Happy Pride everyone. I know I’ve been quiet, apologies.
Pride is generally an odd time for me.
Since I came out in 2020, local prides have never felt terribly welcoming to me. Trans women aren’t a focal aspect of “Denver Pride,” they much prefer to take corporate blood money and feature gay men and drag queens than listen to us filthy trannies about what we’d like.
And on the less political, but more personal side, I’m generally laid up with hellish allergies for the back half of May/ front half of June – cursed tree sex – and I have a peculiar habit of having the worst interpersonal moments during pride. Ghosting by girlfriends, kink scenes gone awry while your’s truly was deep in pup space, the endless cavalcade of performative cruelty that this pride has been (I’m half tempted to make every word in the last segment a link to a different anti trans, queer, women, or children focused thing from the last month, but I suspect it would depress the folks who need uplifting and those willfully ignorant of the problem wouldn’t click on the links).
However, there is one thing I can do that tends to help, at least help me stay stable and sane. I can write. I’d like to write deep, thought provoking things, fiction to loose the things inside my skull upon the world. But those require commitment, work, and self confidence.
All elements I’m glad to provide, but in the same way one must eat their vegetables, literally and proverbially, one must diversify their palette as well. All work and no play makes for a dull mutt.
So, fuck it. I want to write more. So, I will. And few topics are easier to pontificate on, than how queer media made me feel.
And seeing as I run a weekly movie night in my discord, why not write about the things we watch. My desire to talk about media with my friends and community is the entire reason I started those movie nights. Ok, there was a side goal of creating a community space and activity, but the point still stands.
For Pride, I decided to make a point of showing specifically queer movies, though I decided to confuse my own recollection by ending May with a Wachowski sister double feature of Bound followed by Street Racer, aka the girls’ most lesbian movie and their gayest.
The first week of Pride 2026 we watched Mulholland Drive of David “Fix your hearts or die” Lynch fame, followed by Tár. I might write a bit about them at a later date, but I mostly wanted to give y’all the background before heading into this most recent Monday’s movies, I Saw The TV Glow and Boy Meets Girl.
Where last week my goal when picking movies was “lesbian cinema” this week was simply “trans women.”
As a topic in film we’re… not exactly viewed favorably. For mutt’s sake, the most well known movie about us by one of us (I Saw The TV Glow) is likely only so well known because it fits so well into the progressive need to see the suffering our society inflicts on minorities as something they can overcome, which ISTTG almost, ALMOST lets them treat it as, before rug pulling it for the ending they deserved and what our global, man dominated culture seeks for all who defy its conventions. A broken trans girl apologizing to nameless swarms for daring to ask them to help her stay alive.
Lindsay Ellis has an entire video essay on our portrayal in film over the years, many like Rocky Horror, still held up as elements of queer history, which they are, in so far as they remind us trans girls that even among our supposed “fellow faggots1 under the law” we are denied our womanhood and cast as murderers, rapists, pedophiles, as dangerous.
These two movies at least, don’t do that (I promise this will get lighter once we’re talking about the second movie).
I’m well aware I’m a late arrival to I Saw The TV Glow. In my defense, I was fairly certain it was going to emotionally destroy me. Frankly, I’m surprised it didn’t, but between a year long job hunt, a divorce, the passing of my dog, and… well y’know the general horrors and feelings of helplessness, it didn’t quite manage it. I’d also blame the fact that I was wearing my critic hat pretty early into the film, not because I was catching issues. Rather because 30 minutes into the movie I was fucking furious at every cis critic who’s tried to discuss the movie while ignoring the trans focus, or as Walter Chaw did last month, replacing the trans themes with his own identity perspective.
Can we just address that really quickly? When discussing any work of art addressing the plight of any minority group, it’s perfectly understandable to critique it through the lens of one’s own experiences. Queer folk do it all the fucking time since we’re so rarely represented honestly. We see ourselves, our struggles in those stories. But we don’t ignore the fact that those stories are about the experiences another minority experiences, unless those people are trans women.
Then suddenly you don’t need to say “Owen/Isabel’s struggle and ultimate failure to take up the space to be her true self spoke to my experiences.” It’s fine, downright expected, that you can ignore a girl curling into herself walking down darkened halls dotted with masculinity affirming aphorisms, hiding from the few signs telling her to be her honest self, only to finally expand, blooming out under the literal gods damned trans flag. For fucks sake, minutes later the camera cuts from Owen walking, slow and dejected through the woods home to a brightly lit shot of Isabel doing the same, before looking around. Finding herself alone, a smile breaks across her face and she bounces through the woods.
This isn’t subtext, this is the text of the fucking film you cis walnuts! If you’re discussing I Saw The TV Glow and tried to discuss it without highlighting that it is, unquestionably, the story of what our society does to trans girls, then you did not watch the movie. You’re writing about what you wanted to see, what you wanted to feel, in the face of a movie that said, to your face, “you are a cog in the machine killing trans girls, do something about it.” And you chose to maintain your happy existence as a cog.
As for the second film… ok I’ll be pretty light on this one because I don’t completely hate it. I asked Bluesky for movies they thought properly, textually, encapsulated “trans joy2,” a topic I’ll assuredly write about more specifically soon enough, and they did not disappoint.
Frankly, I was expecting, like, 2 responses. Maybe some well meaning idiot liberal would suggest that vile piece of transphobic prattle, Emilia Perez or that coal mining propaganda starring Pedro Pascal’s trans sister.
But no, my mutuals (holy shit where did I get so many cool mutuals?!) had 5. I mean, they mostly preparatorily couched my expectations. They were all pretty het. None were made by trans women. Two were Thai, but were from around 2000 and had not escaped the comedy of the time.
So, I settled on picking Boy Meets Girl, largely because I saw they’d cast an actual gods damned trans woman for the part.
And having now seen it, I’ll say it: Dani Finn was right, Boy Meets Girl was probably the best trans joy movie made in 2014.
It should have been a lesbian movie, not het. The male lead, Robby, is kind of a nothing burger of a character. The ending is something between an ass pull deus ex machina and a Chekov’s gun. While its important the dude is the one to set that ball rolling on said ass pull ending for the plot, it comes out of left field with no leg work on screen in a way that fucks the films pacing while stealing all agency from Ricky for the finale. David is an utterly indefensible character who deserves to be dropped into the Mariana Trench. And, frankly, after his comments in the heat of the moment in this movie’s relative approximation of a chase scene, I’d say Robby belongs down there too.
And yet, I’d actually kind of recommend it?
I mean, it has that classic lib fixation on trans women’s penises, seeing us as the universal submissive, while also portraying us as the endlessly horny fuck beasts who simply NEED to shove our dicks up straight guy’s asses3.
And yet, it put an actual gods damned trans girl on screen. In a swim suit. Hell, she has one of the most tastefully done full frontal nude shots I’ve seen done of a woman, much less a trans woman, in a long time. It lets her be messy in ways real trans women are rarely allowed to be outside our own circles.
Sure, it tries to do that curiously liberal thing best typified by Crash, extol a world view where bigotry is not systemic, but individual, waving away any questions of how those individuals happened to come upon those personal values.
And yet, it lets an actual trans woman speak her truth, lets her call out bullshit, and most importantly, it lets her be a delightfully catty woman to those who most deserve it.
Boy Meets Girl should have been… well the good version of that edgeless, flavorless, blancmange, Make Room For Love, with a splash of Dear Evan Hansen if it was actually queer and could decide on it’s bloody tone.
Ricky realizes she’d fallen into the comphet trap unique to our kind, while showing Francesca how to love untainted by the hatred of the boy they’d unwittingly shared while using Ricky’s youtube channel and her own efforts, to bring about her desires, though I suppose that would remove the theme of others helping trans women, but then I live in the realities of 2026, where we can be stabbed dozens upon dozens of times and there’s still a debate about whether a man stalking and murdering a trans girl is even a hate crime, so maybe I’d rather not pretend the cis will have our backs.
Instead, it’s a kind of poorly paced film taking a surprisingly honest, for Hollywood, crack at the experiences of trans women, albeit filtered through the lens of the straights4. Which feels a bit silly to say, given the second Ricky reaches New York and meets other trans girls, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts she’d have a polycule in about 3.2 seconds realizing polyamory would have solved all this movie’s plot, and Robby is gonna have to learn from a bunch of trans lesbians REAL fast how to properly treat a girl dick or end up in the perma-cuck chair, but I get the feeling he’d enjoy that anyway.
Oh, and I love the way this movie just gets the concept of sisterhood. Sure older women consistently treat Ricky like shit once they know she’s trans. Sure, every man in her life, save her father, calls her at least one slur (pretty sure Robby calls her at least 3).But women, women are there. Yes, Francesca has the whole progressive obsession with her dick, but not to the exclusion of Ricky as a person — though, with some minor reshoots you could absolutely turn this into a horror movie about a trans girl who doesn’t realize she’s dating a wackadoo chaser, who herself doesn’t realize she’s a wackadoo chaser. While the deus ex machina is mostly attributed to Robby, the actual work to support Ricky is done by another woman.
I suspect it’s one of those things I’m only noticing because I’ve been working on a few essays and video essay scripts on egg fics, but it’s really telling that, in 2014, even the liberals got that the first people to embrace trans women as women, are the cis women in our lives.
It would be silly to post this and not mention next week’s movie plans right?
Of course, that means I need to pick next week’s movie plans before I can post this… well that was either a foolish mistake or a brilliant way of forcing myself to get that done early.
(Or, not so early since I’m finishing the edit on Saturday) <And posting on Monday, double oops>
Well, because he is gay, and totally not just because I want an excuse to talk about the movies, on Monday June 22nd we’ll be watching all three Benoit Blanc movies.
We’ll be starting:
Knives Out at 4 PM MDT
Glass Onion at ~6:20 PM MDT
and Wake Up Deadman at ~8:40 PM MDT
All in the community Discord, so please join us!
(PS. once the rest of the schedule is done it will be up here at phenn.gay/stream/)
Thank you all for watching, as always everything I do, written, streamed, videos, whatever, is all brought to you by supporters just like you for as little as a dollar a month over on patreon.com/phenn and ko-fi.com/phenn, you can also find my discord and such down in the description, have a happy timezone and thank you very much to my patrons especially, April, Fragile Paper, Manfred, Pinball Witch, Pimento, Robin-Autumn Marsh, Rose, Writer Princess, and Yalc
- cis girls, you really need to stop saying that word like it’s ever been applied to you. It has always been reserved for those who subvert the “natural” order of penetrability, which is to say it’s a slur for gay men and trans women. Those whose cultural existence is maintained in a delicate super position where our theoretical dicks and desire to be penetrated by other dicks are all that define us. The already fairly reclaimed slur you’re looking for is dyke ↩︎
- I don’t dislike it per say, though I’d argue the best we get lately is queer joy rather than trans, but that is not germane to this topic. No, the key with trans/queer joy is that it doesn’t matter if your setting doesn’t also include the pain, the stigma, THE REASON trans joy is necessary. Without that, all you’ve created is a soft and edgeless world where joy matters not because there is not suffering to be offset, my personal exemplar of good trans joy is still the Magica Riot series by Kara Buchanan ↩︎
- For fucks sake y’all, half the girls I know can barely get it up after hrt even if they want to, and the other half are so comically large they’re scared of hurting someone, and most of those would kill for a partner who’ll let them bottom ↩︎
- For the record, when I use the word straight, I do not mean het, I mean it the way straights use it for themselves; which is to say cis, het, monogamous, breeders, aka “normal” ↩︎
