It was the perfect part for Aneesh Sheth. The Indian American actress, who is a transgender woman, was auditioning to play a trans Indian American woman – a rare leading film role that seemed made for her.

The director praised Sheth’s performance after a callback, but told her there was one main problem: She wasn’t “masculine” enough.

Ultimately, the director cast a man.

Sheth’s experience in 2015 is one that trans actors say is still all too common in Hollywood. Producers and directors hire men to play trans women, and visa versa, often promoting damaging misconceptions about trans identity while denying the parts to trans actors who have the lived experience.

Trans and gender-nonconforming actors shared stories with the Guardian after news broke that Scarlett Johansson would be playing a trans man in a new film, sparking swift backlash.

Hollywood has long given awards to cisgender actors (people who aren’t trans) for playing trans characters, such as Hilary Swank for Boys Don’t Cry and Jeffrey Tambor for Transparent. But there has been growing resistance in recent years. Even Tambor said in an awards speech that he would be “happy” if he “were the last cisgender male to play a transgender female”.

Trans actors said it can be a struggle to get auditions for trans or cis roles, that they get offered two-dimensional characters that perpetuate stereotypes, and that they sometimes face offensive comments about their appearances, bodies and identity.

“It’s really disheartening,” said Sheth, 36, who has a part in a new movie with Claire Danes and Jim Parsons. “You spend all this time developing your sense of self. Then you go into the room, and the criticism is not about your work. It becomes about your identity.”

Despite some high-profile works starring trans actors – including the new TV drama Pose and award-winning 2017 film A Fantastic Woman – the overall picture is bleak. The advocacy group Glaad reported that no major studio films included trans characters last year, and only 17 characters were trans in the last TV season.

Trans male characters are so absent from film and TV that Emmett Jack Lundberg, a trans male film-maker and actor, decided to make his own web series, Brothers, featuring diverse stories of trans men.

“Trans men don’t exist in most people’s minds,” Lundberg said, noting that his first exposure to trans men was Boys Don’t Cry, a 1999 film based on the true story of a trans teenage boy (played by Swank) who was brutally murdered. Lundberg said the film traumatized him and he didn’t come out and transition until more than a decade later: “I had no experience seeing a positive trans male role model in the media.”

In some ways, little has changed in mainstream Hollywood for trans men and transmasculine characters. The parts simply aren’t there, and when they come along once every few years in major films, Hollywood casts women.

“As trans people, we don’t often get to play roles that are rooted in that part of ourselves,” said Brian Michael, a trans male actor. “I’m not finding the kind of trans stories I want to embody.”

One exception was Ava DuVernay’s show Queen Sugar, which cast Michael as a trans police officer. The role wasn’t a cliched coming out story, he said, but instead someone who “happened to be trans” and had already transitioned.

“It’s important to be visible and to tell a story,” he said, adding that for trans youth, “You see that there is something down the road.”

Trans women said they often get offers to play sex workers with little depth or get scripts with outdated or inaccurate terms like “transsexuals” and “crossdressers”.

Lynne Marie Rosenberg, an actor who runs the CastandLoose blog that publishes offensive character “breakdowns”, provided a few examples. One sought a “male to female transsexual who is as sassy as she is bitchy”, adding, “if the light is right, she can be quite beautiful, but to the observant eye, she isn’t fooling anyone.” Another was looking to cast a “transgender female” who “has a real ‘surprise’ for a few of the guys”.

Maybe Burke, an actor who is agender (doesn’t identify as male or female and uses “they” pronouns), said directors would reach out, compliment their look, and then offer them offensive trans women roles: “It’s a homeless sex worker who gets murdered, and I’m like, ‘Thank you so much, I’m so glad you saw that in me.’”

Film-makers have also told Burke they are looking for someone who is at a different stage of “transition”, implying they wanted someone more “passable” as a cis woman.

“I’m a complete human being walking into the room, and you’re telling me I’m not finished,” they said.

Bianca Von Krieg, a trans activist and actress, said that a film that hired her once asked her to send nude photos because, she later learned, they wanted to know if she was trans. Other times, she said, it can feel like casting is simply a “beauty contest” for trans women: “I’ve been treated by other directors and actors like I’m less than human, or I’m a third-class citizen.”

On the flipside, trans women have also been told they “don’t look trans enough” for parts, said Isley Reust, another trans actress . “I felt very hurt by that. I can’t even play something that I am.”

With so few opportunities, trans actors can face tough choices about where they draw the line and how they pay the bills.

Reust said she deeply regretted working on a film that cast a cis man as a trans woman: “I felt shitty afterward, and I feel like I let my community down.” She said she would never do it again.

Some trans actors also struggle to decide whether to be open about their identity, recognizing that they might get fewer auditions if directors know they are trans. Angel Qinan, a trans actress, said she is public about her gender, and never gets sent on auditions for cis roles.

It can feel limiting, she said. “We can play a sister, a mother, a daughter, a best friend. We can play lead characters.”

Ivory Aquino, who has been acting since she was a child, decided to come out as trans last year after she was cast as Cecilia Chung, a trans activist, in the historical series When We Rise. She had long played cis women and knew it could be risky to speak out.

“It was more important to share that part of me rather than hold back,” she said, recounting that when she first transitioned as a teenager and thought she would never be able to act again. “Part of me was doing it just to have the visibility for someone who was seeing themselves.”