Gender is a set of interpersonal relationships and social practices that evolve in the presence of other people , in social spaces, and over time. My theory of trans lens corrects the institutionalized cis-sexism that assumes the cis status of even those characters with fluid gender practices. It does so by questioning the purported neutrality of cisgender subject positions. Tracing the development of trans presence in Shakespearean and global performances, this article uses Richard Eyre’s film Stage Beauty as a case study to demonstrate trans lens at work, to delineate the relationships between transgender, adaptation, queer, and performance studies, and to reveal the caveats of those fields. :::: https://borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org/borrowers/article/view/350