people were not expecting – because it came from a minority they rarely listen to.

Some transgender people were furious that Jared Leto won Best Supporting Actor for a performance that seemed to encapsulate all of the worst stereotypes about transwomen, despite the fact that Rayon, his character, was completely fictional and could have been represented in myriad ways.

A friend of mine, William, took to Facebook to articulate his anger. He wrote: “Trans* actors do not get work. There are no roles for them. Having a Cis person play a Trans person is like having a white person play a person of colour. It isn’t that you don’t understand, or that you’re not a good enough actor, it’s that you cannot imagine what it feels like to live in the world as something so completely other from yourself. It’s that you have not participated in that narrative, have not felt that fear. It’s that in playing that role you are silencing Trans people, telling them that Cis people can tell Trans stories without Trans voices. It’s wrong.

“It’s that after shooting is done, Jared Leto stops getting bikini waxes and goes back to being a Cis, straight, white, male and enjoys all of the privilege that affords him. It’s that he will (probably) win an Oscar for five or six months of work when Trans women are being murdered. It’s that the difference of experience between Trans people’s own narratives is so pronounced that I, a Trans man, would never feel comfortable playing a Trans woman. It would be disrespectful and fraudulent.

“Please stop defending Jared Leto, he doesn’t need your support. There are plenty of Trans people out there who do.”

By the way, if you’re wondering how many trans people have played cis characters, it’s zero.

I’m not transgender. I’m cis. So when trans people tell me they’re angry, it’s my job to listen, and, if possible to get to you to listen too.

*Trans(gender) is the state of one’s gender identity (self-identification as woman, man, neither or both) or gender expression not matching one’s assigned sex. Cis(gender) is where an individual’s gender identity matches the behaviour or role considered appropriate for one’s sex.