While a smattering of transmasc characters have appeared in films and TV shows in recent years, much of this representation feels tokenistic and shallow
Last month, I watched Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, a psychological drama about a sexual assault at Yale. It’s a conversation piece film, one that wants to poke at contemporary political anxieties: MeToo and its backlash, identity politics versus class politics, the idea of meritocracy, student activism and trigger warnings. It’s debatable whether it manages much more than poking. But in the weeks after seeing After the Hunt, I’ve been thinking a lot about one specific character: the film’s trans character, Alex (Lío Mehiel). They’re only in a few scenes, but those scenes tell you a lot about what’s happening to transmasculine representation in film.
Transness in film is a vexed, and vexing, topic. Film history has provided an incredible archive of visual transness and genderqueerness, able to encapsulate images and ideas that other forms can’t; equally, film has also saddled trans people – particularly trans women – with a lot of sticky transphobic iconography (if you haven’t seen it already, I’d recommend watching Netflix’s Disclosure if you want to understand Hollywood’s impact on the trans community). Trans men have less of an iconographical burden to deal with than trans women do; we don’t have the same bank of offensive stereotypes that people reach for, the same sexualised boogeymen immortalised in films like Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs. Generally, people either think of trans men as a more respectable, and therefore less spectacular, kind of trans person, or they don’t really think of us at all.
There are exceptions to this, of course: transmasculinity isn’t immune to being harnessed as a tragic condition, or to being mined for sexual content. The most famous (infamous to some) film about transmasculinity is still Kimberly Peirce’s Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry, a film that dramatised the real-life rape and murder of Brandon Teena, a passing trans man who had been outed to cis acquaintances. It’s a violently distressing film, one fascinated with Brandon’s charm and ability with women, but ultimately more fascinated by graphically recreating his suffering – as if Brandon wasn’t killed by two real men, but was instead tragically brought down by the impossibility of emulating masculinity (the film also leaves out the murder of Brandon’s Black friend Phillip, a source of much criticism since its release). Under specific circumstances, transmasculinity can draw the same kind of prurient curiosity as transfemininity: tampons shoved under mattresses, cameras panning over bound breasts.
It’s much more common, though, for trans men and transmasculine people to be represented via less bombastic stereotypes. On screen, we are usually at least three of five things: young, progressive, innocent, sexless and sterile. In After the Hunt, Alex mainly exists plot-wise as a litmus test for the other characters (protagonist Alma, for instance, reliably misgenders them). They are a supportive partner to Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), but Alma accuses the affluent Maggie of dating them as part of a ‘Common People’-esque need to be among more ‘real’ people, a notion the plot does little to disrupt. Alex is ‘good’ in a way the main characters aren’t, but they’re also clueless, disempowered, and directly emasculated and humiliated by Maggie’s professors; this could be an interesting plot point, if Alex was given any dimension or interiority.
But After the Hunt’s only real interest in Alex is in a scene where they’re getting dressed in their apartment, where we get a lingering shot of Mehiel’s top surgery scars, after the film primes us with multiple teasing shots of them with a towel over their chest. Alex and their scars are an intriguing curio, but they’re also the film’s image of modernity, of the scary new world Alma doesn’t understand. Alma’s naked disdain for Alex isn’t made sympathetic, but Alex is still, at best, more a symbol of the new world Alma fears than a person in their own right. At worst, they’re a punchline.
When trans people are, occasionally, included in mainstream films, it’s often as this kind of shallow visual shorthand. There’s plenty to criticise about transness on television – notably, one of the most famous ‘trans shows’ in the past decade was shuttered after its cisgender star sexually harassed his trans woman colleagues – but TV is leagues ahead of film in terms of telling deeper trans stories, and in terms of the diversity of roles available. You can find trans men of colour in significant roles on shows like The L Word: Generation Q, Sex Education and 9-1-1 Lone Star; the only place I’ve seen a non-white trans guy in a film was at a trans indie film festival. Film often feels like a ghost town for trans people, regardless. Even Elliot Page has only released one film since transitioning (as per his memoir, this is partly because the Flatliners shoot was so unsafe that he took a break from film acting).
Some old film tropes have quietly been accepted as problematic, like casting cis actors for trans roles, but cis filmmakers have been quick to create new, innovative ways to use transness badly (see: Emilia Perez)
A certain disillusionment has set in; now the peak era of ‘trans visibility’ seems to have ended without much forward progress. Some old film tropes have quietly been accepted as problematic, like casting cis actors for trans roles, but cis filmmakers have been quick to create new, innovative ways to use transness badly (see: Emilia Perez). Trans women can, at least, take solace in a thriving transfeminine indie film culture, with critically acclaimed directors like Jane Schoenbrun, Sydney Freeland and Louise Weard making deeply exciting work. Trans men seem a little bit more directionless, perhaps, when it comes to using film to our own ends. There are recent transmasculine films that rank among my favourites, like Henry Hanson’s Bros Before and Noah Schamus’s Summer Solstice, but I still haven’t seen a better trans guy movie than Harry Dodge and Silas Howard’s gorgeous anti-heist film By Hook or By Crook, and that came out 25 years ago.
Transmasculine film feels depressing right now. How do we overcome the sense of flatness, of shallowness? Even roles I want to like can feel too squeaky-clean, as if the transmasculine ideal is a person who cannot develop forehead lines or have impure thoughts. Vera Drew’s madcap parody The People’s Joker features an emotionally manipulative trans guy ex; maybe that’s one answer. Maybe we need transmasculinity on screen to become both more adult and more evil, easing the association between transfemininity and horror. Perhaps the invention of Che Diaz was actually a good thing. But please don’t quote me on that.