Trans Bodies in Film

Edited by: Lasya Adiraj

Trigger Warning: self harm, discussions about trans bodies, transphobia

Content Warning: This piece contains spoilers for the films Danish Girl, 3 Generations, Girl, Transamerica, and Tangerine

The body is the medium one uses to perform one’s identity to the world as an audience. Bodies were considered, and in ways still are, a direct presentation and representation of our gender. The idea of gender and what it represents emerges from something so inextricably social that the thought of gender existing outside a performative sphere seems inconceivable. 

Transpersons are individuals who have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their sex assigned at birth. Hence, the discussion around gender performance becomes more targeted; a transgender man or woman who has not undergone hormone replacement therapy (HRT), or other reconstructions, has more to “fulfill” in order to successfully present as their gender. This concept is referred to as “passing” in transgender communities. Rudimentarily speaking, a cis woman is also continually performing her gender by engaging in reaffirming acts, but her body isn’t under that scrutiny. It is essential to keep in mind, however, that gender presentation is not purely about the body. Whether cis or trans, each person presents as their gender in various ways, and most importantly, performs their gender in adjunct with their life and personality.

For a medium based entirely on performance, it becomes key to engage with each phase that goes into the creation of trans characters and their stories. I decided to look at The Danish Girl (2015), 3 Generations (2015), Girl (2018), Transamerica (2005), and Tangerine (2015). Each of these five films has trans characters as the protagonists, and most of them explore the process of transitioning and coming out as a central theme. These films make many mistakes in their representation of transgender people, for reasons and in ways I will explore.

The Danish Girl, set in the late 1800s, is a story based loosely on the life of Lili Elbe, a Danish transgender woman who was the first recipient of complete sex-reassignment surgery. She was born Einar Wegener and was a successful painter in that life, prior to starting her transition and changing careers to become a saleswoman. The story is set in the 19th century but made in the 21st, a fact that becomes important when we consider the various ways in which this movie falls short. The movie cast Eddie Redmayne, an actor who had just won an Oscar the year prior, which led to it acquiring significant traction. Mainstream media dealing with queer representation has to be even more careful in its choices since trans identities rarely receive proper representation. The film cast a cis male to play the role of a trans woman, which may have been excusable a decade ago, but now?

A woman in the role would perhaps have known better that her performance is not as simplistic as being female. The movie enhances certain aspects of femininity in Lili, such as her response to dresses and gowns, the act of tucking her penis to see herself without it, and her feathery, light voice. These scenes elicit an emotional response, no doubt, but become counterproductive when placed in a film where no other woman’s femininity is similarly highlighted. The performance becomes only about gender, which is understandable in a person struggling to live life inhibited only by gender, but forgets that a person is more than this aspect of their identity. The fact that Lili as a person is ignored, and what we see is just a woman, leads to a caricatured representation of what it means to be female. Redmayne, at the end of the day, does not portray Lili Elbe; instead, he embodies a simplified idea of a woman. 

This gross simplification also fetishizes womanhood in the same way cis women are often objectified; the unnecessary focus on a gentle, caressing touch or the fluttering of eyelashes. And this regressive womanhood is only embodied by the one trans woman in the film. The other women, while represented according to the time they were living in, were rounded, complete people and not mere caricatures of their gender. The hyperfocus on Lili’s femininity distances her from the other women around her, a form of othering that contradicts the purpose of such a film.

3 Generations is a film about a teenage trans boy, Ray, seeking to start testosterone treatment at the age of 16. Through his mother’s eyes, the story is told as she navigates the boy’s transphobic grandmothers and gets his father’s consent for the treatment. The story casts cis actress Elle Fanning instead of choosing a trans man to play the role. While the movie includes the vital issue of transphobia in the queer community by showing Ray’s lesbian grandmothers struggling with his identity, it falls flat on many other fronts. The movie title itself removes all focus from the protagonist and his struggles by turning his transition into a story about the family as a whole. The movie that initially debuted as About Ray seems to deal with the pain and dysphoria in a checklist-marking way; top dysphoria? Check. Periods being hard? Check. One of the first scenes of the movie involves Ray sitting with his mom and grandmothers in a meeting with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist outlines the bodily changes that will take place as a result of HRT, and Ray celebrates the idea of his period stopping. His mother accidentally misgenders him, an authentic experience for even the most supportive of parents; however, she corrects herself for barely a second before saying, “it’s been hard for us.” This line, equating Ray’s problems to those of the family, and the surrounding shots in the film that focus first and foremost on his relatives, make it clear that the movie is not about a trans boy. It just has a trans boy. The movie is filled to the brim with discussions between the various family members, with Ray entering scenes often to receive information about himself and be purely responsive. The movie also shows an unsettling scene where the mother discusses the pros and cons of having a penis with a man she has just hooked up with. This seems to be a way to unnecessarily draw focus to the physical, especially since Ray is not getting bottom surgery. He’s going on hormones.

Girl is a Dutch movie about a trans girl who aspires to be a ballerina. This, perhaps, is the most cis-gendered film on the list. As Matthew Rodriguez describes it, Girl is “trans trauma porn,” another film that has cis people behind it, and assumes that transitioning and dysphoria are purely physical concepts. Multiple shots in the film show Lara, the protagonist, staring intensely into a mirror at her naked form, genitalia in display. Over and over, her physical form is brought into the light, highlighted by her aspirations to be a ballerina and the multiple shots of her taping and untaping her penis to keep it tucked. The vilest, most tone-deaf show of this obsession with the physical is in the climax of the film, where Laura cuts off her penis after calling an ambulance, having decided to take matters into her own hands. The problem with this is not merely the show of such an act on screen. It directly contradicts the process of transition that is explained earlier on in the movie: gender-confirming surgery for trans women requires a penis. This film, too, cast a cis boy to play the role of Laura, however, this move for them is in even poorer taste than the previous films. Lara started hormone blockers as a young girl, meaning she would not present androgynously or with masculine features the way the main actor, Victor Polster, does. This makes him entirely unfit for the role, and yet, the film went with this casting choice to enhance the focus on Lara’s supposedly male body.

Transamerica (2005) is about Bree Osborne, a trans woman who has undergone all forms of physical transition other than a vaginoplasty, who discovers that she had a son from a fling 17 years ago. The movie is comparatively much better with representation and trans women. It does cast a cis woman to play the role of a trans woman, which is again a factor that takes away representation from trans actors; however, her physical appearance fits the bill for a trans woman who has been through the various stages of gender-affirming surgery and treatment. The movie shows her journey with her parents, who rejected her, her new-found son and their relationship, and her understanding of her own identity as a parent and woman. The movie works carefully with the concepts they present, and while some factors seem outdated (such as the curt psychiatrist who treats dysphoria as a pathology), overall, the performance is convincing, accurate, and unexaggerated. Bree’s femininity is natural (though a bit old-fashioned), her relationships add to her story without taking focus away from her, and she sees character growth and a complete arc. The movie, though entirely focused on her surgery as the end goal and her troubles with bigotry, manages to present her as a whole human being, not the caricature of a woman as thought out by a cis person.

The shortcomings of these films can be overcome by accurate casting, writing, and involvement of trans individuals. Films like Tangerine are indicative of this very change, with trans women playing trans women and trans individuals behind the writing and conception of the film. The movie, which follows a transgender sex worker who realizes her boyfriend and pimp has been cheating on her, takes us through the lives of two women. They are not just trans or just women. They lead lives adjacent to their gender identities. The film is one of the better-acclaimed films about trans people.

Transgender films, especially those made for mainstream media, tend to tell a story only of pain, bodies, and suffering. They present a form of storytelling that fetishizes the pain and the physical and propounds an idea of transgender people meant to be pitied by the gender-normal audience. It removed the humanity of a trans person, stripping them down to their gender and capitalizing on the same stereotypes that we try to rise above in cis films. Transgender individuals, perhaps more than anyone, spend their lives acting. Before coming out, they act like their birth sex, and after, have to reach higher than any cis person to perform successfully as their gender. A community whose whole life is based on performance being underrepresented and caricatured in popular media seems ironic, doesn’t it? 

This insight might help them dissect their need for perfectionism and help them break out of the cycle of never-ending procrastination.

• ASHOKA UNIVERSITY
• cinema
• film
• representation
• transgender
• transphobia