Trans Media

THE UNINTENTIONAL (?) TRANS ALLEGORY OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE’S “NERVOUS MAN IN A FOUR DOLLAR ROOM”.

Welcome to #TransTuesday! I wanted to do this one last week, but had to prime you a bit (you’ve been primed and didn’t even know it!) for: THE UNINTENTIONAL (?) TRANS ALLEGORY OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE’S NERVOUS MAN IN A FOUR DOLLAR ROOM.

I’ve been a huge Twilight Zone fan all my life, but only recently saw this episode for the first time. In just catching them whenever they were on tv, or during those New Year’s marathons, it just never crossed my path.

And I was instantly struck by it, and how deeply it speaks to the trans experience. But I want to caution you that this isn’t like my Matrix trans allegory threads, because this was very likely unintentional. My book on it, should you be so inclined to check it out, is BEGIN TRANSMISSION: THE TRANS ALLEGORIES OF THE MATRIX.

So I’m calling this an unintentional allegory, yet I put a question mark in the thread title. Why? Well I also said you had to be primed first, by which I mean it would be good if you read the TRANS HISTORY essays.

From those, you know that spotting trans people in history isn’t always cut and dry for a variety of reasons. And you know why that is. But that still doesn’t explain the question mark in the title, does it?

See the thing is that we have no way to know if anyone involved with this episode was transgender. Nothing I’ve ever seen or read about Rod Serling (who ran the show and wrote this episode) suggests he was anything other than a cisgender man.

If you’re interested, I did something like this before about THE UNINTENTIONAL (?) TRANS ALLEGORY OF THE LITTLE MERMAID‘S “PART OF YOUR WORLD.”

There are apparently some reports of possible homophobia on Rod’s part in biographies I’ve not read, but those are apparently also mentioned without any kind of source so they’re suspect at best.

What we do know is that Rod was very progressive in his views, and would today EASILY be described as a “social justice warrior.” That’s part of why I’ve always loved him, outside of the fact that he’s just a great writer.

Is it possible that despite that he was still homophobic/transphobic? Certainly, especially given the times he was raised in and what society told you about gay and trans people back then.

I will remind you that I myself was raised to believe being anything other than cisgender and heterosexual was wrong. We all have these biases, whether explicitly put into us by those who raised us, or implicitly put there by simply existing in a discriminatory society.

So it’s possible that Rod knew some trans people, and wrote this to specifically speak to their experience. But given what a small percentage of the population we are, and the incredible stigmas we faced in the early 1960s, it’s just as likely that it’s coincidence. Maybe.

How could that be? We’ll discuss at the end. Let’s talk about the episode first. (I encourage you to watch it and form your own thoughts, it’s season 2 episode 3, streaming on Paramount+ and also I think on Amazon Prime). You’ll be able to follow if you’ve not seen it, though.

The episode is about Jackie, a man in a very small, enclosed space, waiting for the job George is going to give him. Jackie’s worried, and doesn’t want to do the job, but feels he has no choice. In terms of the allegory, George represents our heavily binary-gendered society.

This episode utilizes something Twilight Zone never did before, and possibly never did again: overhead shots. They’re very unusual for this (or any) show, used to convey how small Jackie feels inside his tiny, oppressed space.

0:30 – Jackie’s biting his nails, so right away you know something’s wrong. I mean the title also gives it away, but here you’re seeing it in action. He’s deeply bothered by something.

0:50 – He’s been waiting for George’s call. Note again how he says the room he’s trapped in is hot and stifling, he feels the weight of it bearing down on him. This is very much what it’s like to have gender dysphoria and not know it.

1:30 – Jackie’s worried about what George is going to ask him to do, and doesn’t want George to think he’s not up to it. He’s worried about how he APPEARS to George. What will society think of him? He craves George’s acceptance.

02:24 – Rod: “This man leaves a blot, a dirty, discolored blemish to document a cheap and undistinguished sojourn amongst his betters.” “…a strange mortal combat between a man and himself.” Jackie has been remarkably bad at being who society wants him to be.

03:16 – George comes to visit, intimidates Jackie and wants him to do a murder. Society wants Jackie to be violent. But why?

4:04 – George: “What would you like to do, Jackie? What’s your heart’s desire?” Jackie can’t believe anyone would actually care, or grant such a thing, and hasn’t even figured out for himself what his heart’s desire IS.

04:16 – Jackie: “If it was up to me, I’d like some decent odds for a change.” When you’re trans and don’t know it, the entire world, the universe, all of existence feels like the deck’s stacked against you and you have no idea why.

04:30 – Jackie: “If they pick me up one more time George, it’s three strikes and out. I’m long gone, and for good.” Jackie’s worried if he conforms to what society expects of him, it’ll be the end of him.

4:50 – George: “You always look like somebody’s squeezing you through a door. What do you do to sleep at night, Jackie? Hide in a locked closet?” The “in the closet” metaphor is HUGE here. And how have I described gender dysphoria before?

Like a 500 pound weight on your chest, or like someone is eternally “squeezing” you.

5:12 – George: “Tonight I’m going to let you be a man.” Ah, now we’re getting to it. Jackie isn’t what society (especially in the early 60s) considered a “man.” He’s passive, he’s submissive, he’s “weak.” The message is clear: do violence for society and be seen as a man.

05:33 – George gives him a gun. This is how society says Jackie “gets up in the world” and “becomes” a man. Violence.

George says there’s an old man who “spits in their eye,” aka doesn’t respect the “order” of this society, and therefore he has to go. He wants Jackie to kill him, and this violence will remind everyone else to stay in line. Ring any bells??

6:50 – George: “You never did a job like this because you never COULD do a job like this, and that’s why you’re gonna do this one.” Society knows it’s losing its grip on forcing Jackie to conform, and they’ve reached a tipping point.

7:00 – Jackie protests, “I got no guts” aka he doesn’t have the heart for it, and George backhands him. Comply/conform to “being a man” or you will receive violence.

Worse than that, at 7:28, George, “If I find out that you welched on me, that you chickened out… you’re dead.” Society won’t let Jackie keep not conforming to who they want him to be.

This is what our society has done all along, visited violence upon anyone who doesn’t conform… especially those who are assigned male at birth and display anything other than the “accepted” behaviors and mannerisms society has deemed okay for men.

This is why we trans women are so often the victims of violence, it’s this very thinking. And we see it here with Jackie, who doesn’t want to be the man society says he should be.

8:17 – Jackie picks up the gun and looks at it, throws it down. He considers what society wants, rejects it. But how’s he going to survive?

8:33 – He looks in the mirror the first time, he sees himself reflected as the “unmanly” person George says he is. Chastises himself for not being who George/society wants him to be. Tries to talk himself into doing what George wants. Fails.

8:58 – Jackie, to his reflection: “I wish I could trade you and I could use another model.” He wishes he was different and not the way he is, literally wishing he could trade his body for another one!

He then tries to convince himself this is just the way the world is and there’s nothing he can do about it, which is exactly how a lot of trans people (myself included) try to convince ourselves we’re not the trans person we already know in our hearts that we are.

9:50 – He goes back to the mirror and admits he’s not a killer aka not the man society wants him to be. But if he doesn’t conform, he’s going to BE killed. But if he does go through with it, he feels he’ll also die aka it will kill the real him.

10:33 – Jackie: “Boy I wish I could trade you in.” Again, he’s wishing he were an entirely different person.

10:42 – Jackie: “No matches. Cigarettes and no matches, that’s me all over.” Regardless of your thoughts on smoking, it’s often done for pleasure (especially in the 60s). This is showing you Jackie doesn’t have what he needs for even brief, momentary pleasure.

Jackie: “That’s Jackie Rhodes, the halfway boy.”

THE
HALFWAY
BOY.

“That’s the story of my life.”

This one’s pretty self-explanatory!

10:54 – Smoke wafts at him from behind. Something back there, in his reflection aka deep inside his subconscious, has access to what he needs to find pleasure in his life.

11:00 – He looks back to the mirror, and sees the him he wishes he could be. Confidence and strength, the real him (her). It terrifies him. He tries to run, but the reflection demands his attention.

As a reminder, if you haven’t read the trans tuesday on PHOTOS AND REFLECTIONS, and how difficult and complicated they can be for trans people, as we go our whole lives without seeing ourselves in them, check it out.

11:30 – Jackie worries he’s lost all his marbles, but the Reflection tells him he hasn’t lost them yet, and the Reflection means to see that he KEEPS them. The reflection, the true Jackie, is trying to HELP.

11:53 – Reflection: “I’m part of you, Jackie. Another part of you. Don’t you even remember me? You used to know me, a long time ago, Jackie. A very long time ago you were up for grabs. You coulda gone one way or the other. You could have gone my way or your way. You went your way. You know what that means, Jackie?”

This is an excellent description of who someone reached a point where they almost accepted their transness, but our of fear continued pretending to be cis instead.

12:55 – Jackie refutes the reflection and runs away. But he doesn’t… leave? Instead he runs to the closet.

T H E   C L O S E T.

But his reflection is in there too. Even when you’re in the closet, the truth is in there with you. It’s always with us, as we see when Jackie sees it again in the bathroom and out in the hall.

14:13 – Jackie: “Now I get it. I’m talking to myself.” Reflection: “That’s just who you ARE talking to. Part of yourself. The part you never let come out.”  I  MEAN.

14:45 – Reflection tells Jackie if he goes through with the hit, it will kill them both. Both the poor excuse for a man he’s tried to be, AND the real him. Jackie knows this, and that’s why he’s been so nervous.

15:12 – Jackie says if you’re me and I made all the wrong choices, didn’t you make the wrong choices too? Reflection: “Every time I tried to talk to you, you listened to somebody else. That was your mistake.”

When we don’t listen to our subconscious, to our hearts, to what we know to be true, and suppress them and instead listen to society’s ideas of who we should be, that’s its own (very real) kind of death.

15:28 – Jackie: “I was a runt, a skinny little runt. If you want to join a street gang, you gotta go along with them. You back down, they give you business.” He had to try to conform to society just to survive, under threat of violence.

Reflection: “Yeah, you went along with them. And you made me go along, too.” Even though Reflection/true Jackie hasn’t been able to be out living her life, she’s been riding shotgun with all of Jackie’s decisions.

That speaks a lot to how complicated and weird THE PAST (and why it haunts us) is.

15:50 – They discuss all the things Jackie did that he never wanted to do, all because the gang/society told him that was what was required of him. And he didn’t have the confidence or ability to stand up and say that’s not who he is.

And there were consequences, he got caught and spent 11 months in reform school. Aka conforming to what society wants made him feel trapped, even as a kid. This has always hounded him. Nobody BECOMES trans, if you’re trans you’ve always been trans.

16:39 – Reflection: “You got less time than you think. But you never had time. … Six months later you were in jail again. And that parole officer couldn’t help you any more than Janey Reardon could.”

Let me here point out that this woman from Jackie’s past, that he has a wistful fondness for, Janey Reardron, HAS SAME INITIALS AS JACKIE RHOADES. Further, just how close are “Jackie” and “Janey?” Hmmmmmmm.

17:14 – Jackie: “She was a nice kid.” Reflection: “She was a beautiful woman. She tried to set you straight. I loved her, Jackie. I loved Janey Reardon.” The reflection IS Janey Reardon, the person Jackie Rhoades could have (and almost did) become.

17:38 – Reflection: “I needed her, Jackie. So did you. I tried to tell you how much we needed her. … Two years we spent in the pen on that one. And when we got out, Janey Reardon had gotten married and moved away.”

Reflection: “She walked out of your life, Jackie. Our of our life. YOU CHEATED ME OUT OF HER.” This is almost just clear as day, isn’t it? And speaks of the journey of self-acceptance and self-actualization in the same way the Matrix movies did.

The “romance” there wasn’t between Neo and Trinity, but Neo’s ability to love HIMSELF enough to rebuke all of what society said to exist as his true self. It plays out the same way here!

18:05 – Reflection: “You wouldn’t wanna have a girl, would you Jackie? Somebody sweet and pretty, somebody who would love you? Somebody who would be kind and gentle with you? You don’t need that, do you Jackie?”

aka Jackie’s been refusing to treat himself with sweetness, kindness, gentleness, and love. This is what denying our true selves is, in every way. It’s an act of violence against ourselves.

Jackie loses his cool, gets angry and upset, why is this happening to him? “What do you want from me?” Basically the same thing many trans people ask themselves when figuring this all out. The true us is in there and won’t leave us alone. What on earth do they want?

18:34 – Reflection: “I want to take over, Jackie. I wanna call the shots. I want you to let me out. I want a chance to live. I want to live with all the guts and goodness you left behind.” What was good and left behind? JANEY REARDON.

Reflection: “I wanna live the dreams you dreamed and never had the guts to live.”

P H E W

18:57 – Jackie: “I’m calling the shots. And neither you or anybody else is telling Jackie Rhoades what to do.” We keep trying to deny our true selves, but that doesn’t make the truth any less true. It just makes us miserable. On cue:

The phone immediately rings and it’s George checking to see if Jackie carried out the hit yet, and Jackie is instantly subdued as we’re reminded he’s NOT doing what HE wants, but what society wants.

Jackie grabs his coat to go, and Reflection is seemingly missing. Jackie wants to see how he looks, being the person society wants him to be, BUT THE REFLECTION IS MISSING, because he is not that person.

20:02 – Reflection returns. “You go out that door, you’re finished. We’re both finished. That’s the door to nowhere.” Reflection again pleads to be let out, to take over, to finally become the real person he’s always been inside.

20:16 – Jackie: “I got everything I want.” Reflection: “You got nothing. You got nothing but a pain inside. …You got nothing. You ARE nothing. It’s time to be SOMETHING.” This is the dissociation of being trans, the complete disconnect from reality and our true lives.

20:47 – Jackie: “You’re a liar!” He flips the mirror, but even as it spins, Reflection remains, getting bigger and closer with each spin.

21:14 – George returns to deliver consequences/violence because Jackie didn’t comply with his orders. George: “Get up little man.” Denigrating his manhood for not conforming.

21:55 – Jackie quits the gang, because Reflection has taken over. He’s becoming his true self. He speaks with confidence. He’s self-assured.

22:12 – Society can’t believe it, and Jackie hits him a few times/fights back. This is not the violence society wants him to commit, but self-defense and fighting for his right to exist as his true self (which he wouldn’t have to do were society not violently oppressing him).

22:34 – Jackie kicks him out, and George is cowed. Jackie removes the ammunition from the gun and tosses it back to Society, refusing their orders, their violence, and REMOVES THE AMMUNITION aka their power over him.

22:52 – Jackie tosses the bullets in the trash. The very things society used to keep him in line are literally garbage. He won’t keep them.

23:01 – He calls to CHECK OUT OF THE OPPRESSIVE ROOM he was trapped in (he’s made the decision to transition), tells them his name is… different! His transition came with a name change, as is wont to happen.

He now goes by JOHN RHODES. What’s even closer than Jackie/Janey? John/Jane. Only one slight vowel shift between them.

23:33 – John: “Now maybe we stop biting our nails.” No longer anxious, oppressed, trapped, the nervous habits cease. He is calmer. At peace. (I have a trans lady friend who said she bit her nails all the time pre-transition… but not anymore!)

23:46 – John looks back at the mirror… and the true him is all he sees. He closes the door, leaving the oppression behind him.

And if you don’t understand the confidence shift that has happened, please see the trans tuesday on that very topic, CONFIDENCE 2: INTO THE UNKNOWN aka WHAT IS HAPPENING aka A WHOLE NEW WORLD.

23:50 – Rod: “Exit Mr. John Rhodes, formerly a reflection in a mirror, a fragment of someone else’s conscience, a wishful thinker made out of glass, but now made out of flesh, and on his way to join the company of men.”

Did Rod have a blind spot when it came to LGBTQIA+ rights? Maybe. But look at the compassion, kindness, acceptance, and rejection of bigotry that permeates all his work. I choose to give him the benefit of the doubt. I think he did what he could given the state of tv at the time.

Did Rod know trans people and wanted to write something that spoke to their lived experience? Quite possibly. But it could also be a very long string of very specific coincidences. But how can that be, when so much of it is so (very) specific to the trans experience?

It’s because TRANS PEOPLE ARE HUMAN BEINGS. We all deal with the same shit as humans, though the details may vary. TRANS STORIES ARE HUMAN STORIES. You can identify with us a lot more than you think. Give it a shot. We’re worth it.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF REAL GENIUS, part 4

Welcome to Trans Tuesday! Today we’re going to see what it means to self-actualize, talk about self-hating trans people, and touch your heart as we wrap up with THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF REAL GENIUS, part 4!

PART 1, with much needed context about writer PJ Torokvei and the time this movie was written and filmed in.

PART 2, where we talk characters and begin discussion of the movie proper, which establishes how its particular allegory works.

PART 3, where you really get to see some of the genius (pun probably intended, let’s be honest) stuff the allegory is telling you!

46:04 – Despite not being understood by his parents, Mitch wants to go home because when he came the closest he’s ever been to being happy, he got yelled at for it and saw a man get made fun of for wearing makeup. 

He’s scared. He just wants to go back to the way things were, when he had no idea you could be anything other than what society told you that you were, because this way is difficult and painful.

Remember Neo in the first Matrix? “Why is this happening to me? What’d I do? I’m nobody. I didn’t do anything. I’m going to die.” Nobody asks to be trans, it’s foisted upon us by genetics or fate or the universe or whatever deities you believe in. 

And again, can’t tell you how many trans people go through that. Why did I have to be trans? I don’t want to be trans! This is scary and hard and society will hate me. Why can’t I just be “normal?” 

47:15 – Mitch’s call was recorded by ultra conformo Kent, and he’s publicly humiliated for being a man who has feelings. His mom tells him he has to be “her little soldier” and his dad says he hopes nobody “saw him crying.” It’s toxic masculinity allllll over.

JUST GO CONFORM AND BE A MAN, MITCH. SUCK IT UP. STOP HAVING FEELINGS AND BEING ANYTHING OTHER THAN WHAT SOCIETY SAYS A MAN CAN BE.

48:27 – Chris catches Mitch packing to leave, and tells him that if he does he’ll “miss the fun.” If Mitch gives up on accepting his true self, he will never find the trans joy that exists on the other side.

48:40 – Mitch says he needed Chris’ help and all Chris wanted to do was party. Chris says he was just trying to help him relax (about society’s cis binary rules, so he can fully explore his true identity). And it worked! Jordan came in and a gender nonconforming woman was the answer to relieving his dysphoria.

48:55 – Mitch thought Pacific Tech would be different, but it’s the same as high school. They’re both social hierarchies with Mitch at the bottom for not conforming. Even when pretending to be a cis guy, I was bullied and shunned through all of school and childhood.

Because even in that costume I didn’t know how to wear, playing a part I didn’t know how to play, trying to be someone I wasn’t… I wasn’t who society said a man was, someone I could never be. And the bullies see that, and use it against you.

49:10 – Chris explains how he used to be just like Mitch, and his mother dressed him the same way. Chris had all the same “male” expectations laid upon him by the cis people in his life. 

49:24 – One night Chris had a vision – Hollyfeld. In the closet. And he talked to him, and found out Hollyfeld used to be where Chris is now. But he buckled under the pressure, because there was nothing more to his life than what society expected of him. 

Hollyfeld didn’t see that there was more to life than living up to society’s false expectations. And that by doing so he was hurting other people (like him, other trans people) because he kept himself in the closet. 

And this is what changed Chris, and why he transitioned and is the person he is now. He didn’t want to end up that way. And Chris tells Mitch he’s going to end up the same way if he doesn’t wake up and choose a better life. I fuckin’ told you Hollyfeld was Mitch’s future self!

Also please note I don’t think this movie is saying that if you’re trans you have to come out. As a trans woman in the 80s, PJ was intimately aware of how dangerous and difficult it can be.

But this is also acknowledging that the more of us who stay in the closet, the less of us it appears there are. Which means less people see us, learn about us, are inspired by us to come out for themselves. And the more of us that come out can increase societal acceptance.

It’s definitely a double-edged sword. Coming out puts us in danger, but staying in the closet makes the entire trans community’s advancement more difficult. No one must come out, but for those of us who it’s (relatively) safe for, we do have some obligation to each other. Matrix Reloaded deals with this as one of the big themes it tackles.

But I also think this is PJ working through the issue herself, trying to convince herself to come out. She knew it would not only help her, but other trans people. But society doesn’t let coming out be something that exists only on our own terms, does it?

It would take her another two decades to get there. But get there she did.

54:24 – Susan: “Can you hammer a six inch spike through a board with your penis?” Chris: “Not right now.” Okay, listen. Listen. He was just hitting on her, and she asks him if his penis is all manly and he replies… no?! His response is funny, and sometimes a joke is just a joke, but this is the second joke about how this apparent cis man, who is into ladies (as PJ was!) either does not have a penis, or does not have one that functions the way you’d expect (hey, HRT definitely does that). I’M JUST SAYING.

55:09 – Hathaway says Chris is no longer of any use to him, and he won’t allow him to graduate. Chris says he’ll go to the dean and tell him about his work on the laser, which should merit a degree on its own. Hathaway reminds him… “who’s he going to believe, you or me?” And note the wording when Chris said he could pass Hathaway’s class. “Even if you pass, you don’t pass.”

The cis white man in charge is telling Chris he controls his future, and even if he passed (as a cis woman) he wouldn’t pass, meaning Hathaway would out him. And as a reminder, back when this movie was written and made, passing as cis and disappearing into the woodwork (“woodworking”) was required to transition! See MISGENDERING AND PASSING and TRANSMEDICALISM.

Who will society believe, the weirdo non-conformist who says they’re a woman despite having apparent mismatched secondary sexual characteristics, or the entire cis white man-led history saying we are all defined by our genitals at birth? See TRANS HISTORY for discussion on the presumed cisgenderness throughout all of history, and the problems it causes us in the present.

57:48 – During his plans to get back at Hathaway, Chris pretends to be conforming to gain Hathaway’s trust and acceptance. This is different than him throwing away the popcorn, because he’s not actually trying to appease anyone here. It’s a ruse.

58:05 – You can see he’s still got signs of his true self there with the slippers. He’s letting Hathaway know he can play the game if he has to, but his spirit and will can’t be crushed.

58:36 – As Chris and Mitch work on not being entirely shunned by society, Hollyfeld is still there behind them, looming in the closet, reminding them of what awaits them if they actually conform and reject their truth.

1:00:28 – Mitch is dreaming… about being shoved in a mailbox (again) by men who are mad he won’t conform. The closer we get to actualizing, the scarier it gets to think about how the people in our lives are going to react. 

From the letter we discussed in part 1, we know PJ clearly had these same well-founded fears. Which absolutely, devastatingly came to pass the second she came out.

1:02:00 – They meet Hollyfeld, who’s been watching them. He’s used his skills to enter a contest over a million times, but it’s not breaking the rules. “They set up the rules, and I’ve come to realize I have certain materialistic needs.”

Going back to PJ’s letter again, it’s bullshit to have to “live as a woman” by society’s rigid definition of what that is, just to access the medical care we need. Or to pretend to be attracted to men when you’re not. But if that’s what we have to do to fool them into thinking we’re conformos who’ll uphold the gender binary, we’ll do it.

Us having to conform to crap like that just to get the care we need has some bad bad consequences, which we’ll get to shortly.

1:02:32 – Hollyfeld, for no real reason, says Mitch is going to grow five inches in the next year. Which makes no sense until you remember that earlier Chris made a joke about how of course Mitch wasn’t looking for Hollyfeld’s clothes in the closet…

…because Hollyfeld was much bigger and they wouldn’t fit. If Mitch stays on this path, in a year he will have grown into the man in the closet. I TOLD YOU HOLLYFELD WAS MITCH’S FUTURE. Ahem.

1:03:05 – Let us just pretend Sherry did not say she was waiting three years (since Mitch was TWELVE??) to be “old enough” to try and seduce? HE IS FIFTEEN NOW great googly moogly. This is… very very cringe. I’m gonna presume one of the other writers was responsible for that mega-problematic moment.

But note that Sherry, the only other woman besides Jordan in the movie, wants Mitch. She previously liked Chris and all the other “smart people” in the vast minority, the metaphor for trans people.  Remember this for when we get to the end.

1:04:29 – Mitch didn’t want to sex her up. So he goes to… Jordan? Who he does want to sex up but she is 19 and he is 15 yiiiiiikes more cringe. 

The point, though, is that here Mitch is more comfortable with a gender non-conforming woman. He’s more comfortable with her now than he’s ever been. Again, remember this when we get to the end. Is this kiss, like every kiss in all Matrix movies, one of self-acceptance? Maybe!

1:05:13 – As they’re leaving the lab, one of the other students working on the laser says “Let’s go, girls.” Another asks what he means by that, and he says “it’s a figure of speech.” Is it? IS IT THOUGH? 

Because while “guys” and “dude,” words for men, have certainly become standard for applying to people of all genders in our patriarchal society (see TRANS REP IN MEDIA 2024 for more on that), the reverse is never true. 

Nobody, least of all a cis man, says “let’s go girls” to a room of other cis men. Unless, perhaps, they’re gay. Queer. Or unless, perhaps, they’re not cis men but trans women. I’M JUST SAYING.

1:05:53 – Kent, again, directly sabotages other trans people for his own personal gain. Self-hating trans people are the worst.

1:14:14 – As soon as Hathaway surprisingly gets what he wants from Chris, Kent is of no use to him and is abandoned. The bigots don’t care about you, you damn pick-me fools. They will abandon you the second you are of no use to furthering their goals.

Help leopards, get your face eaten.

1:15:13 – Chris: “Let’s get a burger.” Sometimes a burger is just a burger… buuuuuut also in the scene with the pool party in the auditorium, back at 40:28, I told you to put a pin in that note. Do you remember it? Chris told one of the women to not eat something because it would make her breasts bigger. 

What was she about to eat? Say it with me, babes:

A BURGER.

Weird thing for an apparent cis man to do now if it’s gonna make boobs grow, isn’t it? Sure seems like this is Chris helping Mitch start HRT!

I’M JUST SAYING.

1:16:10 – Lazlo appears. Chris: “I’m so glad you came out.” CAME. OUT. Lazlo, Mitch’s future, is on his way out of the closet! Chris: “Want a hamburger?” Hey, you’re out of the closet, time to grow some boobs, yeah? Come on! It’s right there!

1:17:05 – Chris and Mitch have conformed and helped Hathaway achieve the goals that will bring him more power and wealth. Hollyfeld lets them know that it’s going to be used to hurt other people, just like his conforming and forcing himself into the closet was used to hurt others. 

By getting Hathaway’s approval, they have aided him in hurting others in the future. That was something they never intended. They’d been thinking only about making life easier for themselves.

By conforming to what society wants (“living as a woman” for a year before you can get access to care, pretending to be attracted to men), even to get something we need, we are hurting others. Because that reinforces that it’s the way it should be done.

And then other trans people who need access to that care will have to go through the same thing, and it could (and likely will) hurt them, too.

And I don’t think this is saying trans people back in the 80s shouldn’t have done what they needed to do to get the medical care they needed. The point is that the system itself is harmful and needs to change. We shouldn’t have to hurt others to help ourselves.

1:20:35 – Kent gets a literal “come to Jesus” moment, which is remarkable when you remember all the Christianity allusions in the names of Chris, Mitch, Jordan, and Hollyfeld. They are literally bringing him closer to them, as in – away from being a self-hating trans person and toward accepting himself, and breaking his support of the false cis binary matrix of society!

1:21:01 – Even Kent the conformo is surprised to learn that working to help the system, in order to get its rewards, has hurt others. He didn’t realize that just doing what was asked of him could affect others. 

1:23:-47 – When they get the fake IDs, Chris: “Mine looks like him, and his looks like me.” Another nod for you that, hey, they’re alike. They’re both trans people. And Mitch is moving closer to Chris, transitioning and being an out trans person.

All the subterfuge with the plane and the laser is a metaphor for Mitch and Chris finding a way to change the system so nobody gets hurt.

1:31:28 – Kent, waking up to his own transness, doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, and is looking for answers… and is reading about schizophrenia. I’ll remind you again that being trans used to be classified as a mental illness and you should read up on TRANSMEDICALISM (and WPATH version 1) for more on that bullshit. 

That was the prevailing thought among the medical field at the time this movie was made and released, and how fucking sad is it that if you wondered if you might be trans, this is where you’d look for answers? It’s terrible but also do you see how trans this is?

1:32:05 – We see mega-conformo Kent is wearing a dickie. Even his conforming wasn’t the true him, it was literally a costume he put on because it’s what was expected of him!

Again, the false binary cis status quo also hurts cis people and forces you to wear a costume and perform your gender a certain way. It’s toxic masculinity again. It’s “boys don’t cry.” It’s “men can only display anger and lust.” It’s “women have narrow shoulders and thin waists and shaved legs.” And on and on.

But as a self-hating trans person, someone who hid their own transness and became a vocal transphobe and oppressed trans people to show how “not trans they really were,” this shows you Kent is dropping the costume he felt he had to wear, and the role he had to play. He has moved closer to self-actualized and out trans people like Chris!

He’s told by “Jesus” to wait by Hathaway’s house for a sign. With “moving toward Christianity” being the metaphor for moving toward transness, what do you think that means? We’ll get there soon!

1:33:50 – Confirming what I surmised about Gene before, here’s your proof that he is in fact trans like Chris and Mitch, as evidenced by their matching bunny slippers. They do not conform in the same way. Gene may only show a little of it now, but it’s there. An egg, perhaps finally beginning to crack.

1:37:28 – Kent gets his first taste of what’s to come, as he is now in proximity to… the thing that inconveniences Hathaway. Do you remember what the popcorn was a metaphor for? Transness. He eats a piece! He’s accepting himself!

1:38:29 – …and it carries him right to Chris and Mitch. Accepting your transness carries you to community with other trans people! Look how Mitch and Chris were worried about him as he approached the house, and then helped him when he needed it. And he’s happy to see them!

As soon as Kent cast off the false shell of the person he was pretending to be, even if he hadn’t yet figured out who he is, they were there to literally pick him up and help carry the weight. Just like Chris did for Mitch when they first met (not literally in that case, tho).

1:40:06 – Hollyfeld returns. Look at him. By helping others not conform, it’s helped him break out of his own conformity and performance of the cis binary. Mitch’s future is now one of nonconformity. Mitch will transition, and find joy. He will be out of the closet and free.

1:41:34 – Hollyfeld says it’s “getting weird around here.” Chris: “Absolutely.” Jordan: “I didn’t notice.” Mitch: “I like it.” Jordan didn’t notice because she’s always been “weird.” Chris has embraced it. And so have Mitch and Hollyfeld.

And here’s why I told you to pay attention to the two women. My read is that Jordan is representative of Mitch’s first steps to figuring out who he is: gender nonconformity. And he is with her now. He is a gender nonconforming woman.

We know Sherry, the arch feminine (in this movie) always moved toward the fully out and self-accepted trans person. She wanted Chris, and she wanted Mitch but he wasn’t ready.

But Hollyfeld, Mitch’s future, is. And that’s why Sherry is now with Hollyfeld here at the end! Mitch’s future is attaining full self-actualization as the trans woman he truly is.

I do not believe the movie is saying you’re not a woman if you’re not high femme. I think it was just made in the ‘80s and uses broad archetypes of girly-girls and tomboys to make its point about where Mitch got to, how he got there and where he’ll end up, by staying out of the closet.

1:41:38 – Look at the happiness that accepting trans joy brings to everyone when we don’t let the “inconvenience” of our existence to cis society be more important than living our lives as our authentic selves. 

1:42:32 – Look at all the popcorn around the house. I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it again, the more of us that come out, the more of us that see what’s possible, that trans joy exists, and believe we can do it too. Hathaway covers his nose so he doesn’t have to smell it.

TOO BAD. SMELL OUR HOT BUTTERY TRANSNESS, BIGOTS. 

We’re not going anywhere.

Remember that PJ was deeply closeted when this was written. It would be twenty years before she felt she could come out to the world, and once she did it seemingly cost her her career and quite possibly her life.

I see Real Genius almost as PJ’s message not to just every other trans person out there, but to herself. She was examining what being trans meant to her, to the world, and trying to figure out what to do about it. Even the title is a metaphor for it, because if really smart people (geniuses) are the movie’s metaphor for trans people, the title is Real Transness. 

Hey, I’m trans. It’s real. Trans people are real. It’s time to be me.

I’m so so glad she finally got to a point where she felt able to be herself.

Reject conformity. Reject the cisgender binary matrix. Find and be your true self. And fix the system so nobody else gets hurt along the way. This is the way to joy. For all of us.

This is the message in Real Genius. Self-acceptance. Help those who come after. Make the world better for everyone. It’s beautiful. 

Thank you, PJ, for your heart and courage, for your humor and your real genius.

And for paving the way for trans women screenwriters like me.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF REAL GENIUS, part 3

Welcome to Trans Tuesday! This week we’re talking about the dream (THE! DREAM!) and pools and makeup and self-discovery and, if we’re lucky, self-acceptance in THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF REAL GENIUS, part 3!

As a reminder, you need to have the context from PART 1 about writer PJ Torokvei and the time this movie was written and filmed in.

And of course, PART 2, where we began examining the allegory itself, which includes all the setup you need that makes the rest of the allegory work.

19:40 –  Mitch is in a sweater… and then falls into a pile of ice. He was somehow prepared for what was waiting for him, without even knowing it, just from one conversation with Chris. But look at Chris now… still not dressed how you’d expect. He’s prepared for the cold! But not conforming.

20:24 – While Chris is listing off his jokey problems, did you catch the, uh… gender nonconforming one? “We had one entry for the Madame Curie look-alike contest, and he was disqualified later.” Do you see the transness baked into this movie? Right under the surface?

22:28 – Kent, king conformo, calls Mitch and Chris “degenerates,” even while he was the one found naked and alone with a bowl of Jello. So there’s something “off” about Kent, even though he’s the most adamant about being who Hathaway and society want him to be. Again, he’s a self-hating trans person, and seeing those who’ve embraced their true selves and found joy disgusts him (because he’s disgusted with himself for not having the courage to do the same).

22:31 – Even when sleeping, Mitch conforms to the “dress code” of men, pants and a shirt with a collar in man-coded colors. He then sees Hollyfeld again, and checks the closet more thoroughly but still can’t find him.

24:19 – Look how Chris sleeps. Almost naked, comfortable with himself, and still not conforming to what society expects. In every aspect of his life, he is true to himself.

24:36 – Jordan finds Mitch in the men’s bathroom. Even here, in a place only for men, he cannot escape the woman that captivates him. What do you think that means? She made him a sweater, the thing he was wearing when they met, that prepared him for the world outside. She is helping him with that preparation.

25:08 – Jordan tells him if he ever needs to talk she’s only a couple doors down and never sleeps, so she’s always there for him if he needs her. This is, sort of, waking up to the real you inside and knowing the real you is always in there. Always. Whenever you need her.

25:49 – Chris: “Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?” Mitch laughs, says no. Chris: “Why am I the only person that has that dream?”

This dream is one of the most trans things about the entire movie. He sees himself in fancy robes (not naked like everyone else), is atop a pyramid (he’s a focal point), and naked women are throwing pickles at him.

In the present, pickles are a thing with many trans women. A common part of HRT for many of us is testosterone blockers, which deplete the salt in our bodies.

And so the body craves more salt, and that leads to pickles. It’s such a thing we make constant memes and jokes about it. Did HRT in the 80s do the same? Does the “trans women and pickles” thing stretch back that far? I don’t know. It feels unlikely, since community with other trans people was much harder to find back in the 80s, due to the lack of internet but also the way we were often required to hide our transness and socially isolate ourselves (see TRANSMEDICALISM for more).

And one horrid side-effect of that (or maybe even part of the intended effect, if you think about it for a few minutes) is that we were almost entirely unable to form communities, or a shared culture. There very much is a trans culture now, and trans subcultures in trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people. And that allows things like memes and jokes specific to common experiences to emerge. Back in the 80s, that would have been impossible in more than very small in-person gatherings, which were also likely few and far between and difficult to locate, if they existed at all.

So my gut says pickles being here is a coincidence, and probably only because “pickle” is a funny word, but… what does naked women throwing small, phallic objects at a person dressed differently from them, who has been elevated to a place of prominence and focus (a cis white man), say to you metaphorically?

Because it very much reads to me like someone’s subconscious trying to tell them they’re a transgender woman and not a cisgender man. “Look at us, naked and honest with ourselves, with nothing to hide, throwing away a phallus that we do not want.”

You do not need to have or want bottom surgery to be a trans woman, but at the time this movie was made? You absolutely did if you wanted to transition.

So when Chris asks, “why am I the only one who has that dream?” it speaks to how it must have felt to realize your transness back then.

We had little to no cultural footprint, and most people had likely never met or even heard of trans people back then and knew nothing about them.

So realizing you’re not like everyone else, and not the gender you were assigned at birth, very likely made you feel extra isolated and alone. Like you were somehow the only person like that. This entire dream screams transness all the way through.

Mitch: “Did you know there’s a guy living in our closet?” Chris confirms he sees Hollyfeld too, and is well acquainted with him, knows his name. Mitch asks why Hollyfeld keeps going in the closet, and Chris responds by asking Mitch why he goes into the closet. 

Of course Chris knows Hollyfeld, he knows what it’s like to be in the closet before coming out or self-accepting, and at one time that was his potential future too. His directly asking Mitch why he goes in there is another huge clue to what the movie’s trying to tell you with its trans allegory. Why are you hiding yourself?

27:32 – In the “going to school” montage, we see Mitch is trying to figure out why there’s a guy in the closet. He’s looking at him through a reflection. A reflection. Mitch is seeing what his own future is going to be, pretending to be a cis man in a closet. And it’s miserable.

I’ve talked so many times about how REFLECTIONS AND PHOTOS affect trans people, and they’re also heavily used in the allegory of The Matrix movies.

27:41 – Mitch tries to follow Hollyfeld out the door, but as soon as he opens it Jordan comes in. What will prevent him from following in the path of that potential future self, and a life in the closet? Paying attention to the non-conforming woman he can’t get away from.

28:11 – Mitch starts dressed in his suit, ultra-male. Then he’s dressed just like Hathaway, trying to be like him. Trying so hard to be cis, to be accepted.

But then his clothing gradually starts to get more casual, and then he’s even wearing the sweater Jordan made him. He’s moving along the path!

28:34 – While everyone else is recording the lectures, Mitch is still going to class. He’s not conforming, which follows along with his style of dress loosening up. He’s already starting to do what he thinks is right, and not what society expects.

28:57 – Mitch drops his papers and Hollyfeld helps him collect them, they share a moment of recognition. Is this Mitch finally realizing they’re not so different, that this could be the future that awaits him?

The song that plays over the montage where Mitch becomes more of his true self is “I’m Falling,” credited to The C.S. Angels, who were only called that in the US, and were The Comsat Angels everywhere else. Have you listened to the lyrics of this song? ‘Cause… uh. Phew.

I never thought this could happen
I never thought I could feel this way
Until this strange reaction today
You give me a new sensation
In a place that has no name
Something tells me I’ll never feel the same
Now it’s all changed
What have you done to me
I’m falling endlessly
I began to slip, I did not know what was coming next
Even so I was not prepared for this
I used to think nothing mattered
Now I see possibilities
You showed a new direction to me
And it’s all changed

If you don’t think that reads like a trans awakening, I don’t know what to tell you. Now PJ did not direct this movie (or produce as far as I know), and most likely had no choice over the use of this song. 

Further, it does not appear that any of The Comsat Angels are trans (though referring back to TRANS HISTORY 1 and 2 you never know who is trans and doesn’t know it yet, or who is trans and can’t be out, etc).

But what I think is more likely is this coincidentally perfectly fits the theme of Mitch’s trans awakening because any kind of moment of deep self revelation in any human shares a lot of similarities. Again, trans stories are human stories. We’re all connected.

So I don’t feel that song was likely picked because of how trans it reads, but rather the trans allegory of awakening and self-acceptance so closely matches so many other awakenings that we humans go through, cis and trans alike.

30:24 – There’s a shot from inside the closet. Here again we see the skeleton inside. It’s there, haunting Mitch. Living in the closet is indeed a kind of death. A death of our true selves, a waking death that keeps us from truly living our lives.

32:35 – Hollyfeld lives in the closet alone. It’s dark, it’s dirty, it’s filled with cobwebs, it’s a lonely existence cut off from the world. His autograph machine is filling out contest forms, he has to game the system to find a way to exist in the world. Trans life in a nutshell, because society makes it so difficult for us to exist (thanks to bigoted Republican gas station hot dogs).

33:18 – Hathaway wants to know what that smell is. He hates the popcorn. Here’s something that brings Chris joy and is barely a minor inconvenience to Hathaway, but it must be eliminated because he doesn’t like it.

In my book on The Matrix, in the first movie I discuss Agent Smith’s speech about the smell of humans. It’s an inconvenience he wanted removed, because his inconvenience was more important to him than our right to exist and be happy.

And Chris tosses the popcorn aside. He may have self-accepted, but he’ll also do what he has to in order to be “accepted” by people who don’t really even care about him. So part of him, in some small way, is still conforming. 

This speaks to things like trans women in the 80s having to pretend to be attracted to men, even if they weren’t, just to be “allowed” to access medical transition care. And as we know from that article after PJ’s death, she was not attracted to men. Did she have to pretend like she did to access her care? Did she refuse to lie and thus had to wait to access care until cis gatekeepers got their shit together? We don’t know. But it was clearly on PJ’s mind in the early 80s.

34:06 – Hathaway talks about his wishes for what Chris would become and says “…and then-” Chris cuts him off with, “I got a haircut.” Society wants us to be cis, but trans people go and change our presentation to suit ourselves instead. Do you see how this is so very trans?!

35:53 – Hathaway says Chris’ attitude is “distracting Mitch” and it is therefore a problem. Stop showing Mitch that he can be trans too!

Chris mentions he’s leaving school soon, but Hathaway reminds him he can’t graduate without passing Hathaway’s class. Hathaway is the gatekeeper and will prevent Chris from moving on in his life if he doesn’t get what he wants.

Again, cis people are the gatekeepers of everything trans people need in this world… access to HRT or surgeries, legal name/gender marker changes, equal rights, living our lives without cis violence, and more. The Matrix also talks about this a lot. Directly.

You can read about my own experiences with cis gatekeeping and how I had to “prove” I was a woman just to begin medical transition in TRANS KIDS AND THE INTAKE EXAM.

38:59 – Mitch is getting frustrated, so Chris uses the work to lead Mitch to freedom, relaxation, a party. Joy. Chris believes that by working within the system (even if it means tossing his popcorn away… pretending to be attracted to men, for example), you can achieve what you want. And back then, that wasn’t wrong. It sucked, but it was what you had to do.

40:24 – Even though Chris has jumped in the water and is soaked, and is hitting on women… he has not taken his shirt off! Like Neo wouldn’t in The Matrix. Like I wouldn’t if I could at all avoid it for all my life pre-transition, even when swimming, because my flat chest spiked my dysphoria.

40:28 – A lady in a bikini is going to eat a cheeseburger, and Chris tells her to stop. “Don’t you know that eating that can give you large breasts?” Is this is a joke, or is it something more? Put a pin in it for a bit.

40:48 and 42:08 – Not only has Hathaway conformed and been rewarded for it, but he’s found a way to still wear makeup within the acceptable bounds of society for men (being on television). This is kind of what Chris is doing, but to more of an extreme.

Hathaway wants Chris to “be himself,” but only so much as it still fits within the bonds of the cis binary laid out for us. But note this is a false option, as even Hathaway can’t get away with it as we’ll see in a minute. You can see this also in THE TRANS ALLEGORY OF I SAW THE TV GLOW where there are tons of motivational posters and slogans about being true to yourself, that all of us are bombarded with for all our lives. But as soon as trans people do that, society says “no not like that.”

Also in here, note that Kent directly sells out Mitch and Chris, literally turning on trans people like him to gain favor with the white cis men in power. Thanks so much, Caitlyn Jenner and Brianna Wu, may you step on a lego with bare feet every day for the rest of your lives.

42:49 – Despite wanting to enjoy himself, Mitch is apart and alone even at a party full of people. Again like Neo in The Matrix. Like me at every party or social gathering for my entire life until I transitioned. Because to be perceived means having to put the mask back on, to be seen as and try to play the part of someone that it hurts us to be.

42:42 – Jordan arrives and Mitch lights up with a smile. There’s definitely something to this non-conforming woman he keeps seeing.

43:22 – Jordan has gotten Mitch more into the party than before, but he wants to know why she’s not “necking”. Her emphatic reply: “I’m not gay.” To me this speaks to the way our sexuality can confuse our understanding of our own gender.

This calls directly back to the letter about PJ Torokvei, and her saying she couldn’t be a gay man because that’s not who she was. See SEXUALITY IS NOT GENDER.

Jordan explains how she’s “different” and guys are a little afraid of her (remember Mitch saying other kids were intimidated by him?), and if she stopped to think about it she’d be a little upset. 

Also note that Jordan brings a breathing apparatus. To help Mitch breathe underwater. In my essay on GENDER DYSPHORIA, I described it as like… drowning.

In my INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR MAYA DEANE, author of Wrath Goddess Sing (my favorite novel ever), we talked about the metaphor she used for dysphoria… being trapped at the bottom of a well.

Jordan, the non-conforming woman, provides Mitch with the relief he needs from gender dysphoria. Do you see what this is telling Mitch, here? Non-conforming womanhood can provide the rescue he needs!

Hathaway then arrives to remind them of their obligations (to cis society) and chastise Mitch for even a moment of finding himself, for being happy. And look what spending time with nonconforming femininity has gotten Mitch, and how embarrassed he looks (which is just how society wants him to feel).

Again, this is something The Matrix dealt with several times, especially in Resurrections. You have obligations to cis society, so abandon this trans nonsense and uphold the binary like you’re supposed to. They want us to believe there’s no joy to be found in accepting your transness.

44:54 – Here Hathaway gets called out for wearing makeup, since this is a thing men aren’t supposed to do. Even within the bounds of society and “I have to do it so I don’t get washed out by the lights on camera,” you still get made fun of for it.

This is showing you it’s a false choice. Tossing away the popcorn to appease the cis binary won’t actually make them okay with you. You’re still an outsider and an outcast. And PJ knew it.

Next time we’re going to wrap up with Mitch’s final outcome, you’ll see where he ends up and the remarkably beautiful message about trans people that Real Genius has waiting for you.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

Part 4 is here!

THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF REAL GENIUS, part 2

Welcome to Trans Tuesday! Now that you’ve got the needed context, we’re going to dive into the movie itself and show you what PJ Torokvei had to say about being trans in: THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF REAL GENIUS, part 2!

If you missed that needed context, you really must first read PART 1. You have to understand all of that to truly understand what’s going on in the actual allegory that we’re about to discuss.

I’ve tried to grab timestamps when I could, as close to the moment I’m talking about. This isn’t as dense as The Matrix, or Barbie, or I Saw the TV Glow, due to PJ Torokvei’s trans voice being one among many cis voices, but you’ll see it shine through.

Before we dive in by timestamps, let’s talk a little about the characters (and especially their names, because there is a lot going on there!).

The movie is about Mitch’s acceptance of himself and his own transness. It’s not as explicit or as strong and clean as Neo’s journey in the first Matrix movie, but again that’s because here there is only one trans voice among many cis voices. But that’s the allegorical journey he’s on. “Mitch” derives from “Mitchell” which derives from “Michael”… one of God’s archangels. “Michael” even means “like God” (sort of).

What do you think that means? Welllll…

Allegorically, Chris Knight is a trans person who accepted their truth and is living out and proud, and Mitch is in awe of that, the way so many of us trans folks are in awe of those who came before us, before we come out ourselves.

“Chris” derives from Christ/Christian, and “Knight” is self-explanatory. And do you see what that’s telling you about Mitch?

Chris is a warrior for what he believes in (being trans and living out and proud). And Mitch is like Chris. That they also work in the broader sense of the movie’s surface “rejecting conformity and embracing individuality” theme makes sense, because that broader theme is actually about the trans theme underneath.

But see what I mean by this being intentional? You don’t accidentally pick those names. And if you think somehow you do accidentally choose those names, wellllll…

Hollyfeld is Mitch’s future, trapped in the closet. If you pay attention, you’ll see there’s a skeleton hanging in that closet for no good reason. But it’s important, because that future trapped in the closet is like death.

Holly is often seen as a symbol of eternal life, and it apparently became associated with Christmas as its sharp leaves were symbolic of Christ’s crown of thorns, and the red berries symbolic of Christ’s blood. Hmmm…

Jordan doesn’t conform to what you’d “expect” traditionally feminine students in the 1980s to look like. Her name is gender neutral, like Chris. She’s the only real woman in the movie, in that she isn’t there just for a joke and has her own goals and motivations. She’s a character, the others are mostly plot devices.

Allllso note that “Jordan” is the river Christ was baptized in. Jordan will be important to Mitch’s self-discovery and acceptance of (and becoming) his true self.

Now look, I’m not Christian, but Mitch/Chris/Hollyfeld/Jordan having names that all relate to Christianity had to be intentional. They are all of one/the same – but it’s not that they’re Christian, it’s that they’re trans. Hollyfeld and Jordan both play a super important part in the allegory. Read on!

Hathaway is sort of our stand-in for transphobic society. Not as directly as Smith was in The Matrix or the CEO in Barbie, but here he’s definitely the representation of everything wrong with the world.

“Hathaway” roughly means “near a heath,” and a heath is a wasteland, or uncultivated land with poor soil and drainage, but depending on which origin you trace it back to could also mean something similar to “war battle.” So what you get is antagonism and violence, where there is nothing of value. This is what’s to be found in the hate that bigoted cis white men peddle. And his name has nothing to do with all the Christ-related names, which are about peace and acceptance. Pretty telling!

Kent is a self-hating trans person, who has allied himself with the transphobes in power and rejected his truth for access to that power (very much like The Merovingian in The Matrix). “Kent” is also the past-tense version of “ken,” which means recognizing, knowing, and understanding something. So in the past Kent recognized and understood his truth (that he’s trans)! But he rejected it and was rewarded for doing so.

Okay, time for timestamps! Let’s go!

03:59 – After the opening movie-within-the-movie about the Crossbow orbital laser, a dude in this room full of powerful cis men asks what another thinks of it. The reply: “I think there weren’t enough girls in it.” This isn’t intended in terms of equality, but sexualization.

That isn’t explicitly trans, but knowing PJ was a trans woman writer that everyone thought was a cis man writer, how many times do you think she heard that exact reply while writing for movies and television in the 1980s and ‘90s? As writer Ian Boothby pointed out in part one, Real Genius is remarkably unsexist given similar movies of the time. This is what happens when you have a trans woman writing it (and a cis woman directing it).

04:29 – Referring to the Crossbow orbital laser (meant for assassinations), one of the dudes says: “So it’s both immoral and unethical?” And then they all laugh, ha ha, so funny. Much like the Matrix movies and Barbie, this is showing you what the cis white men in power think about the rest of us.

They do not care if something is wrong so long as it upholds their status and the social pecking order with them at the top.

05:10 – There is but one cis Black man in the room, and he is the one who objects and opts out of the idea of giving these men the power to eliminate anyone they want. As with the Agents and every other person of power in The Matrix, cis white men are the source of the problem. They’re the ones who established this system of oppression.

05:35 – After the lone Black man nopes out, one of the white men says he: “…used to be a good man. Afraid we’re going to have to eliminate George.” 

They allowed him into their circle when they thought he upheld their beliefs in their own superiority, but as soon as he told them what they were doing was wrong, he had to go. One of the old dudes immediately leaves, as if to imply George was going to be killed right then.

This speaks to the fear of marginalized people standing up to those in power, especially the fear of coming out (doubly so in the 1980s), and what’ll happen if you do. Because coming out as trans is a direct threat to the lies cis white men established to keep themselves in power. And you see it right now, in 2025, with these same cis white men in power working to strip trans people of our rights. We prove the cis binary is a lie (see THE FALSE DICHOTOMY), and that’s what the entire system of white supremacist oppression is built on.

06:10 – We meet Hathaway. He’s getting asked for autographs, showing you he’s well liked by the general population, even though he immediately demonstrates what an asshole he is. Bigotry was somewhat celebrated in the past. 

Even more than it is now, as hard as that is to think about. 

06:29 – We get Mitch’s intro, and you see right away his parents don’t understand him. It’s literally like he speaks a different language. Because he’s trans and they’re cis.

08:19 – Mitch: “They’re really all right, it’s just sometimes they have no idea what I’m talking about.” Is there a clearer description of family and friends that you love, but who just cannot understand who you are?

Remember from part one, in the letter written by Stan Brooks after PJ’s death, he talked about not really understanding who she was or what it meant to be trans, and continually deadnamed and misgendered her out of ignorance. Mr. Brooks, at least, continued to love PJ as a friend.

08:28 – Mitch doesn’t have many friends, and thinks he intimidates other kids. He’s an outcast, he feels like he doesn’t fit in and nobody likes him. This is life for a lot of trans people, pretending to be cis and being very bad at it while our GENDER DYSPHORIA keeps us isolated.

08:50 – Hathaway thinks he and Mitch are alike, and is honoring Mitch by getting him accepted to Pacific Tech at such a young age. He wants Mitch on his team, to be cis like him. Society sees the outcast and wants to mold him into the person it wants him to be.

Mitch thinks this is what he wants, because he’s been told by society that’s who he should be. “You’re a cis guy, this is what cis guys do!” And so he goes along because that must be true. What else could there be? All of gendered society isn’t built on lies, right? Babes, see TRANS TRAUMA 2: SOCIETAL GASLIGHTING for more.

09:00 – Mitch is going to be working with Chris Knight, a legend. Mitch already knows of and is kind of awed by Chris. 

09:05 – Cut to Chris and we immediately see even from his shoes that he does not dress like those around him, or like you’d expect. He does not conform. A trans person.

09:15 – And just in case the shoes weren’t enough, you get his subversive shirt and his alien bobble headband. He doesn’t care that society thinks he looks ridiculous and not like they want him to, he’s more comfortable being his true self. “I love toxic waste” on his shirt. This thing society says is toxic waste (being trans)? I’m gonna love it.

09:23 – The cis white dude in the suit pulls open the door for Chris, but Chris pushes in the other door on his own. He doesn’t want the path society has laid out for him, he’s going to make his own way. Cis? No thanks, that’s not who I am.

09:50 – Chris is introduced to Sherry and Mike. Chris immediately undercuts Mike, the cis white man’s, boasting. Takes him down a peg. Chris is charming, disarming, witty. Sherry, a woman, finds that entertaining. Almost like cis women are hurt by the false binary too…

Mike has no comments about Chris’ manner of dress… until he learns that Chris knows the flaws in his project, and then instantly moves to insulting him. Your deviation from the norm will only be tolerated (by some) if you know your place and don’t threaten their power.

Sherry here is also instantly into Chris. The surface of the movie posits this as her just liking to seduce the smartest minds in the country, but she’s used in a very clever way as part of the allegory later on. Just remember the woman liked the out and confident trans person.

10:00 – Chris apologizes for the alien bobble headband with a joke, “I didn’t want you to think I was stuffy. You know, no fun. All brain, no penis.” NO PENIS. Sure he didn’t mean it literally, but… do you think… that line is by accident in a movie written by a trans woman, that is about transness? 

Chris appears as a cis man, right? So this is showing you right away his transness is one of the ways he doesn’t conform. It’s kind of like how “trans” is in the very opening shot of The Matrix. It’s right there. Are you paying attention?

10:31 – As the stuffy cis white dude leaves, he mentions to Chris that Sherry will answer his questions about anything, like dress codes. Hey, trans person, your clothes and presentation don’t meet our expectations. Fix it.

10:40 – Cis white dude says Chris is one of the ten finest minds in the country. Chris: “Someday I hope to be two of them.” This could mean he is of two minds aka has a duality? Was raised as cis but is actually trans? 

I can’t really parse it, but there could be something there. But also sometimes a joke is just a joke. But there’s more here. This is showing you Chris is a member of a small minority…trans people!

Remember we’re maybe 1% of the population by our present best estimates. The actual percentage is likely higher due to some trans people not being out (or knowing they’re trans yet), but we’re still a very small percentage of the population.

And Sherry is clearly into “the smartest people in the country,” the smallest minority in the population. Does this make her a chaser? Yep. They’ve been around for as long as trans women have been – forever.

This isn’t saying trans people are smarter than everyone else by default (though we can see the cis binary matrix of society better than anyone else), that’s just how the allegory works in this one moment so you understand what Sherry’s about for later.

If you need a reminder, see the essay on CHASERS AND THE FETISHIZATION OF TRANS WOMEN. The movie doesn’t really have anything to say about chasers, even though it features one. What’s important is what it uses Sherry to say in terms of the overall allegory, and that has nothing to do with chasers. It’s a ways off yet, but we’ll get there.

11:25 – Mitch meets Gene, who teaches at Pacific Tech. Gene says they’ve been told to expect great things from Mitch. 

11:50 – Gene wants to give Mitch advice but seems confused, addled. Gene sees transness in Mitch, like he sees it in himself (this gets confirmed later!). But Gene hasn’t self-accepted and doesn’t know how to help someone self-actualize when he hasn’t been able to help himself. It’s an egg recognizing another egg (eggs are what we call trans people who don’t know they’re trans yet).

12:02 – As Mitch walks, someone asks him “where’s the funeral?” I think the movie wants us to think that’s due to the suit he’s wearing, but as a trans woman pretending to be a cis man, suits were hell for me. They made me feel like dying because they’re the most heavily male-coded clothing around. I suspect PJ felt that, too. See HEAVILY GENDERED CLOTHES AND TRANS PEOPLE.

12:38 – Mitch gets to his dorm and… his clothes are missing. We later learn Chris took them and put them away. Chris is already trying to show Mitch that those men’s clothes are not for you.

12:43 – Chris’ side of the room is messy, chaotic, and we again see that he does not conform.

12:52 – Hollyfeld enters Mitch’s room, disappears into the closet. Note he’s dressed similarly to Mitch, but has a beard and his hair is longer. Remember that Hollyfeld is Mitch’s future… this is you in twenty years, trapped in the closet.

13:16 – Mitch: “What kind of a place is this?” This isn’t the world he’s used to, and things don’t work the same. It doesn’t make sense to him. It speaks to waking up to why the world feels wrong when your egg starts cracking and you discover your transness.

13:19 – Chris: “Would you be prepared if gravity reversed itself?” Chris is upside down and talking about flight. This is foreshadowing that he’s going to reverse Mitch’s ideas about the world and it will free him of the societal restraints holding him down. Flight is used as a metaphor for GENDER EUPHORIA in The Matrix films, and I even described my first experience with it the same way in BODY HACKING. 

Dysphoria is so oppressive and legit feels like a weight on you, so when it lessens, you feel… lighter. Like you could fly.

But if gravity reversed itself, Chris doesn’t know how he’d keep the change in his pockets until he realizes: nudity means he wouldn’t lose his change. To me, this is saying that the way to not lose the changes you want to keep is to be naked and completely honest with yourself.

13:30 – During the conversation Chris continues to not conform (they’re jokes, but they’re all about not conforming to your expectations). He asks Mitch if he’d like to use his “penis stretcher” and Mitch says “No!” 

Is that because it’d be dangerous? Or is it because penis size has often been used as a sign of “manliness” and that’s the last thing Mitch wants… to be more of a man? I’M JUST SAYIN’.

13:50 – Chris wants to “avoid responsibility,” all the obligations and expectations society saddles you with so you will conform and perform your assigned gender correctly.

13:59 – Chris: “You see, Mitch, I used to be you.” Chris used to be an egg, a trans person who didn’t know they were trans and hadn’t self-accepted. Are you seeing how so much of this is so very trans when you know what to look for? You’ll see this pop up again later, when Mitch’s journey is almost complete!

14:14 – Chris wanted to reconnect with his old self (an early in transition Mitch), so he put Mitch’s clothes away for him… in the bottom drawer, and he threw the sports jacket away. He’s already pushing Mitch along the path of acceptance and realization of his true self. Those clothes are not for him.

14:35 – Chris’ drone breaks out of the room, shatters a window. Chris: “Would you classify that as a launch problem or a design problem?” Did things go wrong because you were “designed incorrectly,” or because you were sent off into the world incorrectly? 

Are the feelings you have about not being a cis man because you were born with a body that’s not right for you, or because society used that body to tell you who you had to be without deviation? It can be both. And either way it shatters societal expectations.

15:29 – Not only is Hathaway working with the cis white men in power to develop their weapon, he’s committing fraud and stealing from the project. He’s unethical in every regard. There is nothing good about the wrong mold society tries to force us into. It’s irredeemable.

16:58 – Kent! He’s a self-hating trans person, the kind that’ll sell out himself and all the rest of us for access to power. And you get that right from his line, “When Jerry (Hathaway) is not here, you do what I say. It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.” You see right here that he has gained power and status by rejecting his transness.

17:48 – Mitch is introduced to the group and is Hathaway’s new favorite. Chris didn’t show up because he didn’t feel like it. Everyone in the group is subservient and deferential to Hathaway… except Chris. Which tracks with everything we’ve learned so far. 

17:53 – Hathaway says he’s surprised one of the students stopped stuttering, and he replies “I’ve been giving myself shock treatments.” What’s a stutter? Something about you that you didn’t ask for but is part of you, like transness. And did you know… shock treatments also used to be used to try and “cure” transness as part of abhorrent “conversion therapy”? Look what this person did to themselves for access to power. It’s an incredibly dark line. 

19:24 – Mitch is already more relaxed and dressing more comfortably, this is the first time we’ve seen him not in a suit. Chris has already inspired Mitch to move along the path to self-acceptance and actualization, away from “typical man.”

Seeing other trans people out and living their lives, and finding joy, inspires others to do the same. I’ve said it a million times. So many trans women, and trans women writers, made me believe I could do it too. And it’s part of the reason why the Republicans in power want to erase trans people from public life, because if nobody can see us or learn about us, how will they know they’re trans too? I didn’t know trans was a thing a human could be until well into adulthood, after the body horror of the wrong puberty had wreaked havoc on my body.

Next time we’re going to talk about Chris’s dream (oh, THE DREAM!), lyrics, and nonconformity! Don’t miss it, because you need it to really understand the amazing message at the end of it all.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

Part 3 is here!

THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF REAL GENIUS, part 1

Welcome to Trans Tuesday! Today we’re going to dive into another movie with an incredible trans allegory that says something truly wonderful about trans folks. We’re starting THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF REAL GENIUS, part 1 – CONTEXT AND SCREENWRITER PJ TOROKVEI.

I had somehow managed to never see this movie for my entire life until watching it to do this writeup. I don’t know how that happened, I wasn’t trying to avoid it or anything! But Jennifer Kramer, a trans friend of mine, mentioned to me that she thought I should do an examination of its trans allegory.

This of course piqued my interest, especially when learning that one of the three credited writers was a trans woman. So I watched it, and there is definitely a trans allegory at play and we’re gonna talk about it. But we have to talk about a few other things first.

A trans woman screenwriter! I mean talk about my wheelhouse, that’s me. And here’s a movie written by one of us from the 80s! But Hollywood is complicated, and so is trying to learn about trans people who existed in the past, despite the fact that we have always existed and always will, for reasons I talked about in TRANS HISTORY 1: HOW AND WHY WE NAME TRANS PEOPLE IN HISTORY.

We ARE going to go through the movie by timestamps, just like in my deep-dives on the MATRIX, BARBIE, I SAW THE TV GLOW, and NERVOUS MAN, and I know that’s likely what you’re all anxious for. So I want to mention that won’t start until part 2 next week, because there’s vital context we have to talk about first.

You don’t have to have read my book to understand the trans allegory of Real Genius, but I will call back to the Matrix allegories multiple times because, surprise surprise, different trans allegories are still trans allegories and thus have much in common. And the Matrix is the platonic ideal as far as trans allegories go.

Now it’s common for movies to have multiple writers across multiple drafts. The Writer’s Guild has rules for who gets credited and how, but not every writer that works on a movie’s script always gets credited.

It’s also common for script changes to happen during shooting, for the director to adjust things, etc etc. There’s no way to know how much of what made it to the shooting script and then ended up in the movie was from the trans woman writer’s contributions. 

So there are other voices mixed in with hers, and she didn’t direct it. This is not a case of a pure vision like with the Wachowskis and the Matrix movies or Jane Schoenbrun and I Saw the TV Glow. This is one trans voice amid a sea of cis voices, all contributing to the final product.

I see trans metaphors and an overall allegory in Real Genius, and some parts we can almost be entirely sure came from the trans woman writer based on how very trans they read, but there’s no way to know exactly what came from who without someone who worked on it to tell us.

The trans woman credited as one of the writers on Real Genius is PJ Torokvei. She worked with Second City, wrote a handful of movies, and was showrunner of WKRP in Cincinnati for a while. But all of it was under her deadname. Once she transitioned, she had no further credits that I could find.

I don’t know if that’s because she chose to retire from screenwriting, or because of discrimination she faced after coming out. I certainly hope it’s the former, but the transphobic world we live in (doubly so back then) makes me fear it was the latter.

She came out in 2001 and died in 2013 from liver failure. Some second-hand information I found suggested her death may have been from complications from her medical transition, which is awful to think about. The thing that eases your pain being what kills you is just… horrific. But there’s also this thing we call “trans broken arm syndrome,” where you could go to the doctor for a broken arm and they’d blame it on us being trans somehow. This happens a lot with cis doctors. So the true cause of her medical issues is just not something we have details on.

Also note that when PJ transitioned, WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) would have likely been on version 5, possibly 6 depending on the timing of when she began. While not as horrific as version 1 was, it still classified being trans as a “mental disorder” and there were a lot of problems with it. You can read a little bit more about the specific issues with those versions here.

To see where it all began, see the essay on TRANSMEDICALISM (and WPATH version 1), to truly understand what horrific bullshit trans people who wanted to medically transition in the recent past had to deal with.

I was able to find and speak with someone who worked with her (though not on Real Genius), and I’ll include some of his thoughts shortly. But first I want to talk about a secondhand account of PJ from a friend of hers, Stan Brooks, in a letter written and published in the Hollywood Reporter after her death. That’s as close as we can get to hard facts, but some of it is relevant.

I’m going to quote some important parts, but if you go to read the article, be aware it routinely deadnames and misgenders her (in an article written by her close friend!), and includes pre-transition photos of her. It was painful for me to read. 

It happens out of ignorance and not malice, as far as I can tell, but note that even when it was written (in 2013) trans people had so little cultural footprint that in a letter from a personal friend about our death, deadnaming and misgendering was still rampant. For the portions I’m quoting, I will be using her correct pronouns and real name.

Stan Brooks says PJ sent a letter to friends/family coming out on her 50th birthday. Part of it read, “… [she] was choosing to go public with the secret that [she’d] always felt trapped — as a female in a man’s body — and that [she] planned to have surgery to change [her] sex.”

In the letter, PJ also confessed fears over losing friends, family, and her career. PJ was forced to “live as a woman” for a year before any kind of medical intervention would be allowed, which almost assures that she was under WPATH version 5, as that bit of transphobic bullshit was still a requirement.

Imagine being forced to live a year adhering to someone else’s idea of what a woman is or should be just for the right to access the lifesaving medical care you need. CAN YOU IMAGINE? It’s pretty horrific.

Stan asked her, “‘Why not just be gay and come out of the closet?’ [PJ’s] answer was all too obvious and drove home [her] anguish.”

PJ’s reply: “If only it was that easy. I wish I could do that. I’m not a man. I’m not attracted to gay men. No more than heterosexual women are attracted to them.”

Imagine some of your closest friends asking why you don’t just be a more “acceptable” form of queer, and the complete lack of understanding of what it means to be trans, being the reply you get. Again, it’s from a place of ignorance and not malice, but it’s still painful.

“Some of PJ’s friends from the Second City days and family members had turned their backs on her during this transition. Some never called again after reading the 50th birthday letter.” Fuck. Heartbreaking. And sadly all too common.

The letter says there were serious complications from her gender confirmation surgery which kept her going back to the hospital, and may have eventually also contributed to her death. But again, “trans broken arm syndrome” is real, so who knows.

As part of my research for this, I contacted writer Ian Boothby, who worked with PJ for a while, to see if I could get a little more info about what she was like. I’m going to include all of it, because there is so little information about PJ out there. I want to preserve as much of her legacy as possible.

Tilly Bridges: Can you tell me a little bit about how you first met PJ, and what it was like working with her? What was her personality like?

Ian Boothby: BC Film, a Canadian government program, had a competition to write a sitcom, and I along with Christine Lippa and Dean Haglund (from the X-Files) wrote a pilot called Channel 92 about a failing sports channel that gets rebranded as a women’s network.

One of the very masculine/sexist hosts has to adapt to their place in this new environment. It starred Gary Jones and Teryl Rothery (from Stargate SG-1) and Ellie Harvie (The New Addams Family).

PJ was still writing under her previous name and was brought in as our comedy consultant and expert on all things sitcom, having been one of the head writers for WKRP.  

We hit it off right away. I think we all had background in improvisation and that gave our sessions together a playfulness with the goal to be to build on each other’s ideas. 

Looking back the concept of a station evolving from a masculine to feminine energy has some symbolism.  
She was sharp, very quick and filled with useful stories that lead us in the right direction. We were all SCTV fans and so were starstruck by someone who had worked on the show.  

We do a lot of movies and tv shows in British Columbia but very little on our own, and PJ made what seemed like the impossible possible, by showing us the structure of the sitcom while still giving us enough room to have our own identity. 

TB: Did you have any indication she might have been trans, or was unhappy during her time pre-transition?

IB: There was a lot of laughter in our times working together, but that doesn’t always mean happiness.  I wouldn’t want to project.  A few years later, after she transitioned we visited her at her home in LA and it was great catching up. She had the largest TV we had ever seen,  embedded in a wall in a room filled with boxes, because it was too big to actually watch. 

It was inspiring seeing someone live the LA writer life. …there was a lot of joy when we caught up.

TB: Did she ever talk about Real Genius or her time writing it?

IB: I know she was proud of it. At the time I enjoyed it and told her so. I do like that it’s one of the rare 1980s comedies that doesn’t feel exploitative of women, even though there are scenes which could easily have gone that way. Also no homophobia, which for an 80s comedy is very rare. PJ and the other writers made a very funny film celebrating intelligence and friendship while going after the right targets.

TB: After she came out as trans, she seems to have not worked in tv or film again. Do you know if that was by choice, or perhaps due to lack of opportunity for trans people? I know she was rejected by a lot of folks when she came out (which is sadly all too common for us).

IB: I’m sorry to hear she didn’t write much later on, she seemed quite well off and I assumed she retired. But that was just a guess and I didn’t want to be nosey.

TB: I wanted to include a photo of her with my write up, but I only found one that was reportedly post-transition, and couldn’t find confirmation that it was actually her. Can you tell if this is her?

IB: I’ve seen that picture online but that’s it. I couldn’t tell you personally if it’s her. It looks close to how she looked the last time I saw her. 

Thanks so much to Ian Boothby for taking the time to give us a little more context about a trailblazing trans woman screenwriter, especially because now we know some vital information that we didn’t before.

We know that PJ was happy with how Real Genius came out, which isn’t always the case when there are multiple writers and a director who also change things around. I think it’s safe to assume that she believed most of what she was trying to do came through (I certainly saw it, and you will too, starting next week).

But more importantly, we know that in the little time she had left post-transition, she was happy. Even if complications from transition contributed to her death, even if rejected by far too many people who should have loved her for who she really was, she lived a happy and joyous life. It’s a bright beam of sunlight in the darkness.

Real Genius was released in 1985, meaning it was written somewhere in the years prior, given the generally slow-moving pipeline of Hollywood movies. We don’t know exactly when it was written, or when PJ worked on it, but it was likely somewhere in the early 80s.

Regardless of how she presented at the time, or her friends, family, and the entire world thinking she was a cisgender man, we know that she knew she was trans, and was very aware of why she had to stay in the closet for so long. 

If you’re trans you’ve always been trans. And via the aforementioned article about her death, she knew she was a woman regardless of when she began transitioning. Transitioning isn’t what makes you trans, it’s what alleviates and addresses the problem of living as the wrong gender.

So given what we do know, and what you’re going to see through the rest of these essays, I feel comfortable saying the pieces of trans allegory that made it into the final version of the movie were absolutely intentional on her part.

Note that doesn’t always mean consciously intentional. I’ve said many times how in my own past writing I can now clearly see I was working through my own complicated thoughts and feelings about gender, without even consciously knowing that’s what I was doing at the time. That doesn’t mean I didn’t intend to do that, I absolutely did. I just didn’t recognize the meaning behind it at the time.

But a lot of it was very much consciously intentional, I think. It’s all hidden under metaphor, but that’s the only way she could talk about being trans in a movie in the 1980s. Especially when it’s not about the harmful tropes of us being jokes to be mocked, victims of violence, or deceptive sexual predators.

REAL GENIUS IS A CELEBRATION OF TRANSNESS. And now that you’ve got the context, next week we’re going to dive into the movie itself and you’re going to see what being trans meant to PJ, and means to a lot of us. 

And how it can change the world.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

Part 2 is here!

INTERVIEW WITH SHAKINA (writer of Quantum Leap episode “Let Them Play.”)

Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week we’re going to discuss the Quantum Leap episode LET THEM PLAY which aired on February 6 2023, and we’ll be talking about it with the writer and director of the episode, Shakina! If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it right now!

This is the first Trans Tuesday I’ve done as a podcast first, and then converted that to text/transcript. You’ll hear me, my wife/show co-host Susan, and Shakina. We had a really fabulous discussion, so I’m gonna stop delaying and we’re just gonna dive right in.

Tilly: Hi! I’m. Tilly Bridges, your host and I’m joined by my writing partner, my best friend, my wife, our token cis representation, the Al Calavicci to my Sam Beckett, Susan Bridges.

Susan: I am the Al.

Tilly: Definitely. Our guest this week is Shakina, a performer, director, writer, producer, and social activist. She’s most known for her work as Lola on the Hulu Comedy Series DIFFICULT PEOPLE and made television history on NBC’s CONNECTING as the first transgender person to play a series regular on a network comedy. As the founding artistic director of Musical Theatre Factory, she supported the development of over 100 new musicals, including her own autobiographical rock musical, MANIFEST PUSSY. She’s quite obviously also a writer on the Quantum Leap reboot writing, directing, and acting in last week’s LET THEM PLAY episode about trans youth. Welcome, and thank you so much for being here!

Shakina: I’m so happy to be here with both of you. This is so fun.

Till: So at the beginning we like to sort of help the audience get to know the guest when they come on. So I would like to ask you what’s been the most surprising thing for you about transitioning.

Shakina: Wow! Well, the most surprising thing for me about transitioning would probably be how comprehensive it is. You know I have this like spiritual belief that when you like, put something up on the altar for change, you have to kind of give your consent for the totality of all things to evolve. And so you might think of your transition as a physical thing, or as a gender thing, or as a fashion thing; but ultimately, once you lean into it, at least in my experience, it just becomes really comprehensive, and you find all these different ways to extend yourself in new and strange and true colors. And so that’s the most surprising thing for me, that i’m still discovering how transitions never end.

Tilly Bridges: Yeah, it’s like they always keep going.That was something I never expected either. How much I feel-  how much more like myself I feel internally, not just all the external changes, but it’s- I don’t know. I feel like a different person almost, but not entirely because I was always in there. I don’t know. 

Shakina: I think you free up a lot of brain space, you know.

Tilly Bridges: Yes! I used to not want to experience new places, or like new foods… things I hadn’t had before. I didn’t know why, but I’ve discovered since transitioning that it was because I didn’t have the mental energy for it, and once I transitioned and got further into my transition, I was really surprised at how much I started craving those things. I used to hate going to events with a bunch of people I didn’t know, and now I want to. I want to meet these people, and I want to try all these new foods I’ve never had. And it’s- yeah, I never expected that either, that I would enrich my life and all those other ways. What’s one piece of advice that you would give to someone out there who’s just starting their transition, or maybe something you wish you knew ahead of time going in?

Shakina: You know, the funny thing about advice with transitioning is that, like you know, everyone has to take their own path on their own time. I could say from my experience that everything I’ve done to further the fullest expression of myself, I wish that I had done sooner. I want to say, Take your time, and there’s no rush, and you know, like allow it to unfold in a process that feels, you know, gentle and graceful. I also want to say don’t second guess yourself if you now in your heart what you want and need to do, go for it.

Tilly: Yeah, I think that’s something in a lot of newly out trans people I see, is that they feel there’s one certain way they have to transition or whatever, and that’s not the case for any of us. We all have to figure out what’s right for us, and that’s the most important thing. And whether you figure that out right away or you take your time, it’s just important that you find the thing that makes you true to who you really are. 

Shakina: Yeah, and don’t worry about it being linear because it’s never going to be linear.

Tilly: It may change along the way, and that’s okay. Okay, so first, before we dive in, let me say that Susan and I are both huge Quantum Leap fans and have been since the original was on way back when, when I even have a King Thunder band t-shirt, which is a very deep cut for all the Leapers out there. But the show had its hooks in me like every week, and it was one of the most compassionate and progressive shows that was on the air. And there was also something compelling that I did not at all understand, every time there was an episode where Sam leaped into a woman and his soul was the same, but everyone now saw him as a woman, and all the complicated feelings that gave me. So I was so excited, both as a fan and as a writer, that the show was getting a modern continuation. Susan and I really wanted to get staffed on it so bad, but I was mostly really hoping that the show was going to have trans people on the writing staff, even if it wasn’t me. Because nobody in this world better knows what it’s like to be in a body that’s not yours, “facing a mirror image that’s not your own.” So how did the quantum leap gig come about?

Shakina: Well, basically, just everything you said, I said in my job interview about being trans, but I said to them I could pitch you a trans story, which I did (the same story that became episode 112) but I said you know more importantly, my perspective as a trans person gives me the insights to understand what it means to be in a body that’s not my own and seeing a reflection that’s not my own, just like you said, you know it’s so iconically trans. And for me, being a young kid watching that show, the original Quantum Leap, and – the same. Seeing this person, this actor, morph between all these different identities, and still be the same person… and watching them and seeing- seeing Sam for who Sam was in Sam’s truth, and then also seeing them go through all these different kind of incarnations, just spoke to my spirit, you know I just understood that. And and so when I did CONNECTING on NBC, during the pandemic, it was a show that was created by Martin Gero and Brendan Gall, and Martin ended up becoming the executive producer of the Quantum Leap sequel, and also showrunner. But wasn’t at first,  he was just gonna be EP-ing. Martin and I are also developing a project for for me for NBC, and so one of the things we had talked about was like, well, you know, it takes a long time to get your own show off the ground and it would probably be wise to try and get some experience in a writers room. And then when Quantum Leap was announced, I just reached out and said, “hey, if I write a sample can you get it to the showrunners?” And he said, “yeah I can’t like, you know. promise you anything, but I can help you, you know, get your script into their hands.” Which is, if anyone knows anything, the hardest thing to do in Hollywood, you know. And so I like I didn’t even have a pilot sample, I had my own work that I was developing, but you can’t send out your developing work as a sample. You have to have a completely different thing. And so I just like wrote a sample as quick as I could. My friend Shadi Petosky, who’s another trans TV writer, she said, “just write something, you know, that will never get made.” And it just gave me all the freedom to just throw something onto the page with no pressure. And then I got an interview, and that’s how I got the job. I mean.And then the fact that I became the director of the episode that was like a very last minute- I mean we were in our first day of shooting when our director got pulled for Covid, so every step of the way just sort of like unfolded into the next thing. And then suddenly I was writing, directing and Guest starring in my own episode.

Tilly: That’s amazing. When I found out that you were on the staff, I got so excited because I knew that we were gonna be in for something really special, especially when Ian on the on the show, who’s non binary and played by the magnificent Mason Alexander Park had that line that said, “When I was 8 years old I realized that about half the world just blindly accepted as truth the construct of gender that is both artificial and profoundly limiting.” And I was like what the hell is happening! This is a network show, and you wrote that line. That’s so amazing.

Shakina: Yeah, in fact, we knew we wanted Mason to say something, or Ian the character to say something, in that moment and we hadn’t landed on it. And the script was already out for publication with the network, and Dean texted me and was like, “Can we say something here that’s like better than this?” And I was like what if we just said this, and I literally texted him that line, and that’s what made it in the script

Tilly: That’s so beautiful. And i’m so glad it was there. Because yeah, I mean, like, I love your episode a lot, and we’re going to talk about that in a minute. But the fact that you’re there for the whole season, and can contribute to the scripts in this other way makes it feel so much more ingrained, so much more part of the the show as a whole, you know. And I really like that. We need a lot more of that. 

Susan: Yeah, I think at first we were like worried because we see the character and we’re like, nobody’s talking about this. So it’s like we just put one toe in the gender. And that’s all we’re going to do.

Tilly: That’s all you get with so many shows, and it’s really great that we got so much more.

Shakina: And well, i’m excited for you to see where the character of Ian goes too, because I think you know, when you are introducing any new TV show, you sort of have to seed your primary characters, and then, like layer in your supporting cast. And even in series regulars, you kind of have to stack it and introduce them. And and so there’s a sort of like patience game to like getting this trans character the TV time and the story time that they deserve. And I think you know, starting from episode 12 on, I think we’re gonna see more of Ian being involved, which I think is really great.

Tilly: That’s so great. Now I’m extra excited. 

Susan: Yeah, Ian’s a great character. I already love Ian.

Shakina: Yeah, same.

Tilly: Episodes always go through changes from outline to script, with studio and network notes, and every other step that comes between the initial idea and the final episode. How close is what we saw to where the concept initially started?

Shakina: Well, I mean the concept is very, very close to where it originally started, in terms of this episode. You know there are certain things that changed, like I originally pitched a soccer episode, and it became a basketball episode, which I’m actually very happy about, and was way more producible. But you know I think at the beginning there was some- you know, I was really riffing off of these adolescent gender swap team sports movies, which is a very particular but pure genre, you know, from JUST ONE OF THE GUYS to LADY BUGS, to SHE’S THE MAN, it’s really a tonally specific style of teen movie that I wanted to capture in essence in this episode. And so, because there’s in all of those that I reference, there’s a sort of like PARET TRAP-y, gender swappy thing going on, I was playing with whether or not Ben should leap into our trans kid, or the coach, or the dad should be someone different. So that kind of exact angle of how the leap would land took a little bit of time before we landed on Coach Dad.Which was funny, because Coach Dad was like the original pitch, and then it got split up and brought back together. And that kind of stuff just always happens in TV writing.

Tilly: Yeah.

Shakina: But anyway, the idea of then leaping into Coach Dad with trans daughter on the team,

and this sort of series of events that I knew had to happen in the episode, which was like – the car, wash the support group, you know, Ian’s confessional about attempting suicide… and then the conversation between the the girl whose mom is sort of trans-antagonistic, but she feels conflicted and unsure, and then she finally gets to have a real conversation with a trans person and like come to her own understanding. All these different  points of view, the veterans’ conversation about the you know, the trans military ban… like I had a long checklist of things that I needed to fit into this episode, and it was just figuring out how to weave them together with the story beats. To make sure we had, you know, like the entertainment that you expect from a Quantum Leap of 10 pm on Monday night. And you know the heart of trans liberation that we want to share with the world, with enough information to empower our audiences to be critical thinkers and actors, without having to weigh them down with a Ted Talk. And that was like the big challenge of the episode.

Tilly: Yeah, actually, there was a thing I was gonna mention. I’m gonna jump ahead in my notes a little bit here, just to tie into what you said. But when you said that you had so many things that you wanted to weave in… I made a note here, and I- I want to read this out because I think it’s important, especially for the cis people listening who may not know. These are the things that I specifically noticed in the episode that are directly from existing as trans in this world. Okay, so there are cis people not wanting a “culture war” when all we want is equality, a trans girl not allowed to change in the girls’ locker room, Gia inspiring Ian in the way that just being out and showing our joy inspires other trans people – but that exposure can also make us a target, invasive medical questions from cis people, how cis people not saying anything or standing up for us makes them complicit in our oppression, the importance of trans community and found family, the crushing depression of kids forced to pretend to be someone they’re not, the world telling you people like you aren’t worthy, the increased rates of homelessness and violence for trans people, a white cis lady who’s more concerned about property damage than bigotry, police misgendering a trans body, how we have to fight everyone (and our own reflections) just to be who we know we are, cis people who think it’s not appropriate for a trans girl to play on a girls’ team but feel it’s totally fine to put a trans kid through ostracism and bigotry, not seeing your kid’s transness as a burden, cis fear not being trans people’s responsibility, and cis people keep us safe by always having our back. It feels like it took me 45 minutes just to list all of those, but you worked all of them into a single episode, and that’s astonishing to me. And I’m so so glad you did because, what I think a lot of cis people don’t realize, is that we’re dealing with all of that, all at the same time, every single day. So that feels like a miracle that you got so much of that in there.

Shakina: Well, Tilly, i’m so honored that you hold that list together, because even hearing it is sort of mind blowing that we actually accomplished it. And it’s so great that all of that stuff got communicated. And I want to add that and, I’m sorry my mind was blown as you were reading through the list and I was so excited that you gathered all this from it, but I also add that the particular intersection of oppression with trans Latinadad and the way that, like Gia’s targeted harassment was also racist.

Tilly: Yes.

Shakina: And that is another another element that, you know, we were really blessed to be able to focus on in the episode. Because, I think I mentioned this in other conversations around the episode, but it’s truly based off not only my life experiences, but two young trans Latina people who did not make it out alive. You know, and my friend Gia who the character is inspired by, took her own life, and my friend Tony “Lady Justice” Colin was another queer youth organizer in high school, just one year younger than me, and like one district away, making a radical change in their school in the nineties, when we were just like fighting for the right to exist. And unfortunately, Tony took their own life too, shortly after high school. And so I grew up with this kind of sense of survivors responsibility? You know of, like I have to tell my story, and I have to tell their stories, and I have to say their names. And then that was in 19- I mean the years that I went through all this stuff was like in the late nineties, ‘98 was when I dropped out of High School, and ‘99 was when Tony was starting, you know, protest at their high school. And this episode takes place in 2012, and here we are literally 25 years later, from my high school experience in 2023, still going through this sort of, like, inflammatory rhetoric attack on trans people. But I will say I had the most wonderful experience on Friday this past week, when I went I went back to Verdugo Hills High School, where we shot the episode with the cast members, the guest star cast members who all play on the basketball team, including Josielyn Aguilera, who plays Gia. And we showed the episode for the students at the school where we shot the episode, and the girls’ basketball team was there, and the GSA was there, and the Intersectional Feminist Club was there, and it was just such a special sharing and celebration and a real testament that, like, we do move forward and we do make progress, even if it feels like it takes forever and literal generations. It does happen. And one of the kids DM’d me later, and was like, “you know I go to Verdugo, and you have no idea how many sit-ins and protests we had to do to get here.” And I was like… oh, I know!

TIlly & Susan: [laughter]

Shakina: I know because I did them too, you know, and I wish that kids today didn’t have to sit in and protest and literally fight for their lives to go to high school. I can’t wait for the day when kids can just go to high school and not have to have that be part of their adolescent experience. But I’m so glad that this episode exists as a beacon for those who are going through it, and my biggest hope is that just every trans kid, and every parent of a trans kid, and every teacher of a trans kid, just get to see this episode. So they’re like, oh, “I’m valid,” you know, “I’m not alone. This story is a story that is well-known enough to be archetypal, so I’ll get through it.” You know what I mean?

Tilly: yeah.

Shakina: And that’s what I hope the episode does.

Tilly Bridges: Yeah, and you know you i’m glad that you mentioned that because one of the things- I mean, it is hard right now to be a trans person in this country, but-  one of the things that gives me hope is the the upcoming generation, and how much more accepting of differences, and how much more inclusive they all seem to be. I feel like there’s a real cultural shift happening with them, and that gives me so much hope for the future. And yeah, I want to give them everything that we possibly can, and episodes like this definitely help. But one of the things that I wanted to to ask you about specifically as a trans writer… some of the boos and shouts from the crowd during the games, and racist and transphobic boys that stopped by during the car wash – it was really tough to hear. But of course that’s the reality trans people have to deal with. We recently worked on a script with a transphobic character, and it was really difficult for me to have to write those lines that I knew were used to hurt us. So, how was that for you? Did you get through it okay?

Shakina: Yeah, you know it’s interesting. When I first set up to write the episode, I said to the writer’s room, “I have 2 objectives here, and that is to counter the tropes of trauma and singularity with trans joy and trans community.” But of course it’s a one hour drama. You gotta go through the darkness to get to the light, and so there was a careful balance. I mean,. I had GLAAD working on this with me from the very beginning. I reached out to them and asked to have a rep to like consult with me on the script and some of these choices. Unfortunately, I had to go through a process where I was asked by the creative leadership to amp up the trauma, and I was like, “I don’t think that’s the right way to go, I don’t think that’s what we want to do.” We knew we wanted Addison to have some sort of complicated relationship to the subject matter, and we wanted to mine that. But they really wanted me to kind of like swing full TERF with her? So I wrote an outline that was like, really kind of objectionable to me as a trans writer, but like giving the cis what they want, you know? And then, of course, GLAAD was like “No, no, no, no, no!” And then even the execs were like, “Really, we don’t think this is the right way,” and then eventually people were like, “Wow, Shakina, you were right to begin with.” And then we had to go back. So this episode took like months longer than any other episode, because of all the ways we worked intentionally to do it right. But even working intentionally to do it right meant mining me for my trauma, which was in a way, I feel, exploitative. And I hope we can learn from that and make sure that future underrepresented writers who step into a room to take on the mantle of telling the story of their community, and bringing their life experience to that, don’t have to go through that kind of, you know.. second guessing, I guess to say? It’s like, let the trans person tell you what they know is best.

Tilly: Exactly.

Shakina: We have a southeast Asian writer on the show, and episode 13 is a southeast Asian episode, and it’s like, “let the southeast Asian writer tell you what’s best for the southeast Asian episode,” you know what I mean? Like, that’s why when we say “representation matters” it’s not just what’s on screen, it’s not just who’s in the writers room, it’s literally like “who are you listening to?” 

Tilly: Absolutely, yeah.

Shakina: Who are they giving authority to? And that’s something I hope we can continue to grow with.

Tilly: Yeah, we’ve encountered that a little bit too in our career where people want input and feedback and consulting on trans things, but that they don’t always want to listen to what we have to say if it’s not what they already were wanting to hear. 

Shakina: Right, exactly.

Tilly: So I definitely get that. One of the most powerful moments for me in this episode was the parents in the support group, and that voice over with the shots of those trans kids just looking so human and so vulnerable. It filled my heart, and then it also broke it a little, because I didn’t get that. And so many trans kids don’t either. But it’s what all of us deserve. 

Shakina: Yeah.

Tilly: And it’s so important to see that kind of parental love and acceptance on screen. Were those specific shots of the trans kids sort of envisioned from the start? Is that how you wanted it to go?

Shakina: Yeah, I called them living portraits…

Tilly: Yes!

Shakina: …and I just knew that I wanted to hear the parents like grappling with, not having a trans kid, but grappling with the external pressures that they face over just trying to be a good parent? And at the same time, just look into the hearts and souls of these kids, and see them as kids. And you know, the dancing and slow motion came up because – the scene was interesting – is that I didn’t have – like, I knew the ingredients of the scene up ‘til the point that it was written and we were on set. But I just didn’t quite understand how it was going to work filmically to have the support group sitting in one little circle, and the kids hanging out in another circle. But the truth of how these meetings happen is the kids hang out and the parents commiserate, you know? And I wanted to really like get the joy of these kids, the stress of these parents, and the way that Gia was sort of caught in the middle. And then it was, you know we were on set, and we were like having them, you know, dance and hang out. And then we got the idea like let’s shoot some of this in slow motion, and then it just sort of unfolded from there. But yeah, that’s my favorite scene. I cry every time I watch it.

Tilly: Yeah, mine, too. I’m like the whole episode is gonna live in my heart forever. But that scene? I can see it. I can feel it. It’s gonna be with me forever. It meant so much to me.

Shakina: I’m so glad.

Susan: Although I want to say that I kind of hate, like, that you have to show people that trans kids are human beings.

Tilly: Right? 

Susan: Really, do you really need a reminder that humans are human? 

Tilly: Sadly, some people do.

Susan: Ugh.

Shakina: But you do. 

Susan: You do! And I hate it.

Shakina: I mean, you know the episode has been like review at bombed at IMDB. 

Tilly: Yeah:

Shakina: I ran a blockchain on all the twitter terfs a long time ago. So thankfully, I’ve been spared online. But yeah, you know that even just the few things that I’ve seen that have been transphobic or trans antagonistic, are just literally spewing the same hatred that the whole episode tries to counter, you know? And it’s like… we weren’t, we weren’t going to reach you anyway, Booboo! You know what I mean? You were never going to come on over, so Red Rover Red Rover, stay in your corner.

Tilly & Susan: [laughter]

Tilly: Yeah. The other really big thing for me in this episode was the delineation between allies and accomplices, with Ian explaining it in the episode as “Allies sit in the bleachers and wave a flag, and accomplices have skin in the game.” And then this gets demonstrated when all the cis girls on the basketball team support Gia and Ben even says they won’t play if she can’t play. They put their own goals and desires on the line in the name of trans equality, and that’s being an accomplice. And I thought that was such a beautiful way to illustrate it.

Shakina: Thank you. You know there’s two things about the accomplices conversation in this episode that I think are so important. One is being able to admit when you didn’t show up and learn from that, and like, not have it be the hardest, most brutal thing in the world to acknowledge that you might have not been as good of an ally or accomplice as you could have been in the past. 

Tilly: Yeah.

Shakina: Sorry, forgive yourself. Stand up straight and move on. You know what I mean? We are here today, and we need your help, and you can’t just like sit in the corner and worry that, you know, you weren’t helpful enough. You gotta get up and get helpful. And so that’s that’s the first thing with Addison’s big monologue about the trans military ban, and like not knowing how to do the right thing back then. So then the other is how easy it is to do the right thing!

Tilly: Right?!

Shakina: That’s the other thing. It’s like there are so many ways that you can do a little thing to make life better for the people in your vicinity. And that’s true for trans liberation but that’s also true just in general, like to be a good person. So those are the two aspects of accomplice-ship that I really wanted to highlight in the episode.

Tilly Bridges: Yeah. Well, you you definitely did, and it’s something that I mention all the time for both trans people and cis people is that it’s never too late. It’s never too late to transition, but it’s never too late to stand up and do the right thing and support us.

Susan: And stop being a garbage goblin?

Tilly: And stop being a garbage goblin, yes.

Shakina: Yes! That’s right.

Tilly: Okay, so I’ve mentioned before how important representation like this is not just in letting us see ourselves as part of the stories that we love, but normalizing us to people who may not know any trans people. 

Shakina: Right.

Tilly: And I keep going back to the same example, because it’s just such a good one, but there’s real evidence that shows like MODERN FAMILY moved the needle on marriage equality in this country because of the representation of a loving, gay couple on the show. And episodes like LET THEM PLAY can do the same thing for trans people, and we need that now maybe more than ever. And so I’m so so glad that you wrote this, and don’t underestimate how much it means to all of us for so many reasons. I’m so thankful as a trans woman, and I’m in awe as a writer, because you did the thing, and it’s so good.! We need that thing, and you did it!

Shakina: Well thank you so much, Tilly. I so appreciate it, and it was like, really, you know, an honor. And like I said, a responsibility. And you know one thing I also want to say is there was a trans Latina writer in Hollywood, Camila Concepción, who was on GENTEFIED, and really a young (she’s in her late twenties) promising career, and she also took her own life just like a year and a half ago. And while I am so glad that I got to bring this episode to life and tell the story of me and my friends, I want to say in terms of, you know this landmark moment for trans Latina representation, Camila should have written this episode. And it is as much in her honor as it is in my friends Gia and Tony “Lady Justice” Colin. And you know we just have to keep doing this work so that we can see our community live and thrive, and create and contribute to culture. And I’m just happy to be a link in the chain.

Tilly Bridges: Yeah. When you were a kid, did you have any trans characters in media that you glommed on to or wanted to be like, or saw yourself in? Or did you have to find it through other characters that were just maybe not quite stereotypically their gender? Because I had to do a lot of the latter. I never saw a trans character as a kid, and I think that messed me up a bit.

Shakina: Well, I yeah. I mean, I think for better or worse, I saw ROCKY HORROR when I was in fifth grade, and it changed my life. And it saved my life, and also troubled my life in a lot of ways, because my early trans representation were all pretty- you know, like, I want to say “sexually mischievous” and kind of like, you know, unbridled and extroverted in a way that you know, for a young kid with no other examples… it was like either people dying of AIDS, or like a murderous, sexually violating alien transsexual. You know what I mean?

Tilly: Yep!

Shakina: It was sort of like, well, okay, these are my options here. So yeah, I mean, I think that was really- I think that’s why it matters so much to me now to just imagine more trans futures and trans possibilities for the screen, because it creates possibilities for the people out in the world to see themselves and imagine what they can do and who they can be. 

TIlly: Yeah.

Shakina: Yeah, you know, but also in terms of the fictional stuff, you know, it was movies that taught me how to imagine, and shows that taught me how to imagine that really saved my life. You know whether it was like NEVERENDING STORY and LABYRINTH, and those kind of like youthful movies about the ability to become the world you see for yourself. Or you know, things like the original Quantum Leap that was like “this is what it means to walk a mile in another person’s shoes.” And wow! Look at that man becoming a woman and no one batting an eye. That’s great, you know?

Tilly Bridges: Yeah. Yeah, I think the first time I ever actually saw a trans person in anything was ACE VENTURA.

Shakina: Oof.

Tilly: And that’s a bad way for you to first see yourself on screen, right?

Shakina: It is not great, yeah.

Tilly: No, it’s not. So I’m glad that this episode is there because trans kids get to see themselves on screen, and they can see their story and their joy, and their struggles depicted as real and valid. And that they can be heroes too. You know I didn’t know I was trans when I was a kid, but if I’d had rep like this, in anything that I watched, even once, I might have been able to figure it out a lot sooner. So thank you for giving that to all the trans kids out there, so that they can have it better than we did.

Shakina: Thank you. Thanks, for-  I mean, I appreciate that. But again. It’s like simply a duty, you know. 

Tilly: Yeah, yeah, I kind of feel the same way. We’re working on a thing now where I’m getting, I guess we are getting the opportunity to kind of do that as well, and it feels like… it feels like such a responsibility because you want to get it right, and it’s so important. And you want to give back to those kids out there. And it’s just – yeah. So I’m glad that you’re out there doing it, too. And thank you so much for taking the time to drop in and talk with us today. I love this episode. I loved talking to you, and it’s been a real joy for me.

Shakina: It’s been a real joy, too. Thank you. Such a pleasure chatting with you both. Am I so glad you you love the episode, and and I appreciate that you’re amplifying it on the podcast

Tilly Bridges: And to anybody out there listening I just want to say, even if you’ve watched the episode already, please go watch it again. And then 6 more times after that. Bump those numbers so that we get more episodes like this, because we need this kind of representation in our media now, more than ever.

Shakina: Amen to that.

Tilly: Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

INTERVIEW WITH MAYA DEANE, AUTHOR OF “WRATH GODDESS SING,” part 2

Welcome to #TransTuesday! We’re back with the conclusion of my interview with @mayadeanewriter, author of WRATH GODDESS SING – a retelling of the ILIAD with Achilles as a trans woman. We’re getting into other trans characters, my favorite passages, and more!

If you missed PART 1, be sure you check that out first! And then dive right into part 2!

As a reminder, you can get a copy of the book from the publisher:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/wrath-goddess-sing-maya-deane

Or on Amazon to help boost its rankings (leave a rating and review!):
https://www.amazon.com/Wrath-Goddess-Sing-Maya-Deane/dp/0063161184/

TB: In Wrath Goddess Sing Brisewos is a trans man, his analogue being a cis woman named Briseis in the original versions. It made his dynamic with Achilles and the Amazons fascinating. Why specifically did you choose to make him a trans man, and not one of the other characters?

MD: Nobody knows what to do with Briseis, and in many retellings, Briseis could easily be replaced by a solid gold rubber ducky and have just as much personality and agency and role in the story. 

MD: Homer’s Briseis is the best out there, because at least she speaks bluntly of her positionality as a war captive, and while she is treated by the Achaians as a prize, the poem itself confronts her full humanity. 

MD: When I realized that Briseis lived in a town founded by Amazons, I also realized that I had the opportunity to do something different with the character. I started with the question “How would the Amazons react to trans women? Well, how about trans men?” and went from there.

MD: Given that Briseis is a love interest (and slave) of Achilles in the Iliad, Brisewos is a chance to explore and subvert that: what do the events of the Iliad look like…

MD: …if Brisewos was with Achilles voluntarily for purposes of his own, then left her voluntarily for reasons of his own? 

TB: There are many references to Achilles “in the well,” a horrible event she actually went through, but it’s also used as metaphor for her dysphoria. “At times like now, when she was entirely alone in the world, she was still at the bottom of the well, still surrounded by water, her lungs and limbs still burning as she fought to breathe.” 

TB: I’ve often described my own gender dysphoria as being like drowning, which is not dissimilar. Did any of your own possible dysphoria play into the wording of that? What made that specific metaphor be the one you landed on?

(Here’s the very first Trans Tuesday I ever wrote, on GENDER DYSPHORIA.)

MD: Yes, my own experiences with dysphoria certainly were relevant. I was also thinking a lot about the trans reading of the biblical Yosef/Joseph/Yusuf, who was thrown into a well by her brothers, and about the numerous drowned trans women in myth…

MD: …and literature and archeology (some believe the Iron Age bog bodies of northern Europe were predominantly feminine men and trans women) and the imagery was enormously powerful.  

TB: Many passages spoke very deeply to me. I’d like to call some of them out specifically, with a question to follow.

TB: I’ve never seen the loss of hormone replacement therapy described so aptly, so surface-level, so “HEY THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT IT’S LIKE WHEN YOU TAKE HRT AWAY FROM TRANS PEOPLE”:

TB: “On the journey to Agamemnon’s army, she would have none of the herbs that had spared her the indignities of manhood, and the process would resume.” 

TB: “Hair would sprout on her chest and shoulders and back as it had on Odysseus; a beard would follow; she would lose the fiery curls on her head; she would stink like a bull; her skin would roughen and bulge with veins; it would be worse than death.” 

TB: “And it would be death—the death of her self, the inexorable corrosion of her soul, until even her name was forgotten and nothing was left but the shell of a man she never was.”

(See the Trans Tuesday on HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY)

TB: There’s even a bit where you talk about tucking: “The underclothes she wore were tighter than usual, form-fitting around her waist and under her groin, holding everything crushed flat to preserve her dignity.”

(See the Trans Tuesday on TUCKING AND BINDING)

TB: There’s also bits where you talk about the stares we often receive from cis people in public: “She could feel the eyes of the Myrmidons on her back, the chagrin of some, the curiosity of others—Not often that a scrawny weakling comes back a princess…”

TB: “…she thought grimly, so I can’t blame them for staring—but they would not meet her eyes, no matter how fiercely she stared them down.”

TB: “Some gave Achilles doubtful looks as they passed; some looked at her curiously; but nobody seemed able to walk by her without staring at all.”

(See the Trans Tuesday on STOP STARING AT US (trans people are human beings).)

TB: And the bits of truth in how cis people will defend the other cis people who’ve made our lives hell, not able to comprehend the evils they’ve visited upon us:

TB: “She did not want to think about his crushed body, or his past, or his love for her father, or his intentions in throwing her down a well. At least now she would be free of the well forever, and the memory would fade.”

TB: “‘I’m taking the wineskin,’ she said at last. ‘That’s fine,’ said the old man. ‘I just wanted you to know he wasn’t all bad.’ ‘To me he was,’ said Achilles, ‘but I understand your feelings.’ It was a lie, but it should shut him up.”

(See the Trans Tuesday on TRANS POLITICS, and how cis people need to stop tolerating transphobia in their friends and family if things are ever going to get better)

TB: Or the ways that even as our dysphoria lessens or, if we’re lucky, dissipates, we can never ever escape the memories of it haunting us for our entire lives.

TB: “Yes, Helen purred, let your memory take you back to the place you never left. For me, it is sunrise on a mountaintop—when and where, I do not know, but the sun rises and the sea covers everything and I am utterly alone. For you, it is at the bottom of a well.”

(See the Trans Tuesday on THE PAST (and why it haunts us), and how difficult it can be for those of us who transition as adults to have every memory tainted by dysphoria)

TB: Or the way our deadnames can be such a source of pain for us: “…a childhood of cruel brothers with sharp elbows who called her a boy, and a hated inescapable name. Joseph, Joseph, Joseph—it stuck to Kiya like a curse.”

TB: “In the cages in Egypt they had called her Joseph; as the knife cut her, Joseph; as she tumbled into the darkness of the well, screaming and flailing at the air, she heard them jeering Joseph.”

TB: “But she had torn that name away and risen from the darkness to challenge the gods themselves.”

TB: Or the pain of going through the wrong puberty: “No, she would show her what it was like to be broken and twisted, to lose your body, to watch yourself warp and twist and become hideous.”

(See the Trans Tuesday on TRANS KIDS AND THE INTAKE EXAM to understand what forcing trans kids through the wrong puberty can do to them)

TB: It meant so much to me to see our experiences described so eloquently on the page. Was the choice from the beginning always to make the book so very clearly about our specific experiences as trans women, or did something along the way prompt it to get more explicitly trans? 

TB: I guess what I’m getting at is did you intend to be more subtle initially and then realized it in fact needed to be shouted from the rooftops, or was the plan always to make the book as blatantly “the trans woman experience” as possible?

MD: I literally always intended this to be blatantly about our lives as trans women. My life was changed when I first read an unpublished book by Alina Boyden back in 2017 that confronted trans women’s experiences head on; I felt things…

MD: …I had never felt in a lifetime of reading, and I realized for the first time how powerful literature could be. I thought I’d known years before — I’ve been a reader all my life — but no. 

TB: There’s so little literature (or media of any kind out there) this specific to our experiences, and the way you felt reading Alina Boyden’s unpublished book is the way I felt with Wrath Goddess Sing. 

TB: We have so little representation in media, and often it has to be only implied or hinted at. And even when we’re right there on the surface, it’s almost never about us. Where do you go from Wrath Goddess Sing? 

TB: Have you said all you have to say about the trans experience? Are there other aspects you’d like to explore in other books, or is Wrath Goddess Sing the full statement on its own?

MD: I have a lot more to say. Achilles was a defiant, moody, furious teenager born into privilege and doom. 

MD: I love her, but she is just one of the trans ghosts I need to summon up from the Great Below. Currently I am calling forth Kiya in a book I’m calling Beautiful on the Horizon.

TB: I’m very excited to get more of Kiya. Will this be the same version of her we see in Wrath Goddess Sing, or something else?

MD: She won’t be <spoilers> dead yet at the beginning of her story, but yeah, we will see her fall and rise and becoming, and eventually we will understand the scope of her 3400-year grand scheme.

Thanks again to @mayadeanewriter! She was super insightful and forthright, and as a big fan of the book it was an extra joy for me. From one trans lady writer to another, I can’t thank her enough for WRATH GODDESS SING. I’ll treasure it forever.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

INTERVIEW WITH MAYA DEANE, AUTHOR OF “WRATH GODDESS SING,” part 1

Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week is a first for us, as we begin a two part interview with @mayadeanewriter, author of WRATH GODDESS SING – a retelling of the ILIAD with Achilles as a trans woman. To say the book affected me down to my core is an understatement.

This week we discuss pitching trans stories, why “Achilles as a trans woman” was a story she wanted to tell, the painting of trans women as violent sex offenders, catharsis and trans women’s rage, and the imperfect world Achilles lived in (and how that changes when she’s trans).

This interview will read fine whether you’ve read the book or not! There are only the mildest of story spoilers, as we talk more about the trans aspects rather than character or plot details of the story. But as a reminder this is a retelling of a myth that’s thousands of years old. 

If you don’t already know the story of Achilles and the Iliad, and don’t want to be spoiled on a very well known ancient Greek myth, read the book first! If you’ve read the book, this will be enlightening. And if you haven’t, you’re going to want to dive in after this, I think.

Grab yourself a copy of the book direct from the source:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/wrath-goddess-sing-maya-deane

Or on Amazon to help boost its rankings:
https://www.amazon.com/Wrath-Goddess-Sing-Maya-Deane/dp/0063161184/

The book is so, so deeply about the experience of being a trans woman, and I’ve never read something so incredibly in your face about what it’s like to exist in the world as us, that so profoundly speaks to the simmering rage we feel at the unjustness of how we’re treated.

On top of that it’s a fantastic fantasy novel and an excellent retelling of the Iliad. It’s a great read all around that gets my highest possible recommendation. Wanting more info, I’d read several interviews with Maya but most only glance across the transness of it all.

I’ll preface all of my questions with a TB:, and all of her replies with an MD:, so it should be clear where my questions end and her answers begin. Let’s go!

TB: As a trans writer myself, I’ve found it can be difficult to pitch projects that are explicitly trans to cis people (usually cishet white men) because many seem to have difficulty connecting to the themes as it’s so far outside their experience. 

TB: Yet they’re the gatekeepers to getting our stories out there, especially on a wider scale. Can you talk a bit about what the process of getting a publishing contract for Wrath Goddess Sing was like? 

TB: Did you receive any pushback, notes from people who couldn’t understand the trans experience, or changes you were asked to make that would have taken the story further away from its transness?

MD: Honestly, some of my greatest supporters have been cishet white men, including my agent Jason Yarn & my editor David Pomerico, who understood from an early stage that I would face challenges bringing trans women’s literature to market and worked hard to meet those challenges.

MD: In general, I wasn’t asked to make changes that would blunt the impact of the work, though some of the other editors we considered certainly wondered if it were possible for a book about a transfeminine Achilles to succeed in a post-Song of Achilles market. 

TB: What made this the story you wanted to tell? By which I mean, why tell the story of Achilles as a trans woman, rather than an entirely new story with a trans woman lead? 

TB: What was it specifically about Achilles’ story that made it the right fit? Or was it something about the myth of Achilles’ story specifically that inspired the concept?

MD: I have always been bothered by the way that Achilles’ time on Skyros was treated in retellings. In the ancient accounts, Achilles’ years living as a girl named Pyrrha are sometimes glossed over and sometimes taken more seriously…

MD: …and if we look at the visual arts traditions as well as the literary ones, we soon see that Achilles has sometimes been presented as a crossdressing man and sometimes as a trans woman since ancient times. 

MD: This has resulted in attempts to specifically “rescue” Achilles from accusations of transfemininity; for instance, Statius’s Achilleid frames Achilles as an angry, manly Roman vir furious at being sent to Skyros to live as a girl…

MD: …who promptly decides to take the opportunity to invade women’s spaces and rape Deidamia — which, to an audience of manly Roman men, would have been far more honorable than being a trans woman. 

MD: But when I asked myself, “How would the story go if Achilles was simply a trans woman?” I felt the seismic realignment of an entire world beginning to grind into motion, and as the continental plates of my imagination slid into place, I knew I had to tell her story.

TB: I think that’s a really powerful thing. Not just to take this larger than life mythical figure and deeply explore how the story would be different if she were a trans woman, but to reclaim the character from depictions as a violent rapist. 

TB: It also speaks in a meta sense to a lot of what we trans women face in present society… like the “bathroom bills” that won’t stop cropping up, positing to ban us from public life for the non-existent, imagined crime of us as violent rapists. Was that part of your intent?

MD: Well, I certainly do not appreciate the way we’re slandered and libeled — though I think the accusations are simply a pretext for treating us the way transmisogynists already want to treat us. 

MD: One thing I was interested in exploring with Achilles is the essentially cowardly nature of transmisogyny. You’ll notice that none of her childhood tormentors considered it a matter of principle worth dying for; they harmed her when she was a child without power…

MD: …but accommodated her when she became a divine, destructive force. People attack us in large part because they think they can get away with it. 

TB: I’ve read other books by trans authors, other books featuring trans characters, but nothing else has yet matched Wrath Goddess Sing in how much rage a lot of us are filled with, based on the way we’re treated by society. 

(If you missed it, here’s the Trans Tuesday on TRANS RAGE. And its follow up, TRANS RAGE 2: CIS APATHY.)

TB: I’ve not seen that touched on in quite that way before. What was the process like for you, having to dig deep into that very specific feeling… that rage that makes our blood boil at the injustice of it all? 

MD: Cathartic. That’s how I feel all the time. 

TB: It really felt that way for me, too, just in reading it. I’ve often said the rage of trans women burns hot enough to power the sun, and I’ve never seen it explained or described as well as it is in Wrath Goddess Sing. 

TB: The injustice of it all is so hard to deal with. And this book felt like a megaphone attached to my heart, saying all the things I feel for the world to hear. 

TB: It was like a release valve for all this pressure that builds up over time. I don’t know if you also intended it to be cathartic for all of us, but it certainly was for me. So thank you for that, truly. 

MD: I intended that.

TB: As this was a retelling of the Iliad but through the lens of Achilles as a trans woman, how did you decide what to keep from past iterations and what to change? 

TB: I identified with Achilles on a lot of levels, even though our personalities are wildly different, but she still owned slaves. That kept her a little distant as slavery is so abhorent. 

TB: And rigid class systems were still in place. Why keep those things, when so much else was already changing, and in a world filled with gods and magic?

MD: Because the particulars of her society structured her experience. Those were the constraints she faced. 

MD: Like many Bronze Age aristocrats, she knew herself to be literally descended from the gods — and yet her society, like most historical societies, was built on grinding oppression. This is not a contradiction we can handwave away. 

MD: Our own prosperity is also built on abhorrent economic systems and rigid classes; we communicate like gods, with bound lightning, over vast distances, but our devices were created through poisonous extraction and unfree labor. 

MD: Some writers might choose to look away from the horrors underlying their story’s world, but I think that’s cowardly, and I think Achilles’ ability to grasp the horror of her society — and, in her own flawed and limited way, struggle against it –…

MD: …is far nobler than trying to pretend to an innocence none of us actually has. Why write contemporary fiction in a world of capitalism? Why write anything less than utopia? Because we live in history, in the world the gods made, and none of our hands are clean. 

MD: For those who are interested in knowing more about Mycenaean forms of servitude, what you see in Wrath Goddess Sing is actually a hybrid of the Archaic Greek war-captive system that’s described anachronistically in the Iliad…

MD: …and the Mycenaean Greek system of bondage that is carefully recorded in the Bronze Age palace archives. The book explores the way a cataclysmic war with mass looting interacts with an existing system of servitude. 

We’ll wrap it there this week! Thanks again to @mayadeanewriter for doing this interview, and being so forthright and open about everything. It was a joy for me.

Catch part 2 next week! We discuss more trans characters, gender dysphoria, how specifically the book speaks to the trans woman experience (including some of my favorite bits that hit me like a freight train), and where she goes from here. 

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com