Envy & Desire: The Trans Minstrel Show Revisited
on building and dismantling the trans feminine gaze
I will teach you meanness, fear and blindness
No social redeeming kindness
Or oh, state of grace
Lou Reed and Metallica, “Junior Dad”
It’s supposed to be called autogynephilia. It’s like a thing. That’s the name of the fetish. If it’s a fetish? James doesn’t know what it is. Being sexually attracted to oneself as female. Hot! Who wouldn’t be hot for that?
Gross.
Imogen Binnie, Nevada
“How dare you invite a man in a dress to cunty doll brunch?!”
Salomé as Natasha, Envy/Desire
I really love supporting trans woman filmmakers. Since transitioning, my beat as a movie producer has been watching the work coming from within our community and doing my best to platform it as best as I can, using whatever skills I’ve gained from ten years in this industry to give my sisters a leg up. I never considered myself a particularly good filmmaker, so my passions were directed towards uplifting filmmakers who excited me. I’ve made it a point to be as open for advice to anyone from the trans community who reaches out to me, and many of my best friends have come into my life as a direct result of that enthusiasm to support. My philosophy is that we climb together, which I find crucial considering that historically our position in the industry has been below the bottom. I haven’t met any other trans woman movie producers (specifically referring to ones whose whole deal is Producing and are at an industry-regarded level). So, sharing knowledge indiscriminately feels like an important facet to my whole filmmaking ideology. I don’t find transness as an experience or identity to be monolithic, so I take that lack of prejudice into my constitution as a Producer who looks to help out any doll who has the audacity to make a movie.
Now I ask myself, Have I found my limit?
A certain tendency towards a trans cinema.
Speaking as someone in this industry who cut her teeth with a degree in film semiotics, my background goal has always been in trying to make sense of the place of trans filmmakers within a canon of the cinema. I often preclude this with caveats of whether there even should be a trans cinema canon. Can there be a trans cinema canon? The inherent reality of such rests in questions raised by many a scholar of marginalized groups to the cinematograph, and when it comes to us and our stories there are further complications. We’ve been excluded in front of and behind the camera for much of cinema’s existence when it comes to our stories, yet how do we define the extent of that exclusion when it comes to repressed identities and political movement over time. Can anyone say they were the first trans filmmaker? It would be equally as absurd to discount a canon of potential work as it is to try to pick up the scraps now by assigning identities to filmmakers of the past as many have done to the likes of Kurt Cobain. It’s not a place to mine critical analysis — as much as I may connect to the explorations of masculine and feminine identity in The Deer Hunter or Year of the Dragon, it’s not my place to assign a reading of those works as belonging to a canon of trans cinema, nor even a canon of represser cinema. The second emerging issue comes from liminality of trans identity within a perceptibly monolithic framework such as a film canon. A tendency towards a trans cinema would need to be discussed within bounds separating a trans feminine and trans masculine perspective. Trans experience being inherently inclusive of expression, philosophy, and identification outside the binary speaks to a spectrum of trans cinemas. Outside of the binary or even an oppositional definition provided by the likes of formulating a Third Cinema, for instance. A non-cis conceptualization of trans cinema speaks little to the vastly different experience I myself have as a trans woman compared to my trans masculine brothers. Outside of our shared political struggle, there is literally nobody I have less in common with on a fundamental level than him. This is speaking on a macro level and is not to be taken as anything less than figuratively as a means of expressing the multitudes of space between the artistic voices guiding our work, which could both fall under a trans canon. I engage with my gender on a complex spectrum, so as a film director I certainly engage with questions of gender and identity on an equally complex level. The aspects which appeal to me in my current work can be described as exceptionally dense, as much so as I view my own place and voice in this world. I don’t personally believe there is any actual purpose to writing such things as trans film manifestos or attempting to define a canon. In my mind, it’s reductive until there’s actually a good reason to do so, because no matter how hard one tries to adequately approach the endeavour it’s going to be framed in a way that is inherently exclusionary — and our community already has too many problems with that. But…
The Trans Feminine Film Canon, copyright Louise Weard MMXXIV.
…assuming I do in fact want to go against my instincts in exploring the possibility of a canon of trans cinema, or at least a tendency inherent to works made by trans filmmakers, there are signifiers by which to create the framework for a definition. For starters, as a trans woman I’m going to use my perceived experience as a lens by which to formulate these ideas into something approachable. This means that I’ll attempt to create a trans feminine lens by which to ascertain the works belonging to a trans femme cinema canon. This will also mean rampant speculation on my part in the discussion of this topic, as well as engagement with my own work, if only to provide a perspective by which to justify the following conversation. I apologize to everyone discussed herein.
Most perplexing to me in writing this, is that although I did not want to take an oppositional gaze towards the structure of this exercise, I am going to talk about trans filmmakers in conversation with works made by non-trans filmmakers (which I will mockingly refer to in anticipation as Represser-core or Dogwhistling, depending on your particular brand of brainworms). I also cannot adequately speak to a conceptualization of trans cinema without a lot of foregrounding by way of trans literature, which I can only hope your takeaway from this article is to at least read one of the books mentioned hereafter.
Concessions to trans tourists.
To speak recklessly and without citation, let’s assume that the touchstone for trans representation for non-transgender viewers is Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. I remember when I came out and someone asked me, “Oh, like Buffalo Bill?” “Yes, just like Buffalo Bill.” It is one of the most well-known films of all time, what I would call a genuine masterpiece of the cinematic craft and a movie I enjoy immensely. It also includes the usage of the term “autogynephilia” in referring to Buffalo Bill, forever cementing the idea of the predatory shemale in the minds of mainstream moviegoers forever onwards. Depictions of trans women in cinema traditionally fall within two modes — revulsion and pity. Dressed to Kill: Revulsion. The Danish Girl: Pity. Sleepaway Camp: Revulsion. I Want What I Want: Pity. Those dead tranny sex workers on prime time procedurals: Both.
The trans feminine film image is one of revulsion and pity, usually played out attached to a particular genre but undifferentiated within levels of so-called prestige. Often, the portrayal of a trans woman figure is meant to elicit both feelings, which is why these characters are usually played by non-transgender men. It’s a symbolic shorthand which many a film has utilized for easily understood characters who are reduced to that core intersection for a desired affect — look to the number of actors to win awards or receive praise for playing some poor godforsaken tranny who gets what she deserves. Murder, death, or self-mutilation is an inevitability in many a trans feminine film image. A Weard-certified film morality test might read “Does the tranny live?” Even my own work thus far would not pass that test.
Many of these examples look towards a past, one which aligns perhaps our political struggle within the visions of how we have for much of cinema’s history been portrayed on screen. Alternatively, I have written about the euphoria I personally connect with in certain disreputable trans film images, such as the act of self-castration at the climax of I Want What I Want. Looking at the current landscape of cinema about trans women, a film such as Monica alleviates the aesthetics of suffering, keeping the prescribed elements of tranny suffering at the sidelines (while still painfully underpinning every scene) without making the movie an exercise in tragedy-stacking until demise. It’s grounded, which is thanks to Trace’s performance which lends actual interiority to our titular character, however on the whole the overall themes and narrative of the film are not fully amputated from the archetypal cis-crafted trans feminine film image. Lived experience is being consistently asked the question “What do your parents think?” (which unfortunately I’ve been berated with in public before, much to my horror) — this feels like covered ground (such as the scene of parental rejection in I Want What I Want from 1972).
In comparison, in the film Lingua Franca directed by Isabel Sandoval, we see the seeds of an idea which I believe may form the basis of the trans cinema. It is a film about desire. Desire for many things, whether that be sex, stability, or agency. Its narrative still emerges from a place of heightened melodramatics and trans feminine suffering, but it is not playing into familiar tropes. The intersectionality provided by the undocumented immigrant narrative subverts the story’s thrust and places transness at a higher spiritual elevation within the film’s form. The transcendence of the framing and execution of the dilation scene in particular is nothing short of sublime — a nuanced cry against cinema’s adhered to subjectivity for the non-trans tourist voyeur. The inherent entertainment of trans narratives for a non-trans viewer comes from that aforementioned spectacle of revulsion/pity garnered by gazing at tranny suffering. In that regard, Isabel creates a framework in her film by which to disarm the voyeur and platform the trans feminine viewer within an experience which does not allow stops for tourism. The movie is immense in this regard, laying the groundwork for other trans feminine filmmakers to claim their own gaze. My film Castration Movie certainly seeks to find this sense of reclaimed perspective, as does the other Canadian filmmaker for whom I share a homophone, Luis De Filippis in her film Something You Said Last Night. The latter work completely disincentivizes the scopophilic urge necessary in any preceding trans cinema, the trans gaze inherent to the film is entirely empty of that revulsion or pity. It’s just a vibe, everyday life, with no heightened drama or exploration of the inherent suffering of the poor transsexual subject. In that sense, while it certainly platforms an experimental gaze that is certainly coming from Luis’ valid lived perspective as a trans woman, unfortunately I think that its exclusion of suffering at first disregards it from my own formulation of what a trans feminine cinema canon looks like.
In Isabel’s film, the formulation of pity and revulsion is oftentimes directed from lead character Olivia towards her love interest, Alex. The film plays within certain tropes, such as the trans panic moment of Alex discovering Olivia’s secret, but these are filtered through Olivia’s perspective and the building of resentment she holds towards Alex. Alex is in many ways our foil to Olivia, lacking in confidence and incapable when compared to her. Strength comes from confidently living one’s truth, and in comparison our male character is an alcoholic loser who can’t even maintain his job at a slaughterhouse. He is the object of revulsion and pity, and the film’s story concludes with Olivia leaving this lowly creature after he professes his genuine love for her. In trans feminine cinema, there is nothing more pitiable and grotesque than a failed male.
In works made by trans women, the matters of revulsion and pity remain as a semiotic exercise, yet are abstracted via their identification upon a non-trans Other. The trans-centred perspective gives our trans feminine lead character the gaze by which to engage the lens of revulsion-pity, by which she exploits the identification with, a desire, or envy, directed towards a masculine-perceived Other. Stay with me on this one — the trans feminine film image by which to exercise a canon of trans cinema is based upon a metaphoric trans feminine gaze which is applied towards gender identification in the self-as-other. In other words, it’s all about Nevada.
How would anyone make a movie of Nevada?
Knowing that my audience for this are likely a bunch of fucking tourist voyeurs, Nevada is one of the greatest books of all time and the exemplary catalyst of what we might call trans literature. The novel is divided into two sections: Maria and James. The first section follows a trans woman who just won’t take her goddamn estrogen shot already oh my god just take your shot. The second half follows some guy in Nevada who happens to meet Maria in between nights spent jacking off to mtf stories on the internet. The first half is all about getting caught up in discourse. The second half is all about how that discourse keeps you trapped. It’s fundamentally a novel about how you can’t force someone to transition, nor can you define what transness actually means on any level. Nevada perfectly articulates something that we frustratingly as a community have not been able to grapple with… ever. (For the history literate, google Virginia Prince and Louise Lawrence.) How many times as a community must we interrogate the notion of trans enough? The umbrella should be as big as possible, and as much as you might cringe at people who fall outside of your definitions of respectability or to what degree they may participate in our shared struggle, at the end of the day the general idea of gender exploration is what’s on the political chopping block. Who cares if femme presenting AFAB enbies use the word tranny on TikTok? Genuinely, what does it matter whatsoever? I have the same feeling when it comes to “telling trans stories” — let those cissies make them if they want to. Cringe at whatever you want, but I like to err on the side of caution. As someone who didn’t transition for a long time while still releasing my art and just generally existing in the world, I like being inclusive. Better to be safe than sorry. I hate paranoid readings. Shit is dangerous. Inter-community discourse is fundamentally too stupid within the platforms by which it is discussed to be meaningful. Stop farming anger. Reconcile with your brainworms. Go read Nevada.
Nevada’s central dialectic forms the basis of the “good” trans feminine work. From the highbrow like what’s found in the trans literary explorations of Detransition, Baby and Little Fish, to the lowbrow like a Contrapoints video on YouTube. You have the archetype of the trans woman with subjectivity, empowered by her gaze which was earned via having the bare minimum yet still grand amount of strength required to transition, and the archetype of her Other: the pathetic fucking loser failed male. (I hate the term egg, it’s gross even detached from who coined the term, and I won’t use it besides making a specific point that that is not what I am referring to, even if a character meeting that asinine description is the most likely exploration of this archetype. Instead, how about the less reductive term, abject masculinity.) Nevada perfectly explores the affect of this latter figure as a doppelgänger to the former, a mirror by which self-identification in pity and revulsion forms the basis of our gaze’s agency.
Great works of trans feminine storytelling, whether made by trans or non-trans or repressers or dogwhistlers alike, all explore this concept. To varying degrees: Casey Plett’s Little Fish does this. Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby does this. Lou Reed’s Lulu does this. Betsey Brown’s Actors does this. Nikki Cimino’s The Deer Hunter does this. Lex Walton’s I Want You To Kill Me does this. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow does this. Aoife Clements’ Sleepwalker does this. Alice Maio Mackay’s T Blockers does this. My shitty movies do this. The list goes on.
The first section of my film Castration Movie, chapter i. incel superman, is the first time I explicitly filter abject masculinity through the lens of trans femininity, but my previous work was always playing with a surface-level inversion of this idea. Both characters I played pre-transition, in Computer Hearts and SIDS, are failed males. Albert-kun in the former is a represser who covets the femininity of the Vanessa2 futanari avatar on his computer screen. The Patient in the latter wants to be castrated, and is then tormented by finding out that his balls have found a new home in the sexy female surgeon, who was killed in the process. A familiar gender dynamic is certainly at play, and as a repressed trans feminine filmmaker who was making movies in direct relationship to my choice not to transition, where is the gaze placed? In Computer Hearts, the cinema apparatus certainly issues its gaze from the perspective of Albert-kun’s desire/envy, Vanessa2, who is finally born in flesh via their mutual rejection and the failed male’s demise. This conceptualization of identity through the relationship to the glow of the computer screen is once again the centrepiece of trans imagery in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Like Albert-kun, Casey wipes blood on the screen as she desires the image projected from within, attempting to absorb that desire-envy through the monitor’s glow. They’re basically the same movie on a thematic level, made clear by the reveal that our actual protagonist in World’s Fair is the failed male JLB who seems to desire or envy Casey from afar, through the screen — like Albert-kun, the film’s true object of pity and revulsion. Lou Reed becomes that object as he sings Junior Dad on his record Lulu, as do our failed males with their repressed desires at the climax of The Deer Hunter (even removing speculation directed towards the authors of those works, among many others I could use in their place, the works themselves capture this certain tendency of a trans cinema that speaks to some je ne sais quoi non-exclusive to the out trans woman auteur).
So obviously the works by out trans women handle this far meaner than any represser. If the aforementioned works are bleak, then works like Detransition, Baby and Little Fish are genuinely mean. If the represser auteur has some degree of their primary identification with the object of abject masculinity, it at least offers a degree of subjectivity that makes their place as a signifier of personal introspective pain not entirely an exercise in mean-spirited grotesquerie. I hate myself for this, but I can’t do anything about it. I’m as disgusted with myself as you have pity and revulsion for me. The trans feminine auteur on the other hand, rejects the abject masculine outright as the cruel reminder of a worry that this is what they actually are, a totem akin to some previously shed snake skin, a hollowed out shell that operates as not just a horrific reminder of what was or could have been but also the anxieties of one’s own perception. I hate you for this, you should just transition already. I pity you. You disgust me. You remind me of what I fear most. You are why I hate myself. The novel Nevada is so genuinely fucking mean in its sophisticated deep-cut “Trans Girls Only written on the clubhouse” aura that I would honestly be terrified to adapt it for the screen — it’s by, for, and about us in a way that is so uncompartmentalized that I don’t even know how one would appropriately approach its screenplay. The climax of Little Fish involves a scene in which main character Wendy meets a john who is a repressing trans woman, who shows her his heels and asks to get fucked in the ass by her no-longer-existent cock. They watch trans porn together that she starred in when she had a dick, he dresses like a sissy, and she fingers him. After he comes, she gives him recommendations for which gender clinic to go to. This character is ex-military, masculine, but a failed male. An object of true pity and revulsion for Wendy. In the following scene, she almost freezes to death because nobody will help her, because she’s perceived as scary. The object of pity and revulsion is that which she identifies with, what scares her most, a mirror of what she once was. She helps as much as she can, because helping this person is like helping herself, but it almost kills her. The Glamour Boutique section of Detransition, Baby has a similar exploration of these brainworms, as Ames meets with a cross-dresser from the internet, the experience is a mix of euphoria, disgust, and pity, ending with the spell breaking as Ames is perceived by a mother and daughter who disintegrate the boundaries between lived and felt identity at a time early in her transition. The character in present day has de-transitioned, the result of a sequence in which she is reduced to that same feeling of pity and revulsion when she is punched on a street and the spell is again broken, returning her to that moment of identification with the cross-dresser, a symbol of her inwardly directed pity and revulsion. That’s the fear emphasized by the trans doppelgänger, right? That at the end of the day you’re going to be revealed as just a man in a dress, that you’re faced with someone or something that reflects that horror back at you. When are you trans enough? If that enby on TikTok isn’t trans enough then you certainly are, right? How do you win identity politics? Isn’t this why trans girls are called mean girls on Twitter when they pass and make fun of the hons who don’t? Blanchardian typology and /tttt/ brainworms bubbling to the surface of trans discourse again and again. Respectability is just passing, right. Who can say “tranny” — actually just who gets to be called “trans” anyways? Let’s start making chalk squares on the blacktop and begin sorting out all the real dolls. Who do you invite to clocky doll brunch?
Why I shouldn’t have been the first trans person to review Actors.
Looking at applying this framework to a potential trans cinema canon, the thrust behind the story of Alice Maio Mackay’s T Blockers is that of its lead trans girl’s relationship to the feelings brought up by going on a date with a tranny chaser. The idea of the film’s metaphorical-made-physical brainworms are not just the impulses of right wing individuals who are ashamed of their desire for us and exorcise it through violence, but also the internal brainworms of self-hatred brought forward by being reduced to an object of desire, a desire of which is specifically directed at the perceived-as-male part of us. (Not just a fixation on the girlpenis, although this element is often functionally a part of that desire.) Alice’s film has one of my favourite scenes in any movie, an exasperated monologue performed by our trans lead in which she lays out the exact pathway by which that moment of dehumanization took her down a bottomless spiral of hopelessness and self-loathing that no amount of retaliatory violence can truly close. The message at the end of the film is that only through compartmentalizing that self-loathing spiral through art can one truly keep the brainworms at bay. Alison Rumfitt similarly explores brainworms in her book, Brainwyrms, which instead ends with our lead trans girl being completely overtaken by them, yielding to her pregnancy fetish and then birthing a giant worm — is the biggest brainworm of all that this is all just a fetish, and what the book’s ending suggests at its conclusion is if it is, is that really so bad?
Buffalo Bill, in addition to being trans, is shown as having Nazi paraphernalia in her house. I wonder if she posted on /tttt/?
I still love Actors, because I obviously transitioned for clout and see a lot of myself in Peter Vack’s character. I stand by my defence and criticisms of that film, but I never disagreed with its detractors. Is it a trans film? On my list, sure, if only because I see a lot of it speaking to anxieties I have about my own identity. In a way, the masterful affect of Actors and it’s depiction of Petra is that the movie itself operates as the mirror by which to examine my self-loathing. When I identify a little too much with the Petra character, what does it say about me? Am I the living embodiment of the trans minstrel show? I have a semiotics degree, so the philosophical implications provide me with the means for fun film criticism and a space to be auto-didactic and write articles for a year in which I pretend to be a crazy person putting on a show, the joke being my self-loathing stemming from my trans identity and the depths to which I will test the grounds of respectability in some act of self-reflexive martyrdom. The problem in that performance art piece became that I went legit, I’m now making movies that cost millions of dollars, and in spite of how much I hate myself I can’t say that finally getting to go pro didn’t feel immensely satisfying. Suffice to say, I can’t make jokes like I used to anymore, nor divulge industry tea and talk whatever shit I want to. I’m producing a ton of movies this year and I’m directing an adaptation of Little Fish at the end of the year. I’m not gonna jeopardize that by writing an article about my Sundance shenanigans. (Oh, aren’t you salivating for that follow up on last year’s Sundance piece knowing I was at the I Saw The TV Glow premier? Guess what, there was no drama. But if there was, how could you expect me to write about it now?) The industry is too small and my writing too unimportant to jeopardize the work I’m doing to support trans stories getting to the screen.
So in hindsight, did I make a mistake in publishing my piece about Actors… and helping to organize the Chicago screening that brought it back into the discourse? Duh, no. I made friends from the experience, and I value friendships in this industry above anything else. However, oh dear god… if this in some way created a domino effect leading to the conceptualization of Envy/Desire (which offers “special thanks” to my friends Betsey and Peter in its end credits) then I am genuinely sorry.
Envy/Desire: the real trans minstrel show, or how I learned to accept that conceptualizing a trans cinema canon is genuinely impossible
I was introduced to Envy/Desire’s writer-director-star Aimee Armstrong as an emerging filmmaker who was embarking on her first short film. Being who I am and considering my goals in this industry as the trans girl movie producer, I gave her a follow on Twitter and looked forward to seeing what she would make. Eventually I heard the plot description and because I don’t like to conceptualize what, a trans woman filmmaker especially, is allowed to do in this medium, I was genuinely curious about how one might explore the idea of a trans woman discovering that her Chad boyfriend was actually a closeted trans woman. There’s a complex interiority provided to a character to explore in such a concept, and I was genuinely curious if it might fall into the ideas of self-identifying self-loathing apparent in works that also explore these ideas of pity and revulsion towards the abject male Object, framed by the trans feminine gaze. A lot of trans feminine auteurs love to play with brainworms, whether they be that or the AGP/HSTS divide, sissy hypno, or any other sort of dysphoria-induced by confusing sexuality and perceived or real fetishism/paraphilia. I love making movies about trans women who specifically use 4chan too much. Alison Rumfitt writes about dolls who make sissy hypno and consider those anti-trans fascist talking points a little too intimately. A lot of the work by trans artists I connect to the most have this commonality of exploring how these bases for self-loathing operate at a micro and macro scale. Envy/Desire is not that.
Before going deeper, I don’t want to be mean to a young trans filmmaker and I won’t be, especially for what is functionally a student film. I hope that this discussion of Envy/Desire is not viewed as a means by which to deride Aimee, who I am acquaintances with. Although the politics of this film challenged me, and they certainly are challenging, I still support Aimee as a filmmaker and stand by my word to always support trans filmmakers even when I may not agree with them personally. Now, in order to properly engage with this work critically, like in my Actors piece, I’m gonna have to say some crazy shit and make wild speculations about why this movie exists. It’s what I do, babyyyyy.
This movie is… perhaps the most offensive thing I’ve ever seen? As a trans woman, definitely. Envy/Desire is the movie that the worst critics of Actors think that movie is. In a sense, I applaud the team behind this for making something I found genuinely upsetting. I felt like the dolls who saw Dressed to Kill or Silence of the Lambs back in the day and had to send in an opinion letter to the zine of their choice (in a way what I’m doing here is the modern equivalent). This film’s politics are genuinely grotesque in a way that I was somewhat appalled by. It’s mean-spirited in a new way for trans art, which to me makes it very fascinating for discussion.
My first thought as a nearly-thirty-year-old trans woman who transitioned at an age older than anyone involved in the making of this film (an age which a youngshit poster on 4chan may use terms such as ropefuel or hon) was: is there some kind of a generation gap responsible for this? Is this passoid cinema, in relation to work made by a hon like myself? I’ve been on 4chan my entire post-prepubescent life, so I’ve marinated in brainworms for almost as long as the film’s co-star Salomé has been alive. It’s not a generation gap as if the internet is different to grow up with now than then (the first trans woman I remember ever seeing online was in full Nazi regalia, some things never change). To paraphrase something I remember being pondered by Jules Gill-Peterson, when you transition younger do you have some form of privilege, your experience being vastly different from someone who transitioned as an adult and is dealing with consequences of a testosterone-dominant puberty, compared to the youth transitioner’s experience of avoiding that horrible trauma? I don’t know at what age the girls who made this movie transitioned, so it’s likely reckless for me to even pose this question in relation to their film — but, the reason I do so is that the film’s central joke stems from identity validation in relation to passing. The baffling aspect to me being that this joke is being made completely removed from the self-reflexive identification seen in the works I’ve discussed previously. In a sense, it’s hard for me to conceptualize how you make trans feminine art that skips over the Nevada dialectic. How did you get to this conclusion? “Why did you invite a man in a dress to cunty doll brunch?!”
I remember engaging with Aimee’s Twitter presence once, the gist of which is she was deriding a trans mom for a video of pumping her breast milk because it was cringe and made us look bad for our respectability politics because it’s gross or whatever. I remember when I first discovered I could potentially breast feed my (hopefully, I pray) future babies I found it to be something miraculously beautiful, finally one win I could have in this neverending punchline of a life I was forced to lead. I have a lot of very complex feelings about my relationship with motherhood, it’s not as though I’ve been shooting an eight and a half hour movie on that subject for the last fourteen months or anything. Point is, Aimee targeting that cringe trans mom for being no more cringe than any mommy blogger (and wow, would I ever love a world that allows for trans mommy bloggers to exist) struck a nerve and I remember commenting something or other, which is relatively rare for me on social media to drive headfirst into any sort of trans discourse, because it’s all a bad time. Why be mean to the trans mom? Or whoever else is trans and cringe in public? Is it that twinge of self-reflexivity, something that reinforces some deep seated hatred towards oneself? I would traditionally lean towards that, but… Envy/Desire speaks to a film free of empathy. There’s no humanity on display here.
Envy/Desire is only twenty minutes long, and in that time it reveals the horror of Aimee’s character Bella’s discovery of her boyfriend Ethan’s closeted alter ego Cynthia through a series of revulsive trans iconography. It begins with a conversation in which he reveals that his sexual desire towards her is a mix of envy and desire, followed by a discovery of his sissy hypno video search history. Bella then has a conversation in which she is first introduced to Blanchardian typology by her friend Natasha, then returns home to discover Cynthia wearing her clothes. The leering shot of his unshaved legs in the heels says everything about how the movie will go from here, usurped by the following scene which includes the image I found most offensive: Cynthia sitting with Bella and Natasha at brunch, wearing a bad wig, bad makeup, unshaved with visible five o’ clock shadow, in an ill-fitting dress. The movie positions Cynthia’s grotesque appearance as a reason for which to shun her from the dolls’ shared community, Natasha referring to him as a man in a dress and suggesting to Bella that “two is company, three’s a clock.” The underlying idea being that Cynthia’s presence makes them less safe in public, simultaneously presented with the implication that Cynthia using the women’s bathroom is inherently predatory, or at the very least something to cringe at. That’s a man. The movie goes on to make jokes about so-called “euphoria boners” and Cynthia wanting to find herself a “big black cock” to ride. At the end, Cynthia abandons Bella to go be herself. This moment is framed by a long dolly out as we almost expect this depiction of Bella’s isolation to mean something introspective, but alas Cynthia quickly returns through the door announcing that he “came.” Get it, he is AGP after all.
The most perplexing moment of Envy/Desire, in which it almost approaches on a moment of falling in line with the other works previously discussed, is when Bella calls Cynthia an autogynephile and she defends herself, saying that all that Blanchard stuff is discredited. Now, Bella as a character is shown as having just been introduced to the AGP/HSTS typology whereas Cynthia is fully aware of it and knows enough to defend that she isn’t defined as such. This implies that the character of Cynthia has enough of an awareness of her relationship to gender and has explored from her closeted perspective enough to not just be a cross-dresser, nor a fetishist. She has enough of a conceptualization of a trans identity and a confidence in such to want to accompany the other dolls out for brunch. And the joke is that she’s revulsive because she doesn’t pass? Revulsion without pity. Even Dressed to Kill and Silence of the Lambs have a little bit of pity for their tranny monsters, sugar to help the poison go down. Actors works for me because it’s mostly pity, the revulsion coming from the metatextual gamble of how you feel about the filmmakers’ point of view on the proceedings and to what degree you take its artistic exercise in good faith. The best part about Actors is that Petra inevitably transitions, taking hormones and getting FFS. She’s genuinely hairless, well-groomed, with good make-up and style. If the bit of the movie is that she’s “performing trans femininity for clout,” then you can’t say that the film isn’t doing its best to make the audience view Peter Vack as an attractive trans woman. That’s why I take Actors in good faith, because even when Peter as Petra behaves monstrously, it’s not making a statement that trans femininity is monstrous. My criticism of Actors always rested on the filmmakers’ refusal to accept the transness inherent to the work, attempting to deflect those themes and even having a trans woman at the end of the film spell out that Peter isn’t actually trans. The problem here of course, is how do we define whether Peter/Petra is actually trans? The character is taking hormones, getting FFS, and living socially as a woman, even if it raises the caveat of Petra “being a new thing actually.” I hate the cop out, because it suggests a degree of validity politics, and as I expressed before I think gatekeeping trans identity is problematic. On a reflexive level, the text of Actors suggesting that Peter isn’t actually trans is what makes the movie so interesting to me, because on a fundamental level, if we say that Petra isn’t trans then how do we define what transness even is? There’s an admission of transphobic guilt implicit in robbing Petra of her transness, as it once again implies a hierarchy of who actually gets to say tranny. On this note, Envy/Desire frustratingly offers that same attempt at compromise, with the filmmakers urging that the character of Cynthia is just a chaser, when the text of the film complicates that definition by immersing Cynthia in trans iconography and equating her experience to a trans subjectivity (however cringe the filmmakers may find that kind of transness to be).
Ultimately, Envy/Desire is a movie about who is allowed to be trans. It’s a movie caught up in the cyclical discourse which divides the community into cross sections: who’s valid? The movie isn’t asking this question so much as providing an answer, which separates it from the works which explore the trans experience in a more sophisticated way. There is no identification between Bella and Natasha in Cynthia, their cringing at her cusp-to-early transition existence doesn’t stem from any projected recognition of self. Instead, the film is interested in interrogating how there is no comparison between them. They are valid. She is not. The film matches their feelings, as does the film’s themes and the politics of its punchlines which seek to drive home that Cynthia is gross, worthy of ridicule, and not trans. I don’t understand why trans women would make this movie. It’s so mean-spirited in a way that lacks the self-hatred necessary to make trans art like this work. In comparison, I Saw the TV Glow also engages with a cross-dressing scene and is overall a far more mean-spirited and spiritually draining work of art, but it means something and certainly platforms the pity alongside the revulsion (and coming from a place of early transition, once again places that identification within a bleak narrative that suggests no hope for those who don’t try). We need to try.
So how do I reconcile a film such as Envy/Desire within a canon of a trans feminine cinema? It certainly belongs there, even if its attack helicopter politics fail to strive for anything deeper than jokes that will certainly land for any tourist voyeurs in the audience — for all its inter-community /tttt/, Reddit, and Twitter lingo, it still never reaches a specificity for which it could shun the non-trans femme viewer. The humour is almost goal-posted for an anti-trans extremist audience (I hope this is playing to the grift in the way that Blaire White plays to the grift — I respect the grift, it’s hard to make money out there when you’re of our condition). So Envy/Desire clearly fits into my conceptualization of a trans feminine cinema canon. As do a lot of things that explore territory which I find signifies a central tendency of a trans feminine experience as it is explored in art. Is that experience universal? Envy/Desire proves it certainly is not, and that one can form a trans identity which is oppositional to self-loathing. Perhaps that’s aspirational. Or, just maybe making anything under a banner of Trans _______ which requires selectivity is disconnected from the fundamental realities of existing as a trans person. I suggested a framework which would exclude the work of the Wachowskis and Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, of exceptional filmmakers like Luis, or Jessica Rovinelli, or Sepi Mashiahof, or Frances Arpaia, or Carman Spoto, or Nyala Moon, or Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa, or countless others who I could continue to list and infinitely more I wouldn’t be able to think of off of the top of my head, haven’t found yet, and potentially never will have the opportunity to know. Like the cinema, transness should be inclusive to anyone who dares to peek inside.
I hope that every trans girl that wants to make a movie chases that dream.
As always, my DMs are open for advice.
Thank you for posting this. Such a mean spirited and gross movie.