Trans Media

TRANS REP IN MEDIA 2023 PART 1 (movies)

Welcome to #TransTuesday! Over the course of 2023 I tracked every movie and tv show I watched to bring you TILLY’S 2023 TRANS REP IN MEDIA! We’ll discuss where trans people or issues appeared, under what context, and hopefully get a picture of how things are going!

At the end I’ll be comparing trans rep in 2023 to trans rep in 2022, so you might want to first check out the TRANS REP IN MEDIA 2022 to see how things were last year, what was good, and what went entirely off the rails.

Also I want you to PLEASE understand what an undertaking it is to take notes on EVERY SINGLE THING YOU WATCH FOR A YEAR (now for two years running). It’s a TON of work, and it means I can’t ever just brush off transphobia I see.

But if I don’t do this, people don’t know. Even trans people can miss transphobic jokes if they’re not always looking for them. So if I don’t point them out, it doesn’t get talked about, and then nothing ever gets better.

But I ALSO want to call out media that gets it right, that has wonderful and so very badly needed trans representation. We need to celebrate the good, too, especially in this heavily anti-trans climate we find ourselves in.

As with last year, this does not cover all movies and tv shows released in 2023. There’s no way for me to watch everything that’s released, it’s just not possible. And in our present flood of media, we might not even hear about something until a year or more after it comes out.

This is a representation of things I watched in 2023, but that were released recently (within the past couple of years). But Susan and I watch a LOT. We’re screenwriters, that’s part of the job.

So what you’re getting is one trans woman screenwriter’s experience watching the mediums she most loves for an entire year, and what was great, what was awful, and just how often there was absolutely nothing at all for me to report on.

I’m including the titles of everything we watched, and how many trans/non-binary/gender non-conforming people appeared in them. And I’m going to include titles even when NO trans people appeared, because that’s still remarkably the norm.

I tried my best to catch all the trans people but may have missed some, because not every trans person knows every other trans person (huge if true). And also because sometimes it’s not mentioned that a character is trans at all.

In fact, I missed a couple last year and had to add them in after the fact. Did you know the MCU has had a trans person in it? I bet you did not! Patti Harrison is in an episode of She-Hulk, playing a bride. She has actual lines, too!

But nothing in the episode mentions that she’s trans, so I, a trans woman, did not know or even suspect I was seeing someone like me FOR THE FIRST TIME in a gigantic media franchise that’s dominated the cultural landscape for the past decade.

Also, after the 2022 TRANS REP IN MEDIA trans tuesday, I learned that Janelle Monae was non-binary, which meant that even though they were playing a cis woman character in Glass Onion, it was at least representation in terms of actors.

I discussed this in the 2022 write up, but it bears repeating: IF YOU DO NOT SAY OR UNQUESTIONABLY VISIBLY CONVEY A CHARACTER IS TRANS, NOBODY WILL KNOW. Not even other trans people!

And then WE don’t know that we got to exist in those worlds and be part of those stories, and cis people don’t get to see and experience us just being a normal part of the world our stories inhabit, like we should be.

And we SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO THAT. In an ideal world, there’d be a fair amount of trans rep in our media and we’d see it so often that it wouldn’t matter if a character’s transness was mentioned or not.

But we do not live in that world.

And until we do, seeing trans people on screen and as parts of our most popular mediums and art forms is VITAL to the acceptance we so badly need in this society. If we can see it, we can be it. It lets us know we belong and it’s okay to be us.

And now you see why the bigots fight so hard against it, why cis people gatekeep trans stories and trans creatives out of so much of our media. It’s the same reason you see so little representation for every other marginalized community too.

Of course not all of it is active bigotry, but the way the entertainment industry is structured, the easiest way in is by having a connection to those who are already in (largely cishet white people), or being able to be an assistant for next to no pay and often horrible conditions.

And who are the people who can afford to do that? Largely (wealthy, especially compared to many marginalized people) cishet white people.

So the system is self-perpetuating, because less marginalized people get into positions of power where they can help other marginalized people get jobs and tell our stories. And when we don’t, when we appear in media we didn’t get to help create…

It can often be harmful in so many ways. If you need a refresher on the perils of BAD REPRESENTATION and the harm it can do, there’s a trans tuesday on that and Lovecraft Country.

And if you need a refresher on the importance of GOOD REPRESENTATION and the joy it can bring and the good it can do, there’s a trans tuesday on that too, and Cyberpunk 2077.

A reminder: whether or not a trans person appeared in something does not indicate quality or whether I enjoyed it. I really liked lots of things that had zero trans people in them. But it remains difficult to love something and then wonder why there was no place in it for you.

Also a reminder that covid is still real and still a thing and my wife is immunocompromised, so we cannot go to theaters. So anything that hasn’t hit streaming/Blu-ray yet we have no way to see. Still, we saw a lot!

CAUTION: To talk about this there have to be spoilers by necessity! Okay, let’s get into it, starting with movies:

65 – 0

Banshees of Inisherin – 0

Barbie – 1

Trans woman Hari Nef plays Doctor Barbie, though she’s not mentioned as trans in dialogue. No other characters’ identities are either really buuuuut again, if you don’t say it how many people aren’t gonna know and thus miss that representation?

Barbie theatrical poster with Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken digging on a bright pink B with the text “she’s everything, he’s just Ken”

How many of you watched and had no idea there was a trans woman in that movie? So do we count that as trans representation? In terms of actors, yes absolutely. I saw a trans woman on screen and it was fabulous.

Hari Nef’s Barbie character poster, with a photo of her and text that reads, “this Barbie is a doctor”

But trans people can play cis characters, and nothing marks the character as trans, so largely most of the cis people who saw the movie had no idea they were seeing a trans Barbie, which would have been truly remarkable.

Anyway the whole movie is a big trans allegory, but in a way you probably wouldn’t think. I’m gonna do a trans tuesday all about it, so stay tuned.

Bottoms – 0

This was one of my favorite movies of the year, a lesbian teen sex comedy that made me feel seen in ways I haven’t felt before. But there are no trans people. There’s a couple of jokes, though…

Bottoms theatrical poster with the cast and text that reads, “a movie about empowering women (the hot ones)”

There’s one joke where a girl is talking about a guy and mentions his “male penis,” which is only funny if you think there can’t be any other kind (spoiler, there can, there are also female penises and nonbinary penises).

And there’s another scene where the head jock football quarterback is dancing in his room to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which is again played for laughs but is only funny if you think a boy dancing to a love song is something he shouldn’t be doing.

Confess Fletch – 0

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves – 0

Elemental – 1

There is apparently a non-binary character among Wade’s water family, played by non-binary actor Ava Kai Hauser. But I say “apparently” because I missed it entirely, and after watching remembered I’d heard there was some rep and thought I missed it.

Theatrical poster for Elemental, with water creature Wade hanging from the top and dripping water droplets downard, and fire creature Ember standing on the bottom and smiling up at him

And sure enough I did. The character has only a handful of lines and since everyone is calling this the first actual non-binary rep in a Pixar film I must have missed the they/them pronouns.

But if a trans person actively looking for the trans rep still misses it, what does that tell you about how effective the representation was? And I want you to realize even if I had picked up on it, the character is of literally no consequence.

If you removed them the movie would not have a single drop of difference. It’s well beyond time we got more than four lines and were actual characters and not set dressing. I’m in the animation guild, and through that I was able to see the Elemental script.

Now I don’t know which version of the script this was, because scripts go through so many drafts and revisions, and where it starts may barely resemble where it ends up. And things also get changed on set during filming, or for animated films, during recording.

And then they may change further during editing. So this isn’t fully determinative, but in the script *I* read, Wade has brothers and sisters but no non-binary sibling. There are no they/them pronouns used. he role may have been changed to suit the actor, which is great.

And though his siblings have names, Ava Kai Hauser is only credited on IMDB as “additional voices,” which seems… unfortunate, given they voiced a character with an actual name, incredibly small though it may have been.

And yet how sad is it that this still feels like progress?

Enola Holmes 2 – 0

At one point Enola swaps clothes with a boy to elude the police, and there’s a shot of the boy in her dress smiling like he super likes it. The moment is played for laughs, and again we are shown that someone perceived as a boy doing anything perceived for girls is worthy of ridicule.

The Flash – 1

Ezra Miller is non-binary, though they’re playing a cis man. So this counts as actor rep but not character rep. Buuuut Ezra is an abuser and a trash person, so it’s a definite mixed bag at best.

Ghosted – 0

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 – 0

Haunted Mansion – 0

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – 0

Joyride – 1

Deadeye is a character nicknamed that due to their… dead eyes. And, like, have you seen pre-transition photos of trans people? We’ve got those. One of the most beautiful and heartwarming things about transition timelines is watching our eyes come alive.

Joyride theatrical poster with the cast looking disheveled and sitting on luggage, with the text, “Four friends. One Trip. No luck.”

Suddenly there’s joy, and happiness, and LIFE. Deadeye was not named that by mistake. They introduce themselves with their “legal name” and then say to call them Deadeye. How much clearer could that be?

Multiple times through the movie, Deadeye mimes having a penis. And it’s played for laughs, but not by the movie so much as by Deadeye themselves. In the way of “ha ha wouldn’t it be funny if I had different genitalia?” as a “safe, joking” way trans people can dance around our truth.

They have a line later on where they say, “I’m not like the rest of my family.” And their family says they should smile more. Which you can see as sexism, OR… as because pre-transition trans people rarely smile, and when we did it was always kind of hollow.

In the final scene, Deadeye’s hair and clothes have become perhaps more masculine, and “they/them” pronouns are used for them in the final scene. And they’re played by by nonbinary actor Sabrina Wu.

It was written and directed by cis people, but the story wasn’t appropriating anything. It wasn’t ABOUT Deadeye being trans or nonbinary, their transition was just something that happened over the course of the story. Pretty great representation all around, I think.

The Little Mermaid live action – 0*

The Little Mermaid remains a huge trans allegory, including the Part of Your World song and the fact that Hans Christian Anderson may have been trans. I plan to dive into HCA’s published letters at some point to see for myself what clues may be there.

Until then, you can see the trans tuesday on THE INTENTIONAL (?) TRANS ALLEGORY OF THE LITTLE MERMAID’S “PART OF YOUR WORLD”.

And for more discussion on Hans Christan Anderson’s possible transness, and how difficult it can be to spot trans people from the past (even though we have ALWAYS existed), see the trans tuesday on TRANS HISTORY 1.

The Menu – 0

Monica – 1 (but the movie is all about her)

Trans woman Trace Lysette stars in this movie about a trans woman going home to help take care of her mother with dementia, who may not even realize that her daughter is her child, as she’s not seen her since she kicked her out, when she came out as trans.

Theatrical poster for Monica, showing Trace Lysette as Monica, eyes closed and face raised upward as a warm light shines down on her

This movie showed me several things I’ve never seen in a movie before, namely a trans woman having to deal with chasers. See the trans tuesday on CHASERS AND THE FETISHIZATION OF TRANS WOMEN for more on that.

The moment in the movie that just floored me is when, emotionally distraught and fed up, Monica un-modulates her voice as she yells in frustration.

For those not aware, for a trans woman who does gender-affirming voice therapy, one of the hardest things to do can be to maintain it when we get really emotional, because you’re just reacting and not thinking about how you sound. That moment was so powerful to me.

If you want more on exactly what gender-affirming voice therapy is like, there’s a three-part trans tuesday on TRANS VOICES.

I’m conflicted about this movie though, as it was written and directed by a seemingly cis man. But this is a very trans story, the kind that should only be told by trans people and not appropriated by cis folks.

See the trans tuesday on TRANS ROLES AND STORIES (and who gets to play them/tell them) for more on that.

The director said he worked with Trace Lysette through every step of the process, which is great, but… listen, if you’re a cis person who thinks there’s an important trans story that needs to be told, and you can help make that happen? GREAT.

But you need to empower trans people to tell that story. He could have brought Trace on as a co-writer or co-director, but he didn’t. Her only credit is in acting. It’s also possible the director may be trans and not out, or not know it yet.

But it appears to be a cis man telling an inherently trans story, and that makes me uncomfortable. And so my feelings on it are really complicated.

Morbius – 0

Nimona – 1*

This was also one of my favorite movies of the year. Nimona is genderfluid, but also the entire story is very much about being trans and the way the world treats you. But Nimona is played by Chloë Grace Moretz, who is a cis woman. So it’s character rep, but not actor rep.

Nimona theatrical poster, showing Nimona (a young person with bat wings and a demon tail) smiling on the back of Ballister (an adult man in a suit of armor). A large number of sharp weapons are pointed at them.

The movie’s based on a webcomic and graphic novel by ND Stevenson who is trans. ND has said, looking back, Nimona was clearly an intentional trans allegory (even if he wasn’t aware of it at the time).

I’ve mentioned time and again how just because we might not consciously know we’re writing about trans themes, doesn’t mean we’re not. We work through these things subconsciously sometimes, but that makes them no less intentional.

At first I thought I’d have to do a trans tuesday about how trans the movie is, how brilliantly it uses color, how they stunningly use the shape of eyes to convey so much, but then the filmmakers did all that themselves in an interview with Hollywood Reporter.

Still, a LOT of people have said they’d love for me to do a write-up on it and all the specific ways it speaks to transness, so look for that coming down the road sometime, too. This movie is magnificent and everyone should see it.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On – 0

I loved this movie. Marcel is a shell with shoes and one googly eye, who yet is also explicitly male (despite being voiced by a cis woman). At one point people see videos of him and he gets made fun of for having pink shoes, and he says his grandfather had pink shoes.

But again we see the “apparent boy doing anything coded as for girls is worthy of laughter” joke, and goodness it seems to permeate everything. I doubt it’s even a conscious choice in any of these appearances, it’s just THAT implicit in our society.

If you want more on implicit biases and what those are, and why we NEED to root them out and get rid of them, see the trans tuesday on IMPLICIT QUEERPHOBIA.

GdT Pinocchio – 0

This movie is wonderful and ALSO works remarkably well as a trans allegory, but there’s no trans rep to be found.

Polite Society – 0

Quantumanina – 0

Quiet Place 2 – 0

Shazam Fury of the Gods – 0

There’s one very cringey bit where the wizard has his head appear on wonder woman’s body in the middle of someone’s dream, and it’s played for laughs. SO TIRED OF IT, YA’LL.

Strange World – 0

Super Mario Bros movie – 0

Tetris – 0

Three Thousand Years of Longing – 0

Wakanda Forever – 0

WolfWalkers – 0

That’s all the recent movies we saw, and the totals aren’t great. Basically as many jokes ABOUT trans people as there were trans people (not all of whom were even mentioned as being trans). YIKES.

Come back next week as we dive into the first part of television I watched in 2023!

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

Ps – Part 2 (aka TV part 1) is here!

TRANS REP IN MEDIA 2022

Welcome to #TransTuesday! Through all of 2022 I tracked every movie and tv show I watched to bring you TILLY’S 2022 TRANS REP IN MEDIA! We’re going to talk about where trans people appeared or were discussed, and under what context, and see if we can find some conclusions!

Before we dig in, a couple caveats. This isn’t going to cover all movies and tv shows that were released in 2022. I am but one woman, I cannot possibly watch everything that comes out.

Further, so much new stuff is released so frequently, we don’t always hear about it right away or aren’t always able to get to it quickly. So this list includes things I SAW this year, even if they might have been released a year or two ago.

I’m going to include the titles of everything we watched, and how many trans/non-binary/gender non-conforming people appeared in them. And I’m going to include titles even when NO trans people appeared, because you need to see just how prevalent that is.

Also a warning: there will be discussion of transphobic stories and jokes, and I know that not everyone is in a place where they can hear about that. If that would make you uncomfortable, you may want to skip this installment.

I tried my best to catch all the trans people but may have missed some, because not every trans person knows every other trans person. And also because sometimes it’s not mentioned that a character is trans at all.

And that’s something I’m really torn on. Because you shouldn’t HAVE to mention a character is trans if you’re not telling an explicitly trans story, right? We’re so much more than just our transness.

But that only works if we live in an ideal society where trans people show up in media all the time. And that is sadly very much not the world we live in. If you don’t mention a character is trans in a visible, clear way… people will miss it.

And the problem with that is when our representation is so few and far between, when it does happen (and is good representation and not bad), the trans people watching need to know. AND SO DO THE CIS PEOPLE WATCHING.

If you need a refresher on the perils of BAD REPRESENTATION and the harm it can do.

And if you need a refresher on the importance of GOOD REPRESENTATION and the joy it can bring.

Please note whether or not a trans person appeared in something is not intended as an arbiter of quality. I really liked and even loved many things that had zero trans people in them. But it’s also difficult to love something and then wonder why there was no place in it for you.

Okay, let’s dive in. Movies first.

The Batman – 0

Bros – 3
Played by: Miss Lawrence, Ts Madison, Eve Lindley. Great rep, discussed in dialogue, varied personalities. Very well done.

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – 0

Encanto – 0

Enola Holmes – 0

Eternals – 0

Everything Everywhere All at Once – 0

Finding Ohana – 0

Free Guy – 0

Glass Onion – 0

Lightyear- 0

No Time to Die – 0

Prey – 0

The Princess – 0

Red Notice – 0

A Shadow in the Cloud – 0

Sorry to Bother You – 0

Spirited – 0

Thor Love and Thunder – 0

There’s a somewhat stealth transphobic joke in here, where Astrid says he wants to be called Axl and Thor says he’ll call him what his father named him. I don’t think that it was INTENDED as a dig at trans people.

But it definitely reads as “we only accept what your parents named you.” And THAT definitely reads as transphobic. A small thing, sure, not really worth getting upset about. But indicative of the culture.

Turning Red – 0

Wendell and Wild – 1

A trans boy played by Sam Zelaya. I’m very conflicted on this one. On the one hand, trans boys and men seem to get even less representation than trans women and non-binary folks do, and the character of Raul is developed and well-rounded and really great.

And you do find out he’s trans in the story! BUT you find that out by him getting deadnamed on screen, and misgendered when someone’s talking to his mom on the phone. And these things definitely really happen to us!

But this wasn’t a story about Raul being trans, it wasn’t even Raul’s story. And so to reveal his transness in that way seems like it’s making his existence revolve around the trauma he experiences at the hands of cis people, and that doesn’t sit right.

There’s also the issue that Raul seemingly came out and transitioned while attending an all-girls school, and nobody once mentions that as he is a boy, he does not belong at that school because *he is not a girl*.

As it is, it feels like it never occurred to the filmmakers that a trans boy wouldn’t want to be at a girls’ school, and the fact that all his classmates and teachers don’t talk about this tacitly implies that they think he BELONGS there, or they feel he isn’t really a boy.

He’s a great character and I hope a lot of trans boys felt seen by him. I just think he could have been handled with a little more nuance to avoid those sorts of implications. You definitely don’t want young trans boys thinking all cis adults think they belong with the girls.

The Woman King – 0

That’s it for new(ish) movies we saw, and the totals aren’t great. In fact if you removed Bros the numbers would be truly abysmal. There’s a larger point to be made about stuff made FOR queer people, but we’ll get there in a bit. Okay, let’s move on to television!

I’m only including things we saw an entire season of. Shows we’re watching that are still only part way through their seasons are not included, because until the season’s over I obviously have no way to know how many trans people appeared.

Abbot Elementary s1 – 0

Andor s1 – 0

Arcane s1 – 0

Barry s3  – 0

Book of Boba Fett s1 – 0

Cobra Kai s4 – 0

Trans people were mentioned… in two jokes. Thankfully not at our expense, but to show how out of touch Johnny Lawrence is.

Cobra Kai s5 – 0

Dragon Age Absolution – 0

The Expanse s6 – 1

Sanjrani is non-binary, but that’s not mentioned in dialogue (other than “them” pronouns used by others when they are not around). I only caught this because we did an entire Expanse series rewatch this past December and noticed it the second time through!

The first time through I had NO IDEA the character was non-binary, BECAUSE IT WAS NEVER SAID OUT LOUD. And if the audience doesn’t know that character is non-binary, how can it count as representation? This is part of what I was talking about before.

Flash s8 – 0

The Flight Attendant s1 – 0

The Flight Attendant s2 – 1*

There’s a caveat on this one. Non-binary actor Mae Martin plays Grace, but Grace is a woman and referred to as “she.” So this one falls under rep for trans/non-binary actors, but NOT for trans/non-binary characters. Grace was seemingly presented as a cis woman.

I want to take a moment to note this is FINE and GOOD. Trans and non-binary actors CAN and SHOULD get roles like this! But if the character’s gender isn’t stated to match the actor’s, then I think that’s only sort of half representing us in the story, if that makes sense.

For All Mankind s3 – 0

Foundation s1 – 0

From s1 – 0

Gentleman Jack s1  – 0*

Gentleman Jack s2 – 0*

Okay this one’s really complicated, as gender can sometimes be. The main character is a real woman from history, Anne Lister, played by Suranne Jones. Suranne Jones is a cis woman. Anne Lister was… well she was a woman who loved women. And she did not like men.

And did not want to be associated with them. But she also bucked the trends of what was considered acceptable “womanhood” and had no need for most things associated with femininity.

I’ve not had the time to go through and read the actual Anne Lister’s diaries the show was based on, so I’m not qualified to say if she might have been trans or non-binary, even though she likely fell somewhere under the “gender non-conforming” umbrella.

As the show itself portrays Anne as a cis woman, and she’s played by a cis woman, I don’t think we can count this one as anything other than a cis woman. BUT it’s like a… gender-curious cis woman, maybe?

For more information on how Trans People Have Always Existed, and why it can be difficult to spot us in accounts of the past, see the trans tuesday on TRANS HISTORY 1.

I Am Groot – 0

These were just like five minute shorts, and yet… in Groot Takes a Bath, at one point he sprouts lots of leaves and makes different looks with them, one of which is a dress. The dress makes him VERY HAPPY…. and then he gets attacked by a bird.

In none of the different looks he made was he attacked, but the moment he makes a look that doesn’t conform to his presumed male gender, he’s punished for it. I mean GROOT IS A TREE PERSON and yet is gendered? It’s odd.

I also doubt this was consciously intended to be an anti-trans statement, but boys and men getting made fun of when they do anything remotely feminine is a HUGE trope in our entertainment and is an implicit bias woven into all of us.

A League of Their Own s1 – 1*

Lea Robinson is non-binary, and plays the non-binary Uncle Bert. This one is GREAT because it’s clear about who Bert is, and it also deals with what it was like to exist as a Black trans person in the 40s…

But it’s not all about the trauma inflicted on us by cis people. While that is present (and would have felt disingenuous were it not, given the show’s tone and setting), the show also makes it a point to show Bert’s trans JOY.

The show all around celebrates queer people and queer joy, which is really great. But this one gets an asterisk for the character of Max. Max is played by a cis woman and is portrayed as one, but part of the show is Max’s queer awakening.

At one point she says she feels like she’s “in the middle,” but it’s not clear whether this is in reference to gender or sexuality or both. So Max MIGHT be non-binary, but there’s not enough information to conclusively say.

I did a Trans Tuesday about this show, and specifically how it brought out the IMPLICIT QUEERPHOBIA in some cisgender heterosexual folks.

Legends of Tomorrow s7 – 0

Loot s1 – 1

Michaela Jaé Rodriguez plays the head of a charity foundation. The character is great and well-rounded and fabulous… and is never once mentioned as trans. In fact, I have a friend who said he was watching the show and looked up the cast and that’s how he found out.

And this is why I say again it’s so important to work in somewhere that we’re trans… I mean it could be as simple as having a small trans pride flag on her desk or something. Because how many people who watch the show are going to research the cast? Very few.

And if you don’t know someone is trans without researching them, that’s not really representation IN THE SHOW, right? Trans people watching might not realize they’re actually getting to see themselves in this story.

And cis people watching aren’t getting that representation either. They’re not getting to see us be just normal people in society, like someone who runs a charity. And that’s so, so important for normalizing our existence to so many people who don’t yet know any out trans people.

It also makes you wonder if the character is trans or not. Maybe she was playing a cis woman. That’s what cis people are going to assume if you don’t give them a reason not to, because many cis people still see cis as the default.

Anyway, this is a great trans role and great trans representation… if the character were mentioned as being trans somewhere, it’d be perfect. I hope they rectify that in season two.

Los Espookys s2 – 2

Two non-binary supporting cast members, Sebastian Ayala and Spike Einbinder. The former plays Oliver Twix, who I ADORE, but I’m not sure if any gender or pronouns are ever used to refer to them.

The latter plays Water Spirit, who is… a water spirit, who’s mostly non-vocal and only begins to learn to talk toward the end of the second season. I don’t believe either are mentioned as being non-binary, but they’re also not mentioned as being cis.

So it’s a little murky, again because without giving voice to it or putting it on screen visually we can’t know for sure. But it’s NB actors getting seemingly NB roles, and that’s great.

Love Death + Robots s3 – 0

Midnight Mass – 0

Moon Knight s1 – 0

Ms. Marvel s1 – 0

Murderville s1 – 0

Never Have I Ever s2 – 1

Alexndra Billings appears in a small recurring role as a guidance counselor, but she is never mentioned as being trans in dialogue or on screen. Again great to show us in jobs like this, but need to work in that she’s trans.

Never Have I Ever s3 – 1

Terry Hu appears in a small recurring role as a non-binary teen. They’re not mentioned as non-binary in dialogue I don’t think, but “them” pronouns are used.

But also in season three there’s a misgendering joke. Devi, a cis teen girl played by a cis actress, answers the door in a blue hoodie with the hood up, and the delivery man says “Sorry little boy, I have the wrong house.”

Which again seems innocuous, right? But when you think about why that’s supposed to be funny… it’s because this cis man thought a cis girl was a cis boy because she had on a gender-neutral hoodie in what society says is a “boy” color.

So she’s literally just getting misgendered, which happens to trans people a lot and is very painful, and here it’s supposed to be funny. Again, I do not believe this was a dig at trans people.

But it IS another case of the implicit biases of society saying anyone who doesn’t conform to rigid gender roles is “other” and therefore bizarre and worthy of ridicule. And for people who actually get misgendered, it’s not a fun moment to watch.

Obi-Wan Kenobi s1 – 0

Only Murders in the Building s2 – 0

One joke from a teen about an old man “messing up when I inevitably change my pronouns,” which makes it seem like it’s something every teen does on a whim? It kind of undermines how important it actually is when a trans person comes out and needs to change those.

Our Flag Means Death s1 – 1

Vico Ortiz plays the non-binary Jim, and it’s perfectly done.

Paper Girls s1 – 0

This one had no real trans representation, but in a weird confluence of events ended up giving me something from my past that I never got to have. I did a whole Trans Tuesday on THE PAST 2: THE NEW PAST, and often having to find our own representation.

The Peripheral – 1

Alexandra Billings again appears in my favorite trans role I saw all year, the inimitable Inspector Lowbeer. I love her so very much but also… SHE IS NEVER MENTIONED AS TRANS. So how many people watching have no idea, despite how famous she is?

Queer as Folk – 3

One trans woman main character, Jesse James Keitel, and two NB main characters played by NB actors, Fin Argus and CG. This show gets all the rep right, and has the added bonus of Episode 6 kicking me right in the guts.

It was the most accurate trans woman experience on screen I’ve yet found, and even now just thinking about it gives me so many complicated feelings. I’ve never ever EVER felt more seen. Honestly I felt a little exposed, it hit that close to home in so many ways.

Just a brief note of caution on this, the show is very heavy and deals with a queer community coming together and healing after a shooting at a queer club. It took a long time to get through, not because it was bad, but it was just hard to see people like you going through that.

You never see the violence on screen, but the impact and ramifications of it are felt through the entire season. So just be prepared going in. It can be funny and biting, but it’s also sometimes completely devastating.

Raised By Wolves s1 – 0

Reservation Dogs s1 – 0

Cheese introduces himself with his pronouns multiple times, but he also seems to be “the woke one” and nobody really knows how to react to him. Not really used as a joke, it’s just how his character is.

Reservation Dogs s2 – 0

One “he/she/they” joke relating to pubic hair, a “man moon” running gag in ep 1 about Native men who got periods. It’s implied these are cis men, and not trans men, unless I somehow missed that. Which makes this a joke for cis people about how funny it would be for men to menstruate.

…which many trans men actually DO. So that’s not great. Cheese also calls the Creator he/she/they because he doesn’t know which pronouns to use, and Cheese still introduces himself with he/him pronouns…

But after one of those times it’s to have a joke about the guy he’s talking to confusing sexuality with gender. So the tally here is at zero representation, but there were at least three jokes about things related to transness.

Resident Alien s1 – 0

Resident Alien s2 – 0

In one episode the alien Harry, who can sometimes change shape, becomes a woman and it’s utilized very well to explain some of what women go through that men do not. But there’s no mention of trans people being a thing that exists.

And then a joke is made that Harry, in his human woman form, was going to have sex with a woman “with my penis.” But he was a WOMAN saying that, see? Ha ha isn’t that so funny a woman with a penis! Ludicrous and hilarious! This joke is actually very transphobic.

If not by intent, then by omission… the omission of remembering that trans people are living human beings that exist and for some of us what you’re laughing at is just the way we are, and are often attacked and made fun of for.

Resident Evil s1 – 0

Russian Doll s2 – 0

There’s one joke involving pronouns, at the expense of someone who thought it was “chic” to not label a baby with them… again treating pronouns as if they’re some cool fad and not something important to us getting the respect we deserve as humans.

Rutherford Falls s2 – 1

Jesse Leigh is non-binary and plays a non-binary character and they steal EVERY scene they’re in. An absolute highlight, wonderful representation.

Severance s1 – 0

This one kind of bugs me, because I LOVE the show… but when your entire PREMISE is “who would you be with no memory of who you were and no expectations to live up to,” to NOT delve into the inherent transness of that bothers me! Still fabulous though.

She-Hulk s1 – 0

There’s one joke where Jen, looking disheveled in the ladies’ room, gets told, “You’re better than him, or her, or they.” This one is a joke that acknowledges trans people, but it’s not at our expense or anyone else’s. Still, it’s us in a joke when we’re otherwise unrepresented.

Star Trek Discovery s4 – 2

Blu del Barrio is non-binary and plays a non-binary character, stated explicitly in dialogue. Fabulous representation.

Ian Alexander is trans and plays a trans man character, but it’s NOT stated explicitly in dialogue. They allude to it subtly and his character once refers to “my transition.” But he plays a Trill, an alien species. Some Trill have a little slug symbiont that lives inside them.

When the symbiont merges with the host, they become a new person that’s a meld of the host and symbiont. When the host dies, the symbiont goes to a new host. So in this instance, “my transition” is a little vague given the symbionts transition from host to host.

The rep is otherwise great across the board here, and having Ian Alexander’s character be Trill is a nod to all the “finding our own representation” that Star Trek fans had to do for decades with Trill main characters from Deep Space Nine, Jadzia and Ezri Dax.

Dax is still going to get an entire Trans Tuesday someday, the character was that important to me (and a whole lot of trans people), but that’s another post for another day.

Star Trek Lower Decks s3 – 0

Star Trek Picard s2 – 0

Star Trek Prodigy s1 – 1*

Zero is a sentient alien gas cloud (it’s Star Trek, you gotta roll with it) who uses they/them pronouns. Their non-binary-ness is discussed in dialogue.

But they’re played by Angus Imrie, who as far as I know is a cis man. Which is not ideal, as it can imply non-binary people aren’t really different from cis people, and also because non-binary actors don’t get enough chances to play non-binary roles.

He plays the part wonderfully, mind you. This isn’t a knock on his performance, I love Zero dearly. But it’s not giving any non-binary actor representation, even though we get non-binary character representation.

Star Trek Strange New Worlds s1 – 1

One non-binary guest star, Jesse James Keitel. I got SO excited because we still haven’t had a trans woman in Star Trek, and Trek is my absolute favorite and so near and dear to my heart. And I thought the moment was here at last!

But her character is very clearly non-binary. And a villain! Which is great! We can be villains too. But I’m still waiting for that elusive first trans woman character in Trek.

Stranger Things s4 – 0

Superman & Lois s2 – 0

Tales of the Jedi – 0

Upload s2 – 0

This is the saddest one, because there’s two jokes at our expense. One I think was intentional, and the other was maybe implicit.

So on the show people live in this digital world, and one of them gets a new digital baby. Someone says, “It’s a boy, right?” And the answer: “It appears to be, but of course that’s for them to decide.” And it’s not delivered earnestly, the moment is meant as a joke.

The whole “it appears to be” is incredibly wounding to me, as it implies what our genitalia looks like is what our gender SHOULD be, which leads you right to the very idea of trans people being a joke or wrong. Very uncool.

Later the lead character is talking to someone about these digital babies, and finds out in this digital world men can carry the digital baby. And there’s a poster with an image of a pregnant man which horrifies him.

I know some cis people are scratching their heads here, so let me remind you that SOME TRANS MEN CAN GET PREGNANT. It is a real thing that happens. And here, this joke, this entire SCENE is predicated on the concept that the very idea is worthy of mockery.

I think this one is implicit and not intentionally aimed at trans men, because this likely comes from a bunch of cis writers who have been conditioned by society to think only cis women can get pregnant and anything else is preposterous.

So it’s another joke of omission, by forgetting (or just never being consciously aware of) trans people’s existence. But both jokes come at our expense and are hurtful and transphobic.  

Wellington Paranormal s3 – 0

Te Maero is a large hairy monster. The Maero are a supernatural people from New Zealand (in real life I mean, not the show), and I’m not overly familiar with them or the mythology around them and ways in which they may or may not intersect with gender.

But the one the characters encounter is played by a cis man with a deep voice, who says SHE is actually a woman and men of her species are so hairy and their voices are so low (as if neither of those applied to her, which they do).

This one feels wrapped up in all kinds of transphobia, again as if the idea of a hairy person with a deep voice being a woman is something to laugh at and not just the reality for some real humans who exist.

Wellington Paranormal s4 – 0

“The bogey man” is the ghost of a white golfer who made bogeys, and gets told he “should really say bogey person”. The intended laugh is that this man, calling himself a man, shouldn’t do that because it’s not being inclusive? It’s very weird. Feels like a dig at inclusivity.

In another episode O’Leary is playing Guess Who? with Satan (it’s a bonkers show) and Satan asks “are you a man or a woman?” and O’Leary answers, “I find that offensive.” O’Leary is very much a cis man played by a cis man. I’m not even sure why this is supposed to be funny.

BOTH of these jokes seem to come at the expense of trans people, and the belief that our existence is funny by default and is great to make jokes about.

Werewolf By Night – 0

Westworld s4 – 0

This entire season’s story was INCREDIBLY transy, but I don’t think it was intended to be that way.

What We Do in the Shadows s4 – 0

The Witcher s1 – 0

The Witcher s2 – 0

Yellowjackets s1 – 0

So what do we have? Across 22 movies and 62 seasons of television, I found:

22 trans people (two trans people showed up twice in different shows)

15 jokes ABOUT trans people

And a lot of that came from shows specifically made for queer people. Which is fine and great, but we need to appear in all media, not just stuff made explicitly for us. If you take out just Bros and Queer as Folk, which I suspect a lot of cishet people didn’t watch…

We’re down to 16 trans people, and 15 jokes ABOUT trans people. And not all 16 of those trans people play characters you know are trans, and you might not even know the actor is.

That’s DREADFUL. We should get to see ourselves as humans more than people making jokes about how our existence or anything relating to it is just so hilarious to cis people.

And also realize that of the queerest shows I listed, the ones that advertised “hey we’re for queer people!” – Queer as Folk and Gentleman Jack were canceled, and A League of Their Own has not yet been renewed as of early January 2023. That’s a LOT of lost queer representation.

Trans people are human beings, and our media needs to do MUCH better at trans representation. Art can change hearts and minds, and when all out war is being waged against our right to exist, we need it now more than ever.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

ADDENDUM 1/18/2023

A kind person out there let me know that Patti Harrison is in an episode of She-Hulk. There’s no confirmation the character is trans, which is why I missed her entirely, and goes to show you how important actually letting the audience know someone’s not cis is.

Regardless, I’m glad to see more rep for trans actors (she played a bride who was getting married, I believe), if not necessarily trans characters, and I think this makes her the first trans person to show up in the entire MCU.

Which is great… until you add up how many movies and tv shows it took to get to this point. That’s a little depressing. Let’s hope it doesn’t take as long to see the next one.

ADDENDUM 1/26/2023

I’ve just learned Janelle Monae is non-binary! This means Glass Onion gets updated to 1* – non-binary actor rep is present, but the character(s) they play are 100% cisgender women.

GOOD REPRESENTATION (Cyberpunk 2077)

Welcome to #TransTuesday! We’re going to start off 2021 talking about: REPRESENTATION (again), but a different aspect than before. Specifically, today is about CYBERPUNK 2077.

And this is probably not going to go the way that you think.

Note: There will be SPOILERS for some game content and some images are adult-ish, so gird thy loins and prepare thyself.

As a fan of the tabletop game this was based on, and of the genre itself (hi, the first creator-owned comic we wrote was cyberpunk!), I’d been looking forward to this game for YEARS.

To say I was dismayed when reviews came out deriding the game’s handling of trans people is an understatement. I was crushed. I eventually decided to give it a try anyway, and decide for myself. At the very least maybe I could talk about it for #TransTuesday, and here we are.

Quick primer for those who need it: Cyberpunk 2077 is an action role-playing game, where corporations, advertising, and crime have basically taken over civilization. There’s  a lot of futuristic technology, and cybernetic implants and body modifications are commonplace.

These are all hallmarks of the cyberpunk genre of science fiction. To understand this version of 2077 however, you have to understand that back in the 1980s, this game began life as the tabletop role-playing game called Cyberpunk 2020.

It envisioned the hell-year we all just lived through… as imagined by people in the 1980s. For example, there were these things called “scream sheets” which were basically fax machines, out on the street, that would spit out the news for people passing by. FAX MACHINES. Ahaha.

So what Cyberpunk 2077 presents to you is a 2077 based on a version of 2020 dreamed up by people in the 80s. Which is maybe a weird choice, but it’s not altogether different from the Fallout games where their world diverged from ours somewhere in the 50s or so.

To begin the game you create your character, who will be known as “V”. You can choose different origins, select your face and look and hairstyle and the statistics that will define how good (or poor) you are at certain tasks when the game begins. This is my V. She says hi.

(that’s literally Keanu Reeves blurry at a table in the background btw, he plays this asshole whose personality gets stuck inside the software in your brain and he kind of heckles you as you play, it’s a trip)

Right from the start, there are two things this game does that I’ve never seen before, and there are good and bad aspects to each of them.

The first is that while creating your character… you can choose whether they have a penis or a vagina (which you will see as they stand there naked before you). You can choose this regardless of an otherwise typically cis male or female body.

Even during the game’s few sex scenes your genitalia is never seen, they’re no more explicit than you’d find in an R-rated movie. Even if you try to walk around naked in the game, it puts underwear on you.

There seems to be no in-game mechanic or reason for it to exist (which is probably for the best!), which means the only conclusion I can come to is that it was added so that people could choose to play a man with a vagina or a woman with a penis.

That is, of course, the actual reality for a lot of trans people before gender confirmation surgery (and for a lot of trans people who never have or don’t want said procedure). It didn’t particularly make me feel more seen, but was a nice gesture. Maybe?

You can also choose which voice you want for your character. There are two options, a cis man and a cis woman. The game here mentions pronouns others will use to refer to you in the game (amazing! First time I’ve seen that in a AAA game) is based on your voice selection.

If you choose the cis man voice, no matter your appearance or chosen genitalia, people in the game will refer to your V as “he”. If you pick the cis woman voice, “she.” And we certainly DON’T want your genitalia to define your pronouns. So why is that a problem?

Because there’s an awful trend of people “clocking” trans people based on our voices, or saying something along the lines of I’m not really a woman because I sound like a (cis) man. And tying pronouns to voice perpetuates this stereotype. I mean I’m in voice therapy for a reason.

I can’t tell you how awful it is every time I have to talk to someone on the phone and they call me “sir” because, to them, I sound like a man. It sucks. And so the way the game has set this up isn’t ideal.

Sure, trans lady, you can play a woman with a penis, but she needs to sound like a cis woman or nobody will gender you correctly. It’s… not great. There should be an easy fix, though? @cdprojektred, if you’re listening… just give us a pronoun toggle button.

None of the dialogue already recorded for the game would have to change. Every bit was already recorded with characters in the game world referring to you as “he” and “she,” and the game just plays the one it’s told to. The mechanic is already there.

Just make it a separate option the player can choose, and use that to decide which dialogue audio to use rather than the selection of voice. I’m no programmer but it seems to me that’d be a very easy (and so much more inclusive) change to make.

So let’s talk about the game proper. One of the things early reviews calling out problematic trans issues focused on, in addition to the voice/pronouns I mentioned above, was the sexual objectification/fetishization of trans women.

It’s actually kind of a big problem for us trans ladies in a lot of ways, but I can’t get into all of that here. It’s maybe another post on its own, but just know it is most definitely A Thing. And I was heartbroken to hear this game would treat us that way.

It all seems to revolve around this one advertisement that appears on vending machines, billboards, televisions, etc. throughout the game.

The ad is for a drink called Chromanticore, which regularly shouts at you to “mix it up!” and has varied flavors I guess it wants you to combine. So you’ve got the image, which is obviously an overtly sexualized and cartoonishly fetishized image of a trans woman…

And putting “manticore” in the name, a mythological beast known for having parts of different animals (generally part human, part lion, part scorpion) blended together, suggests that someone that looks like a woman but has male genitalia is somehow “mixed up” and unnatural.

So it’s not great. But in playing the game, I’ve come to realize that I think it was intentional but in a weird way makes me feel… included? Because you have to take it in the context of the world. It doesn’t just exist in OUR world on its own, where it would still be horrible.

This exists in a world that has devalued EVERY member of society who isn’t rich. Everything and everyone is sexualized and commodified. Sex and violence are commonplace. (this is only a sampling, there are a TON of different ads)

And it’s EVERYWHERE, because people are a resource to be used up and discarded. @bryanedwardhill, in talking about the game, said it best: the city doesn’t care about you. It presents good and bad and you can decide what to do about it, but it. Doesn’t. Care.

That’s the dystopia the game is set in. And frankly knowing that the city cares as little about trans people as everyone else has some weird backward equality to it.

There’s also the fact that if the people who made the game felt the way this one ad does, it would appear in full everywhere to make its point. But it doesn’t. In fact, it just as often has the only identifier that the image is a trans woman blocked or missing.

And roughly 70 hours into gameplay, it is the ONLY instance of its kind I’ve found. That’s it. But we haven’t yet got to the most important part of all of this. In the game there’s a bar called the Afterlife, and it has a bartender named Claire. Everyone say hi!

Claire is a higher tier of NPC (non-player character, basically everyone in the game who is not you) that has their own missions, who will GO with you on missions, become friends and companions, and in some cases, romantic partners.

Claire will serve you drinks and name one after your friend and eventually you find out that she participates in street races when she’s not at the bar. But this is a cyberpunk dystopia, so they don’t just race, they also all try to kill each other.

Claire has a great truck ready to go, but she prefers to be the one firing hot lead at the competition and she needs a driver. Why? We’ll get to that in a minute. When you travel to Claire’s garage, on your way in you pass her truck. Do you see it?

That’s a trans pride flag! On her truck! In a huge AAA video game. You poke around a little (sorry to everyone in Night City, but if I’m in your house I’m going to your computer and reading your emails) and find messages from her husband about some unspecified surgery.

So you do some races, and you learn Claire’s a total badass. Just as much, if not moreso, than any other NPC in the game.

During a quiet moment, she finally opens up to you. She talks about her grief over losing her husband, who was her previous driver. At one point she talks about something from her past that happened “before her gender transition,” confirming why the flag is on her truck.

And you learn her husband died in a race. And she blames another driver for intentionally killing him when it wasn’t necessary for them to win the race. And she asks you to help her get revenge… throw the championship if you need to, she wants this other driver dead.

Just before the final race, they have a confrontation. There’s yelling and fighting and the guy’s an asshole, and a pit formed in my stomach. Here it comes, he’s going to fucking misgender her and I’m going to feel like shit.

But it never happened. The horrible dickhole of a character created for this game, antagonist of a confirmed and out trans woman, still did not misgender her. Not even once.

So we race and I do as she asked and got the other driver off the course and we confronted him, but I tried to talk her out of killing him. I can see at least three different outcomes of this quest line, maybe four. I don’t know what all of them are.

But mine? She was so grateful for my help that she gave me her truck. So now it’s mine.

So let me paint a full picture for you: in one of the biggest AAA games of the year made by a major studio, there is a trans woman who’s not objectified, not fetishized, doesn’t get killed and isn’t the victim of violence.

She doesn’t have a story about coming out as trans, she doesn’t have a story about BEING trans (so there’s no appropriation), she doesn’t even get misgendered by the guy who hates her most.

It could have been the flag and nothing more, and it’d be a hollow gesture. She could have just been a mission-giver you never got to know, and would have been more of a token character, a superficial pandering nod. But she’s not. She’s so much more.

She’s nuanced and wonderful and fully realized. AND SHE’S VOICED BY A TRANS WOMAN (yo @MaddieTaylor418 you killed it, you’re so good!). I only wish I could romance her in the game, but no, Claire’s still grieving, she’s not ready for it, and I respect that. 😌

And now I get to drive around the game, forever, in a kickass truck with a trans pride flag on it. And every player who drives her truck sees it (there’s even one inside the cab, so if you drive in first-person perspective you still see it).

This isn’t a fan-made mod someone uploaded to increase the representation in a game. This is the game itself, and I’ve never seen anything like it before. And who knows when I will again. This should happen a lot, right?

People should get to see themselves in all our media, and know it’s for them too. And if you want to know the damage that BAD REPRESENTATION can do, see the trans tuesday on that very topic.

The aforementioned sexualized ad may still bother you too much to play the game, and that’s understandable and fine. Everyone has to decide for themselves. I’m not trying to convince you to play it.

But for me, Claire and her entire storyline means SO. MUCH. I want to personally thank everyone involved in it. It healed me. This the game saying to me… you can exist in this world, as yourself. We see you, and you belong. And to me that’s fucking PRICELESS.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

BAD REPRESENTATION (Lovecraft Country)

Welcome to #TransTuesday! Today’s topic is: REPRESENTATION. I didn’t plan to cover this aspect of trans rep in media first, but the most recent #LovecraftCountry episode has weighed heavily on me, so I figured this was the time.

This is going to be a bit sensitive, and I want it to be a discussion. But always remember that while questions are welcome, please accept the answers you’re given and always approach from an angle of compassion and kindness.

Forgive me if this ends up discombobulated, because I’d originally intended to talk about representation that was positive (for me), rather than having to first approach it from the opposite angle. Right now, representation of transgender people in media is still not great.

This will come as no surprise to those of you who aren’t cis straight white people, and especially cis straight white men, but for those of you in the latter category, here’s a very simple way to get the picture:

Quickly name the first ten cis white men who are lead chactacters in movie, tv, book, and comic franchises. Oho, so easy.

Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Luke Skywalker, Jean-Luc Picard, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Captain America, Thor, James Kirk…

And you can keep going for hours. The list is nearly endless. Okay, so now quickly name the first ten cis white women who are lead characters in franchises.

Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Rey, Kathryn Janeway, Lara Croft, (arguably) Princess Leia, Xena, Dana Scully, Ripley, Sarah Connor… I’m already starting to really have to dig through my memory.

Now try it for cis black men. Cis black women. Any cis people of color. For a lot of those you’re going to be lucky to get to FIVE. Now replace “cis” with “transgenger” or “non-binary” or even “gender non-conforming” and see if you can get to TWO.

What about if you look for people with disabilities and not just able-bodied folks? How many can you get to then?

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, because I want to get to the matter at hand. But you have to understand how unbelievably rare it still is for anyone who is not a cis straight white person, mostly cis straight white men, to see themselves reflected in media.

Even before I knew I was trans, representation was of paramount importance to me. It should be to EVERYONE.

You can draw a straight line from MLK convincing Nichelle Nichols to remain on the original Star Trek to Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space (who lists Nyota Uhura as a main inspiration).

Do a quick search for articles about all the women who went into STEM careers because they were directly inspired by Dana Scully on X-Files, it’s been written about a few times.

And it’s not that we can’t identify with cis straight white male characters, of course we can (and had to, because options were thin otherwise, for all of us). But by that same token cis straight white men can also identify with people who don’t look like them, can’t they?

I want to be sure you realize how important representation is. And how RARE it is for people in minority populations to see themselves on screen in any fashion. And a lot of the times we ARE seen on screen, it… doesn’t go great.

How many times are Black characters relegated to the best friend, the funny sidekick, the one who gives magical wise advice? How often are they the first to die in horror media, how often do they receive the least scenes and character development?

Others have spoken about that far better than I, a white trans lady, can. But I mention it here because now we’re getting into the point of this thread: episode 4 of HBO’s Lovecraft Country.

Lovecraft was a known racist. But this show, about, made by, and starring Black people, is reclaiming horror and genre stories in a way that is so, SO needed. On top of that it’s a lot of fun, really well made, and I adore the cast. Though I’m still upset about Uncle George.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

Here’s a brief set-up of the end of episode 4, if you don’t watch the show: our heroes enter a chamber to obtain a scroll with a spell they need, but find it clutched in the hand of a corpse. When they try to remove it, the corpse animates.

It eventually comes to be a living, speaking person of indigenous descent. I cannot speak to how well the indigenous representation of this character was handled, that’s for others to talk about. But I will bring it back up briefly at the end.

This character speaks in a language that is not subtitled, but the lead character Tic can understand the language, and sort of translates through the scene. So everything we have and know is filtered that way, which is fine.

Tic tells us this character is a “two-spirit”, which is a term used by some indigienous people to describe gay or transgender people (again, it’s up to those folks whether this term describes transgender people or not, that’s not for me to say).

Tic refers to this two-spirit individual as “she”, and assuming the show did not intend to have the character misgendered, I will also be calling her a “she” and taking that descriptor at face value.

This all comes right at the tail end of the episode, the two-spirit character was probably only around for ten or fifteen minutes tops. In that short time, there were four different things that left me feeling dehumanized.

I don’t believe any of this was done maliciously, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. Let’s take them one at a time.

1: We’re given a full-frontal nude shot of the character, so we can see that she has breasts and also a penis and testicles. I have no problem with nudity, but here’s the issue. Upon seeing her, and as she starts speaking…

She tells Tic she’s a two-spirit (again, we only find this out from his translation). So… why did we need to see her completely naked? Did we see Tic completely naked in order to believe he was a man? Did we need to see Leti completely naked to know she’s a woman?

A key problem for anyone who falls outside the established societal gender binary (trans people, non-binary folks, people who are gender non-conforming) is so many people not believing we are who we SAY we are.

So many people want to know what’s between our legs, as if that’s something you’d ever ask a cis person. So many people feel we’re not “really” the gender we say we are if our genitalia doesn’t match their preconceived notions.

And it’s irrelevant anyway! Cis women may have their uterus removed. A cis man can lose his penis in an accident. Are they suddenly not women and men? C’mon.

And so here we have a character who says she’s a two-spirit, but the show still felt we had to SEE her naked body in order to believe her, when it has treated exactly zero of its cisgender characters that way.

So it felt to me as if they expected there was no way the audience could take this character at her word, believe that she was who she said she was, if we didn’t get a shot of her naked body on display.

2: When her corpse reanimates into a living being and we see her naked body, Tic asks her, “What ARE you?” This does come directly after a corpse has turned into a living person, so it’s very easy to believe that’s what was intended by the line. HOWEVER.

Transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming people have that kind of line thrown at us time and time and time again, as people who cannot easily discern our gender at first glance treat us like freaks (or worse).

There’s an absolutely awful thing called “trans panic” that perpetrators of violence against trans people have used as a defense for the violence they inflict upon us when discovering we’re trans. Please look up info on it (from reputable sources) if you’d like to learn more.

Trans panic isn’t real, it’s all bullshit, but its effects are something we have to deal with.

Suffice to say it falls into this category of treating us like freaks/objects of horror/grossness/ridicule. So even if intended to be about a reanimated corpse, the choice to have it be said to a trans character (who was chosen to be shown naked) is not great.

3: For magical reasons, something happens as they’re leaving this chamber and as the two-spirit character tries to speak, nothing but a high-pitched shriek escapes her lips. This scares everyone around her, and results in Tic punching her.

I haven’t gotten to this specific #TransTuesday post just yet, but an issue for many trans people, especially trans women who transition after puberty, is our voices. Hormone treatments don’t change a trans woman’s voice. If it already deepened, it’s stuck there.

Many can (and do) find help with voice therapy, but that’s about learning to control your voice to change the way it sounds. It’s difficult and a lot of work, and people go through it because it helps their dysphoria, or it helps them be more accepted in society, or both.

Please note Tic doesn’t ask her to stop talking, or even cover her mouth. A trans person with a feminine face opens her mouth, people around her are horrified by the sound it makes, and that’s justification for a cis man to punch her. In the face.

If you’re not familiar with the absolutely awful and prevalent trend of violence against trans people, particularly trans women, DOUBLE particularly trans women of color, please also look up some info (from reputable sources) and learn. It’s a very serious problem.

And this brings us right to 4: the very last shot of the episode is a cisgender man slitting the throat of the two-spirit character, presumably killing her.

No reason is given, though that’s probably coming. And on this show one character has already returned from the dead, so you can make the case that the character is perhaps not actually dead. Future episodes will tell. HOWEVER.

To make the last shot of your episode a shot of the actual slitting of the throat of a trans character is a *choice* that was made, in a society that already has a massive problem with violence against trans women.

And again, this is a trans woman of COLOR. How many indigenous characters can you name? How many of them are trans or non-binary or gender non-conforming?

So to introduce one, feel you have to show her body for us to believe her words, to ask her WHAT and not WHO she is, to use her voice as justification for violence, and then to choose to show us her throat getting cut open…

It left me hollow. It left me feeling like a husk whose only place in a story like this is as a victim.

And it hurt even more that it happened on Lovecraft Country, a show that’s so good and so important for subverting those EXACT same tropes as far too often visited upon Black characters.

I thought this was a show about not doing that sort of thing to people. Trans people, indigenous people, indigenous trans people are not freaks or objects of curiosity or just victims.

Imagine for a moment how an indigenous trans person watching that might feel, having literally no other mass media representation anywhere. How they went from unbridled joy to unbridled despair in the span of the last act of one episode.

If you’d like a more in-depth examination of exactly how our media has failed trans people, I’ve heard amazing things about the Disclosure documentary on Netflix. That’s what the entire thing’s about, and many trans people have spoken well of it.

I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it yet, though. Because I know what our representation has been… we’re the freaks, the butt of the joke, the victims. And seeing clips of that as trans people talk about what it has done to them…

It’s something I need to be in the right headspace to handle. But if you’re not trans, perhaps it will help you more than this thread was able to.

Again, I don’t believe any of this was done maliciously or with an anti-trans intent. I certainly hope not. But it perpetuates some very unfortunate things, and it made me feel less human simply for being who I am.

And I don’t think any human should ever have to feel that way after an episode of a tv show.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

PHYSICAL REPRESENTATION (and the Hollywood ideal)

Welcome to #TransTuesday! Today we’re yet again talking about REPRESENTATION. Again! Because it’s a big topic with a lot of aspects to cover. And today is about the character of Cara Dune from The Mandalorian. Eventually. It’ll get there, I promise.

Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the show, that won’t matter for what we’re going to be talking about. If you’re new to these posts or aren’t sure why representation is so important in so many ways, I invite you to check out my previous posts on the topic.

See the trans tuesday on GOOD REPRESENTATION.

And the trans tuesday on BAD REPRESENTATION.

What I want to discuss today is specifically the rarity that certain people get representation in our popular media and culture. From both of the previous times I’ve discussed this, you might think there are a lot of trans people depicted in media. But you’d be wrong.

Very often we simply don’t exist in almost anything we watch or read. And we’re not alone in this, because most of our media is controlled by cis straight white men, and so most of the media they create centers… cis straight white men.

And I’m not saying that’s always intentional (though sometimes it is), just that people tend to tell the stories they relate to/see themselves in the most, and when cis straight white men run everything, those are the vast majority of the stories you get.

I covered this in one of the other threads, but it bears repeating. Name a big movie/tv franchise with a cis straight white man as the main character. You could just go on for days. When you change that to cis straight white women, there’s a big drop-off.

When you do it for men of color there’s a MASSIVE drop-off, and women of color even more than that. And that’s only thinking of them as a group, which is disingenuous at best. Black men and Hispanic women have very different life experiences.

And they still so rarely get to see themselves depicted on screen, much less in ways that don’t fall into harmful stereotypes, and still less where the stories are centered around them.

And once you take all those myriad categories and drop the cisgender binary, the representation is nearly infinitesimal. This is not to say that there are no trans characters, or no good trans characters in our media, because there are. But very few.

And it’s just as small for people with disabilities, or whose bodies are different from the “Hollywood ideal” that perpetuates everything we watch. I’m focusing on the trans aspect as that’s my experience, but there are so many more people it also affects.

But I really want you to understand how INCREDIBLY rare it is. And it’s not that I can’t identify with characters of all ethnicities and genders, because I certainly can. I have to.

Every minority has to learn to do that so we can identify with all the non-disabled cis straight white man-centered media we’re fed. But identifying with (or even just loving) a character because of their personality isn’t the same.

I guess there’s really two levels of representation/identification, when you think about it. I mean two of my most favorite characters in the world are Space Dad Jean-Luc Picard and Superman, both are able-bodied cis straight white men.

Each has aspects I can identify with, but on the whole? Not really. And certainly not physically. Even when I thought I was a cis straight white man, I never identified with them on that level, never saw myself in them.

So what this thread is really about is physical representation, and that’s vexing because in an ideal world it shouldn’t be an issue at all. Our media should accurately depict the world we live in, and that world has SO much more than cis straight white men in it.

And yet our media empirically does NOT depict the reality of the width, breadth, and beauty that is the diversity of humanity. On the occasions when it does, please try to think about what that means for those of us who so rarely see ourselves.

Did you read my posts on good representation and bad representation, and what they each meant to me? And what they did to me emotionally? Seeing yourself as not the butt of a joke, not a victim, as a fully realized character?

It means that world (and those creators) see you and recognize you as a human being. That you can be a fully realized character in that story and that there is a place for you.

So without that, what do we do? For me, it’s meant that the majority of characters I have to identify with in that way are not, in fact, trans women or even trans at all. They’re mostly cis women with bodies that don’t conform to the “Hollywood ideal.”

And just so we’re clear, there’s nothing at all wrong with thin white women of a modest height. ALL body types are valid. But there are so many more body types we never get to see.

So this brings me to the character of Cara Dune. If you’re not familiar with her, she was played by former MMA fighter-turned-actor Gina Carano.

She was recently fired for being an awful bigot, and let me just state I fully support that. Before some of her recent racist/anti-vax lunacy, she was actually uhhh transphobic, which was a bit of a gut punch, because I loved the character from day one.

But this isn’t about her awful transphobia (surprise, I guess?), it’s a bit about a tweet I made last week that kind of took off.
https://twitter.com/TillyBridges/status/1359722231018913792?s=20

That tweet is the reason for today’s thread, but it’s not back at the beginning because I want you to understand how important representation is. So why do I see myself in the character of Cara Dune?

Because she’s tall. She has a defined jawline (moreso than the “Hollywood ideal” cis woman generally does, anyway). She’s got broad shoulders. She’s buff (I am nowhere near THAT buff, but I’m a wee bit buff and I like being so).

She’s not a villain or a victim. She’s a character with goals and motivation. And not once does anyone comment on her appearance or treat her as anything other than just another human who belongs in that world.

Now think about how long Star Wars has been going, and how expansive and deep that universe has gotten. I’ve loved it all my life, and Cara Dune is THE FIRST TIME I ever felt even remotely like there was a place for me in that universe.

And she’s not even trans! Although the character COULD be and we just don’t know, but that’s me making head-canon to appease my own wants and desires. There’s nothing in the show itself to indicate she’s trans, and casting a cis woman to play her would imply she’s not.

So yes, goodbye and good riddance to bigots, I’m glad they fired the actor that portrayed her. But the CHARACTER is so unbelievably rare and far too important (to me and, I suspect, a lot of others including many cis women) to be written off.

That’s why I want her recast, because to lose the only (not even real) representation I have in that world would be awful, especially knowing it was done because the actor was a terrible person and also would probably not be fond of having a trans woman fan.

And that tarnishes the only thing I’ve got to hold on to that says maybe there’s a place for me in that world. If we go back to that happy ideal world I mentioned before, it wouldn’t be an issue because I’d have other actual trans women in the Star Wars world to see myself in.

But this is basically how it goes for me. I latch onto tall women, or buff women, or women with strong jawlines, because that’s as close as I can get.

In the present Star Trek rewatch Susan and I are doing with the kid, we recently saw an episode with a woman who had a somewhat more defined jawline, and a somewhat atypical voice (compared, again, to the “Hollywood ideal”).

And so both of those things intrigued me. And though I’ve seen the episode multiple times, I didn’t remember a lot of it but had a sneaking suspicion I should maybe keep my attachment at bay.

Sure enough she turned out to be manipulative, and narcissistic, and awful. Which of course is not to say that people of all types cannot be villains, they can and should be. But so often anything that falls outside the “Hollywood ideal” is made a villain. Or a joke.

Because how can you root for or like someone outside that ideal, right? Impossible. And it permeates everything. I mean we all generally know what the Hulk looks like, right?

But there’s a lady hulk (who has to be called “She-Hulk” even though there’s no “He-Hulk,” okay, sure, uh-huh), and for most of her comics history, she was depicted like this.

To be fair this has been changing in recent years and she often looks much, much more muscular now, which is great.

I’m not an expert on the character (but this is the internet and someone will correct me any moment now), but I don’t think she’s still ever portrayed similar to the way He-Hulk is. Even here, she can’t just be a muscular green monster, she can’t shed all of that “Hollywood ideal”.

It’s just one character, not a big deal, sure. And there’s not big green muscular monsters looking to see themselves in media (that I am aware of, but if so UP WITH BIG GREEN MUSCULAR MONSTER REP!). I only point to it as indicative of the problem.

The fact I can name two big green muscular monsters that are lead characters in the Marvel universe, but I can’t name a single transgender human that’s a lead character in the same universe is exactly what I’m talking about.

If there are some I’m unaware of, please tell me! But if they do exist, they certainly aren’t well-known enough for even someone like me who would LOVE to read about them and see them in movies and tv.

But it sends the message that the Marvel universe has more room for fictional big green monsters than it has for real living transgender people who are already fans of said universe. It feels really shitty.

I love The Expanse, though it doesn’t have a trans character either. But they do have a tall, broad-shouldered, buff woman in Bobbie Draper, and I LOVE her and will love her forever. I feel at least partially seen in that world, and it’s nice.

So recast Cara Dune (with Frankie Adams who plays Bobbie Draper, if you want my opinion that you didn’t ask for but are getting anyway). When actors do bad things and have to be fired, but their roles are so important for representation… please, recast recast recast.

There’s too little representation already, and those of us starving for it shouldn’t suffer an important character being written off because an actor was revealed to be a terrible person.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

FINDING OUR OWN REPRESENTATION (P!nk)

Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week is a personal little corner of the bigger topic of FINDING OUR OWN REPRESENTATION. I suspect a lot of other trans people have similar things in their lives, but the specific one we’re talking about today is P!nk! (the singer, not the color)

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know I’m a mega fan. Probably mostly because of what I call P!nk Fridays, where I highlight a song or performance of hers on a weekly basis. I’m a firm believer in talking about what you love and spreading the joy.

But what you probably don’t know is WHY I’m such a big fan of hers. I mean YES her voice is stunning and I love her songs, and all of that would actually catapult her to the top on its own. But for me there’s also another layer to it.

I talked a little about what she means to me in the Trans Tuesday on the FALSE DICHOTOMY in our society. You may want to check that one out first if you missed it.

So even though she’s a cisgender woman, P!nk doesn’t often conform to the “ideal” image society expects of cis women. On top of that, a lot of her songs also touch upon her struggles with her own identity, and who society wanted her to be.

And maybe you’re starting to see the parallels. She also has a lot of songs that have big “F off” energy, for reasons I already mentioned. And obviously that isn’t necessarily true for all trans people or all trans women, but that resonates a lot with me.

Because in so many ways I’ve talked about in a lot of Trans Tuesdays, with the way our society treats us, discriminates against us, actively tries to harm us and legislate us out of existence, to stand up and say THAT WON’T STOP ME FROM BEING ME is big, big F you energy.

I touched on this a bit in the essay on THE PAST 2: THE NEW PAST, which was about finding our own representation (or mine, anyway) in a show with no trans people involved that still gave me a piece of the childhood I could have had.

And so often trans people (and people of other marginalized communities) have to find our own representation in media, because we are so rarely actually depicted or represented. And then many times, when we ARE represented, it’s harmful and damages the trans community.

You can see the Trans Tuesday on BAD REPRESENTATION for one example of what happens when representation goes very, very wrong.

And of course there ARE trans artists out there. Things are actually really improving in some ways, as Sam Smith, Demi Lovato, Janelle Monáe, and Halsey have all come out as non-binary, and Miley Cyrus has come out as genderfluid. 

All of them came out well into their careers, though. Which may mean they only recently figured it out, or they only recently got to a place where they felt coming out wouldn’t cost them their careers, or both.

But for trans women and men, outside of the indie world the options drop dramatically. There’s Sophie, who we tragically lost, and Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!, and I bet most people who aren’t trans never heard of them. Probably most well-known at the moment is Kim Petras.

But none of them get play on the radio in the US. You’re unlikely to know or have heard of them if you’re not specifically going looking for them or are part of queer culture. Kim Petras was the first trans woman I ever heard on the radio and it was such an emotional moment for me.

And sure she won a Grammy for that song, but I want to point out she only got the opportunity to get on mainstream US radio with a shot at that Grammy because the already well-established Sam Smith invited her to sing on that song.

For trans men the pickings are even slimmer. I’ve never heard one on the radio that I’m aware of. Lucas Silveira was the first trans man signed to a major record label, and that didn’t even happen until 2020.

And so just in the course of living our lives, hearing music in public places, on the radio, in movies and television… we come to find artists that speak to us even if they might not share our exact identity. This is finding your own representation.

This is every trans Star Trek fan only having Jadzia and Ezri Dax to see themselves in for literally decades, even though both are cisgender characters played by cisgender actors. Trek has finally given us characters who are non-binary, and a trans man…

But we trans women are still waiting. As a brief aside, Dax (both Jadzia and Ezri, though Jadzia moreso I think) were incredibly important to the trans community and Dax will get her own Trans Tuesday at some point. 

I’ve had it on my list since the beginning some three years ago, but Dax meant SO much to me as a kid growing up that I just still haven’t felt ready to tackle it yet. It’ll happen eventually, but let’s get back to the cis lady at hand, P!nk.

I could tell you how “I Am Here” feels like being seen as myself, and WANTING to be seen for the first time in my life, taking up the space in the world that I deserve to inhabit. No longer content to hide in the shadows, I want to be SEEN and KNOWN and LOVED for ME.

I am here
I’ve already seen the bottom, so there’s nothing to fear
I know that I’ll be ready when the devil is near
‘Cause I am here, I am here
All of this wrong, but I’m still right here
I don’t have the answers, but the question is clear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-0s7ac7hQ

I could tell you how “It’s All Your Fault” feels like a song from pre-transition me talking to the first time I really saw myself in the mirror, and how I didn’t want that lady to leave, but was terrified to make her real.

It’s all your fault
You called me beautiful
You turned me out
And now I can’t turn back
I hold my breath
‘Cause you were perfect
But I’m running out of air
And it’s not fair
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQFi9QAI5VI

I could tell you how “Try Too Hard” encapsulates the shame and anger and self-loathing I felt at pretending to be someone I wasn’t, and not knowing why or how to break out of it, for so long. For so, so long.

Everything you are, everything you say
Everything you do is not for you
Everything you feel, everything you know
You found it on your favorite TV show
‘Cause everything you want, everything you do
You try so hard to be everyone but you
Everywhere you turn, you just gotta learn
It’s easier if you don’t try so hard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsUNh-Yn8LM

I could tell you how “Don’t Let Me Get Me,” in ways both literal and metaphorical, is a pretty perfect example of the inner turmoil I felt at being trapped in a world I didn’t understand and never asked for.

Every day I fight a war against the mirror
I can’t take the person staring back at me
So doctor, doctor, won’t you please prescribe me something?
A day in the life of someone else
‘Cause I’m a hazard to myself
Don’t let me get me
I’m my own worst enemy
It’s bad when you annoy yourself
So irritating
Don’t wanna be my friend no more
I wanna be somebody else
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asaCQOZpqUQ

I could tell you how “Trustfall” is the moment of the leap into embracing your true self, throwing yourself over the edge and believing that you’ll fly. It’s the moment you decide to transition and become the real you that you’ve always been inside.

We’ve been runnin’ for our lives
We’ve been hidin’ from the light
We’ve been far too scared to fight
For what we want tonight
Close your eyes and leave it all behind
Go where love is on our side
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2KE2a5qo0g

There are more than just these, but those are the big ones. In the thread on the False Dichotomy I mentioned how her Beautiful Trauma tour changed my soul, and it did. 

Not just from getting to hear her voice live, and not just from being close to the stage. And not just because I’d never seen one of her concerts before and didn’t know the explosion of art and love and inclusion that was about to be injected into my veins.

I had a very old phone at the time, and its camera was woeful, so these photos are not great. But they do give some indication of exactly how close we were. Ugh, to be that close and have a terrible camera! It pains me to this day.

There was an extended moment during a costume change, a video with voiceover about a conversation she had with her daughter. I was lucky enough to see it twice, and I’ve found a version I’d very much like you to watch. It’s short, don’t worry! 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPRtBWdehMY

Recently I was driving my daughter to school

And she said to me, out of the blue “Mama?” 

I said, “Yes baby?”

She said, “I’m the ugliest girl I know.”

And I said, “…huh?”

And she was like, “yeah, I look like a boy, with long hair”

And my brain went to, “oh my god, you’re six, why… where is this coming from, who said this? Can I kick a six year old’s ass?” 

But I didn’t say anything, and instead I went home… and I made a powerpoint presentation for her! And in that presentation were androgynous rock stars and artists, that live their truth, are probably made fun of every day of their life, and carry on, and wave their flag, and inspire the rest of us. 

And these are artists like Michael Jackson and David Bowie and Freddie Mercury and Annie Lennox and Prince and Janis Joplin and George Michael, Elton John, so many artists her eyes glazed over. But then I said, “I really want to know why you feel this way about yourself?”

And she said, “well I look like a boy.”

And I said, “well what do you think I look like?”

And she said, “well you’re beautiful.”

And I was like, “well thanks!” But I said, “When people make fun of me, that’s what they use. They say I look like a boy, or I’m too masculine, or i have too many opinions. My body is too strong.” And I said to her, “do you see me growing my hair?”

She said, “no, mama.”

I said, “do you see me changing my body?

“no, mama.

“Do you see me changing the way I present myself to the world?”

“No, mama.”

“Do you see me selling out arenas all over the world?”

“Yes, mama”

“Okay! So, baby girl, we don’t change. We take the gravel in the shell and we make a pearl. And we help other people to change so that they can see more kinds of beauty. And you, my darling girl, are beautiful. And I love you.”

That video. THAT VIDEO is when I knew I could transition all the way. That it would be okay. That I could be ME, and exist, and be happy, and be loved. And it wasn’t me who was wrong for wanting to live my truth, but those who wanted to hold me back.

And I knew that, of course I knew it. I’d have fought for any other trans person to have that right. But my own internalized transphobia kept me from applying it to myself, until that moment during that concert on that night. (internalized transphobia trans tuesday coming up)

And then… then it was followed by THIS, which is everything I believe with every inch of my being.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAaYPQ_ycfI

A long time ago I decided that no matter where I went or what I did with my life I was always going to be very true to myself
I have always identified with people that struggle
Just being able to help people, that is the stuff that keeps me going

We all want to be loved, we all want to be protected
We’re all pink on the inside
We all bleed red, we all cry clear tears, we all put one foot in front of the other
We want to have faith in our world

I think a lot of women are afraid of the word “feminism” and that’s a shame
I’m not afraid to be a strong woman
This is how you were born
I wish for women to stop apologizing

I’m grateful if I’ve kept one girl from feeling different, or ugly, or unempowered
You have to fight for rights, respect, and love, and compassion
And you have to be willing to die for it

With all the strife and economic woes in the world, religious intolerance, global warming… it boggles my mind that we’re spending time, energy, and money trying to ban love
I don’t want there to be “gay marriage,” I just want there to be “happy marriage” and “lasting marriage”

I think the human experience shouldn’t be covered up, I think it should be lived out loud
I see in other people the truth that’s happening and I want them to feel comfortable being that
The music alone is going to keep me going

I’ve owned and embraced my integrity and I feel like I still have a lot of fight left in me
We’ve been failed by our government. There’s a lot of people that feel forgotten, and invisible, and made to feel less than, unwanted, and unloved. And it hurts my heart, makes me very angry.

I will do everything I can to open people’s hearts, ears, minds.
Because I’m not going anywhere.

I’ve seen change, and I HAVE to believe that change is possible, because if I stop believing that? Then it’s just a little too much for me.

So I have a pen and I write. I write about that.

And that led right into my previous favorite song of all time, “What About Us,” which has touched me in so many ways, and is about how we’re all connected as humans, and how we deserve so much better than our society treats us.

We are searchlights, we can see in the dark
We are rockets, pointed up at the stars
We are billions of beautiful hearts
And you sold us down the river too far

What about all the times you said you had the answers?
What about all the broken happy ever afters?
What about all the plans that ended in disaster?
What about love? What about trust?
What about us?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClU3fctbGls

In 2021, between studio albums, she released her first live album which included two new studio tracks, one of which is “All I Know So Far.” And that song spilled my heart all over the world for everyone to see.

This is the part that gets me the most, just rips me open:

I haven’t always been this way
I wasn’t born a renegade
I felt alone, still feel afraid
I stumble through it anyway

I wish someone would have told me that this life is ours to choose
No one’s handing you the keys or a book with all the rules
The little that I know I’ll tell to you
When they dress you up in lies and you’re left naked with the truth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuy-V_3V-4g

I listened to that song on repeat during my run that day. I couldn’t turn it off. It was this cathartic release of so much trapped inside. I was crying. Real tears. A lot of them. IN THE MIDDLE OF MY RUN. I couldn’t stop (listening, or running).

I pushed and pushed and it hurt and it helped and the world was beautiful. I don’t know if I’d be where I am now without that moment during her concert, but I DID get that moment, and everything that came with it, and here I am. She changed me.

She shared her art and her creativity and her pain and her love with the world, with me, and it helped me in ways I can’t even fully vocalize. She helped me transition, helped me become ME. So to P!nk I say thank you. Thank you thank you thank you. Words will never be enough. 💜

And to everyone else creating, no matter what it is, and putting themselves out there, please keep it up. You never know whose life you’re going to touch. We need you. We need each other. We’re all we’ve got. That’s all I know so far.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com

PS – I bought a poster from that concert, and we framed it and it hangs over my desk every day. As a reminder, and an inspiration.

Update 10/5/23

Susan got me tickets to P!nk’s Summer Carnival tour for my birthday. She was playing SoFi Stadium, which is an outdoor venue. We purposefully got seats in the very back row nearest the edge of the stadium and masked for the entire concert once we weren’t the only ones in our area.

It’s a remarkably different experience than seeing her up close like before. No less magical, but definitely a bit less personal. But it was fabulous and so much better than not getting to see her at all.

The last time I saw P!nk, I wasn’t me. But as I wrote above, those concerts changed my life. they made me feel it was okay to be me and helped give me the courage to transition. 

And seeing her for the first time as MYSELF meant so much to me. 

Thank you, P!nk. For everything. 

THE INTENTIONAL (!?) TRANS ALLEGORY OF BARBIE, part 1

Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week we begin a big series so many of you have been waiting and asking for. Do you guys ever think about dying? Tillyvision returns for THE INTENTIONAL (!?) TRANS ALLEGORY OF BARBIE (the movie), PART 1!

This movie ROCKED MY WORLD when I saw it, because I instantly connected with it on a fundamental level… a level below the surface-level feminist story (which I also deeply connected with). But I’m not alone, this movie had a HUGE impact on trans audiences.

Especially we trans women. I knew I needed to figure out why that was, and it’s because there’s a beating heart of transness within. You may not believe me now, but stick with me to the end. Because by then, I believe you will 🙂

Before we begin, let me remind you that BARBIE has real trans representation (in terms of actors, but not characters). You can read more about that in the 2023 TRANS REP IN MOVIES AND TV trans tuesdays.

I’ve heard people say BARBIE is “MATRIX for girls,” but listen, the Matrix films ARE also for girls and nonbinary folks, as BARBIE is very much also for people of all genders. Let’s not play into that reductive gendering of things. That’s part of what BARBIE is about, c’mon!

But I WILL say that BARBIE is… Pink Matrix. Well, Funny Pink Matrix. And that’s very much by design, as you’ll see play out through this discussion. There’s nearly 20,000 words to go, because the movie is just THAT densely packed with transness.

As with many of my trans allegory discussions, I will draw comparisons to the best and platonic ideal of all trans allegories, The Matrix franchise. But for Barbie, that’s going to happen even more than normal. Not just because it’s “Funny Pink Matrix,” but for a very important reason.

I’ll endeavor to make this as accessible to everyone as possible, but you will definitely get even more out of it if you’ve read BEGIN TRANSMISSION: THE TRANS ALLEGORIES OF THE MATRIX. The deeper your understanding of those, the better you’ll understand BARBIE.

I’m saying BARBIE is an intentional trans allegory because, as with many of these discussions, sure some of it may have been subconscious, but that makes it no less intentional. I was writing about my transness without knowing it YEARS before I realized and accepted it.

But you’re also going to see that some of this was very consciously intentional, because it couldn’t have happened any other way. But ALSO it INTENTIONALLY references and calls back to The Matrix in so very many ways. 

And if you’re intentionally referencing the strongest trans allegory in existence…

Then you have intentionally (maybe without even knowing it!) made your movie a trans allegory of its own. And it’s not like there’s only one or two things that nod to the Wachowskis’ magnum opus. It happens again and again and AGAIN.

Much like the MATRIX, it’s about one person’s transition from the man society expected them and wanted them to be, to the woman they truly are (which is also pointedly NOT the woman society wants them to be). 

But even outside of the Matrix references, Barbie is a strong trans allegory. There’s a whole lot to talk about. But maybe you don’t believe the Matrix references were intentional. In any story about identity and societal expectations, there are bound to be similarities.

So I will direct you to The Editor’s Cut podcast, which is a show that talks to film editors about the movies they’ve worked on. In episode 85, editor Nick Houy is interviewed about his experience working with Greta Gerwig and editing BARBIE.

The Editor’s Cut solicited audience questions, and ya girl submitted one. Which was asked. And answered. At 45:35 into the episode, Nick is asked my question, “were all the parallels to the Matrix intentional?” His reply:

“The short answer to that is YES. Very much so. I’m sure [the listeners] will be happy to hear that.” You can listen to it for yourself here.

There’s your empirical proof. They intended to reference, repeatedly, the transiest franchise in existence. Think about why they would do that, and what that says about what the BARBIE is saying at different key points.

Now I’ve heard some people deride BARBIE as “feminism 101,” and that we need more complex and nuanced representation and exploration of feminism. Because if your feminism isn’t intersectional, it’s not really feminism.

And the same goes for supporting trans people. If your support of trans rights isn’t also intersectional, you’re not really supporting trans people. See the trans tuesday on TRANS INTERSECTIONALITY for more.

And I think it’s because the surface story in BARBIE is all about feminism. Explicitly. But it’s not explicitly about *intersectional* feminism, right? Except that it is, because BARBIE makes a point of inclusion in terms of race, disability, body type, and yes, transness.

BARBIE is very clearly intersectional in execution, if not in the dialogue spoken. But all of that is to say that I actually agree that we need more nuanced and deep depictions of feminism in media.

But BARBIE is “feminism 101” for an important reason, and it’s also your very first Matrix connection. I’ve long said THE MATRIX is Trans 101, because it’s the absolute basics of transness. 

It’s about realizing and accepting the truth of your transness, and choosing to transition. And despite what you might think on the surface, that’s a very universal story.

EVERYONE has had moments in their lives where the expectations laid on us by society, family, friends, careers have forced us into boxes we didn’t belong in. Everyone knows that feeling (at least a little), and the fight to get to be true to yourself and who you really are.

But I’ve also said that MATRIX RELOADED, MATRIX REVOLUTIONS, and MATRIX RESURRECTIONS are like Trans 303 level classes. What they are saying about trans life is incredibly complex and nuanced.

And I believe this is why so many people deride the Matrix sequels as “confusing” or “bad.” If you don’t understand the allegory at work in THE MATRIX, you cannot understand the much more complicated things the sequels are saying about transness (especially if you’re cis).

But the Wachowskis couldn’t have said all those complicated, difficult things about trans life WITHOUT the trans 101 basics coming first. You NEED that base to work from. You can’t jump into 300-level classes without taking the prerequisites and have any hope of understanding.

And how many movies have you seen that are directly about feminism? How many movies have you seen that say even a FIFTH of what BARBIE has to say about womanhood and misogyny? BARBIE is feminism 101 because it HAS TO BE.

You NEED that foundation to branch out into deeper and more complicated discussions afterward. And one of the genius things about BARBIE is that its feminism 101 is NOT allegory! It’s all the SURFACE story!

In the MATRIX discussions, there’s a term I use: SUPERtext. It’s the opposite of subtext, it’s stating things plainly, right in your face, so that you can’t deny them. BARBIE often takes that a step further into SUPER-SUPERtext.

Whereas the surface story of the MATRIX franchise is a sci-fi parable of humans vs machines. BARBIE’S surface story is one of misogyny, and the oppression of women, and feminism! And that’s part of its genius.

As a movie that intentionally ties itself to the MATRIX movies, it may not surprise you to learn that BARBIE also uses color in very specific ways, to say very specific things. And is also allegorically about a trans woman’s journey to self-actualization.

BARBIE is the story of one person’s transition, from Ken (yes, from Ken!) to fully-realized Barbie, as she gets hung up figuring it out because she doesn’t want to be stuck as the only kind of woman society says you can be. Evidence abounds! Read on, true believers!

I won’t go into all the details here, but red, blue, and yellow (and combinations thereof) and how they’re used are a HUGE part of the trans allegories in the MATRIX films. When you know the visual language of the movie and what the colors stand for, an entire world opens up to you.

In this discussion of BARBIE, what’s most important are the colors Barbie is IN. In the hyper-saturated world of Barbie Land, intense colors are everywhere. But keep your focus on Barbie herself, and you’ll learn a whole lot.

If she, or people that represent parts of her, are in PINK, she’s dealing with doubt, which comes in many forms. Or lies. False dichotomies… like the gender binary and stereotypical ideas of what a woman “should” be. See the trans tuesday on THE FALSE DICHOTOMY.

If she, or other characters who represent parts of her, are in ROYAL BLUE, she’s experiencing connection. Mostly with her true self. A lot of blues appear in the movie, but those characters in ROYAL BLUE are what you’re looking for.

If she is in EARTH TONES (brown, green, yellow, earthy oranges or reds, anything “natural”) she’s experiencing TRUTH. Of existence, of herself, of reality. 

Also look for moments where any pink or blue show up together. Would you believe that, like the trans pride flag, it’s an indicator of transness? It’s true, my babies. It’s so true you won’t even believe it.

And here’s another MATRIX connection for you. Some of the people around Barbie represent aspects of her own psyche (and also like the MATRIX, one very pointedly doesn’t). The relationship between Barbie and Ken is VITAL.

However it’s the opposite of the Neo and Trinity connection. In the MATRIX, the entire thing is about Neo trying to become his true self, which Trinity represents. Every kiss between them is a vital moment of self-acceptance on the journey to self-actualization.

In BARBIE, Ken is the man Barbie does NOT want to be. The allegory is about someone REJECTING masculinity but thinking only forced woman stereotypes await, and not knowing what to do about it. Barbie NEVER KISSES KEN.

Do you know how huge that is when this is based on toys where Ken has been her romantic interest for over half a century? Did that not seem odd to you? Especially in a society where everything is gendered and compulsory cisness and heterosexuality are forced on us?

Even in, ESPECIALLY in, media aimed at children? And this is a movie based on TOYS, which are FOR CHILDREN? See the trans tuesday on GENDERED CHILDHOODS for more on that.

That Barbie and Ken never kiss is a CHOICE. It is the OPPOSITE of the Matrix’s self-acceptance. This is part of Barbie’s REJECTION of the man society told her she was and had to be, but never knew how to be or wanted to be.

If you’ve read my MATRIX breakdowns, you’ve maybe already figured this one out: WEIRD BARBIE is Barbie’s subconscious, our stand-in for Morpheus. Weird Barbie knows the truth and spends the entire movie trying to help Barbie accept it and become her true self.

Ruth is Barbie’s heart, our stand-in for the Oracle in the MATRIX films. Our heart always knows the truth, but we can’t hear it or accept it until we’re ready to. It helps us figure out what we really want, and just like the Oracle, she’s played by an older lady.

The Mattel CEO is our stand-in for Agent Smith, who was the personification of transphobia (both implicit and explicit). The CEO serves the same function, and is also the stand-in for misogyny in the surface-level story.

He tracks much more closely to the representation of Smith in RESURRECTIONS, however, where he operates under the guise of being on your side, someone who “gets” it, but only because he can use that to solidify his own position of oppressing us.

Gloria is the woman Barbie is inside. Not Barbie’s self-actualization, like Trinity was for Neo, but her inner woman that’s been in there and experiencing all the misogyny of our society for Barbie’s entire life, even while she was trying to be the Ken society said she was.

Sasha is the little girl Barbie has inside. The little girl she was, but never got to be because society told her she wasn’t a girl and couldn’t be one. I think this is why Gloria and Sasha are mother and daughter, because those two versions of us are inextricably linked.

Now you’ve got the basics! I spent 9.5 hours watching the movie and taking notes, and 15 hours doing the write up. Add in the time it takes to post this, convert the text for the podcast version, and actually recording the podcast? Well over an entire day. For one movie! Bananas.

For the timestamps, I used the 4k Blu-ray disc version. Depending on where and how you’re watching, timestamps may differ slightly. ARE YOU READY? 

Let’s gooooooooooo!

1:19 – The dawn (of time). Since girls existed there have been dolls. But they were baby dolls, so girls could only play at being mothers. This is showing you right from birth, girls were expected to serve only one function. This plays a huge part in Barbie figuring herself out.

1:46 – We get the shot of Barbie like the monolith from 2001 with “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” playing here, as it did there. If you’re not familiar, it’s used in 2001 to represent forbidden knowledge, and a sign or symbol of change… also known as TRANSITION.

The music was inspired by a novel of the same name, by Nietzsche, which is difficult to explain concisely. It’s about trying to reject the prejudices of human society by creating our own value, to become something better. It’s about rejecting expectations in search of eternal joy.

And if that DOESN’T read to you like a trans person rejecting who society says we have to be, living a life faking a role that makes us miserable, in pursuit of self-actualization and finding joy as our true selves… then what are we even doing here?

And yeah, it absolutely also works for the surface-level feminism story, and that’s the genius of using it here. As with the MATRIX films, there are layers to everything, and much of it works on multiple levels.

And the knowledge that we DON’T have to conform to what society says we have to be and who it says we are? That is very much FORBIDDEN knowledge. Society has worked really hard to keep trans people hidden, so we can’t see each other and know we can do it too.

See the trans tuesday on TRANSMEDICALISM (and WPATH standards of care 1) for more on that.

And so, when the little girl touches the Barbie monolith, the forbidden knowledge that she doesn’t HAVE to conform to stereotypical gender roles, what happens? A loud WARNING BUZZ scares her off.

2:18 – And that leads to the smashing of the baby dolls, the rejection of the false binary of society. For more on that, see the trans tuesday on THE FALSE DICHOTOMY.

2:50 – Here’s our first visual Matrix reference, Barbie in the white void, just as Neo was. For Neo, this happened when he was in a CONSTRUCT. Not the real world. And this is absolutely setting up that at the beginning of our story, that’s where Barbie exists.

3:40 – Thanks to Barbie all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved. That’s what the Barbies think, anyway, and they’re all living in Barbie Land. Which, note, is ENCASED IN PINK. Barbie is IN pink. It’s a lie, obvs, misogyny has not been “solved”.

3:53 – Look at this shot of Barbie in bed with the roof opening. Remember when I said to look for when blue and pink were together? She’s BETWEEN the blue and pink, BETWEEN the gender binary. She’s not a cis man OR a cis woman. Transness falls between/outside the binary.

Barbie’s still IN pink though, everywhere. Conforming to strict gender stereotypes and roles is NOT her “best day, every day.” This is all shot to show you she’s very clearly going through the motions. She does this every day. It’s always the same.

And her smile… look, you’ve seen the entire movie already, right? Margot Robbie is incredible in it, and THIS smile is not Barbie’s REAL smile. It’s faked. It’s plastered on because that’s what’s expected. Every trans person has plastered that on to hide the pain, pre-transition.

4:34 – Barbie’s feet are forced into the high-heel position. Which is a GREAT visual gag based on the dolls, but my friends, it’s so much more. Like the machine ports on human bodies in THE MATRIX, this represents the same thing.

This is showing you Barbie’s body HAS BEEN CHANGED WITHOUT HER CONSENT. This is a visual representation of the wrong puberty that society forces us through, which contorts and modifies our bodies against our wishes, putting us through traumatic body horror.

In the allegory, this shot right here, shows you Barbie is an adult who’s gone through the wrong puberty, and whose body has been changed in ways she never wanted. She didn’t have access to puberty blockers as a kid, this is an adult trans woman figuring herself out.

4:56 – Barbie DOESN’T HAVE A MIRROR. If you’re not familiar with how reflections and photos are so difficult for trans people, see its trans tuesday for more info.

Here, Barbie is in pink (her dress), IN pink (the mirror border), IN PINK (her entire house). She is buried under a mountain of lies and doubts about who she is and who she can be, and she cannot see her own true reflection. She doesn’t know who she is and can’t see herself.

5:05 – Barbie walks on the water of the pool. Is this a symbol of the artificiality of the world of lies she’s living in? Absolutely. But ALSO, consider this… walking on water is a very religiously heavy concept, right? A miracle performed by the one son of the divine.

And in the MATRIX, “The One” is not, in fact, a single savior of humanity, but OURSELVES. WE are “The One” we’ve been waiting for, because we can self-actualize and save ourselves. And so, just maybe, this moment is telling you Barbie can also save herself. By transitioning.

It took me almost an entire essay just to give you the context through which I’m discussing this. There’s a truly remarkable journey ahead of you, so keep an open mind and join me on the ride!

Maybe we’ll get closer to fine.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillystranstuesdays.com

PART 2 is here!