I don't know the answer to the question of awards that have been structured for only two genders. It is a powerful action Alex Newell took and one that hopefully causes more people to take pause and perhaps not struggle against the reality that there are more than two genders.
I've always liked the term "actor" and tried to use it for all actors regardless of gender. The definition of actor in the Webster dictionary is "One who acts: doer" and "One who acts in a play, movie, or television show etc" The definition of actor has always been gender neutral. It has simply suffered from a "male-as-normal" point of view. It is possible to who 2 awards given for best "actor" or "supporting-actor" with the award stipulation that only 1 person of a particular gender identity can win an award in that category.
I've tried to cast more openly since I was in undergraduate, and sometimes it was more successful than others. I directed a scene from Dr. Faustus and cast a woman to play Mephistopheles which was well acted but suffered from the sexist haunting of women corrupting men. I cast a woman to play Wolf in Hair. That was in part because I knew the actress and everyone expected me to cast her as Sheila, I thought it would be a challenge for her and myself to go against type and expectation. The only change we made was to change Wolf's fascination with Mick Jagger to Janis Joplin.
As an actor I've always been honored to play characters different from myself, It has always been very important to me not to play a stereotype of a person.
My family was very gender binary so I was schooled in how to be a boy from a very young age. I was told what boys do and what girls do and I was not supposed to do what girls did. The fact that my interests were different from what boys were supposed to like, (I liked action figures, and dolls instead of sports) I still absorbed the rules that boys and girls were supposed to be treated differently. And would speak to my older sister in a gentle head voice, and barked at my older brothers with my chest voice.
As I grew up the I got run over in the intersection of gender and race. Since my interests weren't things considered masculine, they also didn't fit with the stereotype of Black men. In high school the court of public opinion decided I must be gay because I didn't act like the Black men they saw on TV. When I last heard the rumor still persisted in the town after I had left. That was the first time people tried to use a binary sexuality to define my gender because my gender doesn't fit a binary.
How do I benefit from my Gender? Though I feel my identity is neither male nor female there have been times when I benefited from presenting as one or other. Depending on the community I was in. Most often I have unknowingly benefited from the privilege of being read as male, and what that meant for the safety of my person. There have also been times when I leaned in to the male aspects of my gender as defense. The most deliberate of these was during Gloria last year. I spent a longer than usual on my bio for the program. If I were in my bubble of Boston MA, I would have used my preferred pronouns (they/them) and originally wrote my bio using them.
But after writing it I felt very vulnerable. I didn't know Baton Rouge. I didn't know if someone might be waiting to assault me outside the theater. I did know that I don't have any family, and few friends in Louisiana, without my support network I didn't feel safe. So I changed my pronouns to (he/him). It was a hard decision but in the end a decision I had the privilege to make.
