#faggotry

Another facet of this is that a lot of the time these narratives are resolved through romance – mostly heterosexual, but occasionally homosexual (Tomboy, Boys Don't Cry, Colette to an extent).

Still from Boys Don't Cry

The girl is waiting to be corrected through discovering that actually she just needs a good man or to embrace her lesbianism and then that pesky gender confusion will go away (just like in reality). Transgressing wholly into some form of gendered masculinity (whether binary or not) is not suspect, so much as it is completely unthinkable in the plot (but not to me!)

still from Lady Oscar

There are very very very few narrative films about transmasculinity that do not take this route, especially prior to the 2010s (I’m thinking By Hook or by Crook as an outlier, which is crucially not a crossdressing film -- but maybe the crossdressing film itself is part of the problem, the fact that trans masculinities have been so confined to this format. or maybe it just needs to be done with more commitment, especially in historical fiction. idk. you tell me).

Off the top of my head we might find Funeral Parade of Roses, Dog Day Afternoon, To Wong Foo, The Iron Ladies, I Want What I Want, In A Year Of 13 Moons, Priscilla, Come Back to the Five and Dime, The Crying Game, Just Like A Woman, All About My Mother, Different For Girls, Soldier’s Girl, Beautiful Boxer, Tokyo Godfathers, TransAmerica, Die Beautiful, Jolly Fellows, and a fair few more about trans femininities, which are not (to be clear) perfect representations or even sometimes quite aware of what they’re doing or what they want to say (I also deliberately went for films that for the most part have cis actors in the roles in order to make a point here – most of these films are not perfect at what they’re doing by a long shot!) But they are clearly about characters whose feminine representations of a gendered self persist throughout the narrative in one way or another.

(there is a separate post here which is broadly “hey why are so many of these femme people meant to be ogled at/treated as freaks and/or sad outcasts when they’re not outright serial killers, which were movies I deliberately kept off the above list” – riddle me this filmmaker/actor going for an easy award, why is transness a tragedy to you?)

(a separate separate analysis which I've already done for something I can't talk too much about which goes something along the lines of "where and how does exploration of gender expansiveness in cinema exist in films set before the 20th century/prior to the advent of trans?")

Masculinities are almost uniformly from the get-go cast as not-really-real and easily correctable (almost always through romance -- add amatonormativity to this whole problem).

A phase.

they are also -- and someone has made this point very well and I have been wracking my brain to remember who so please let me know if you know, i think it might have been in disclosure the documentary -- pretty overwhelmingly white. where we find transmasculinities usually and non-white transmascs especially is documentary (the aggressives, shinjuku boys). or, in the case of a florida enchantment (1914), the difference between a white woman "becoming a man" and a black woman "becoming a man" show the racist ideas of white purity and black aggression. so the girlish exuberance i mentioned that must return to correct (het) womanhood is -- shocking nobody -- definitely tied into ideas of what a correct woman is to begin with (that is, who has more access to some degree of humanness under womanhood). (there's no winning here, no matter how you twist it)

still from Beyond the Aggressives

A couple of examples of this in the other direction are Some Like It Hot and Juwanna Mann -- both movies that I quite enjoy, and whose existence makes me see that discrepancy all the more

I don’t know what it is.

Is transmasculinity not as sexy as a cis woman who’s afraid of her own body? Can we – despite their disappointing endings – embrace these movies as part of a trans canon (bearing in mind Harvey Fierstein’s discussions on not wanting to translate things all the damn time).

still from Mutt, a movie written and directed by trans filmmaker Vuk Lungulov-Klotz

I like a lot of these movies, but while we do have some transmasc films out there that are transmasc, they’re still incredibly rare and for the most part have yet to enter into a space of narratives that are about anything but “how do people feel about this transmasculinity business? do we exist?” A toe dipped into the idea of the concept, more than embracing the potential of it all.

A lot of the narratively fun -- dare I say cultural and thematic trans/masculine -- stuff is still contained within the crossdressing narrative, yearning to make the jump into a cinematic image that affirms and continues to play with gender expansiveness until the end.

As it stands for now we need to turn off the movie before the end and pretend that he/they get/s to actually continue to enjoy this state of non-normatively gendered being. that the happy ending is not a return to a status quo, but perhaps something more... legibly transgressive.

Note: a movie from the 20th century that Doesn't make the character do a return to said status quo is Hussar Ballad, a soviet musical based on a real life historical trans man (I do not say that flippantly, Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov got special dispensation to continue living as a man and described being deadnamed as painful).

While it’s still a crossdressing film at its core, the main character just. Keeps on presenting as masculine at the end.