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| She's The He |
With the energy and charm of a classic high school movie and a distinctly modern sensibility, She’s The He is one of the highlights of this year’s South by Southwest. It follows best friends Alex (Nico Carney) and Ethan (Misha Osherovich) on an ill-advised adventure into the girls’ changing rooms, under cover of pretending to be trans, which leaves Alex way out of his depth and Misha discovering that she really is a girl. Just before the festival, I connected with writer/director Siobhan McCarthy to discuss it.
“It's definitely one of those movies that I wish I had growing up as a queer kid,” they say. “We all had to grow up on the early 2000s movies that are so iconic. Movies like Mean Girls and She's The Man and Clueless. They honestly were such a big part of the entire Gen Z childhood experience that so informed my taste and who I am as a person. But when you're growing up as a queer kid, especially as a trans kid, a lot of those movies might run afoul of your identity, or use your identity as a punchline.
“Coming into adulthood and thinking back on that era, especially as nostalgia for that era has grown so much in the 2020s, it really is foregrounding a lot of those references and clarifying what I feel like made our whole generation who we are. And so in the last year before making this movie, I couldn't help but start thinking about all of those films that I grew up with in the context of being trans and what that story would look like if it was actually getting told by trans people, or at least from a trans perspective – especially a comedy that is being told from a trans perspective. Comedy was usually using us in a negative light and I’m trying to re-finagle it to support us, but still address the history of that genre and the history of those images.”
So is it about creating a high school movie that kids can enjoy if they're trans the way that other people enjoy them?
“Yeah, it's very much so. And I mean, the goal is so much about making a movie that everyone can enjoy, because mostly we think of this as expanding the genre that sometimes excluded trans kids, just to bring that bubble a little farther and include as many people as we can into the thing.”
Ethan soon emerges as the central character but in many ways Alex is the more complex and interesting of the two, and certainly the most difficult to get right, I suggest.
“That was so complicated,” they say. “Part of what was incredibly important to me from the original inception of this idea was that a trans man would play that character. Because the meta angle of having a trans man play a character who is then ‘pretending to be a girl’ layers on so many levels of deconstruction of conservative tropes and conservative ideas that on a mental meta level, especially analysing the movie outside of the movie and in the political spectrum that we're in right now, I thought that was really interesting.
“Approaching the actual character, I mean, I grew up with so many young men like that. It was hard when I was growing up to find humanity in those young men sometimes because there was so much strife and so much complexity. But a lot of my closest friends now as an adult are those boys that I grew up with that were hard to relate to or hard to engage with in the day, but since they have grown into adulthood and have become self aware, it's been really useful to talk to them.
“It was funny because we didn't have any direct conversations about who they think they are now. But just knowing them while I was writing the movie and watching them, especially during this era of the last four years where trans identity has become so foregrounded culturally, watching those boys handle the cultural change around them and watching them also come into their own and come into a place of acceptance and comfort with those identities, and even my own identity, did really help to inform the ways that I thought Alex needed to arc. I mean, in order to make him redeemable. In a lot of ways, he's mirroring what my friends did for me when we were younger. I mean, his inevitable wraparound to be the bridge between Ethan and her mom is how one of my best friends managed to, in a different way and in a less comedic way, bridge that gap between me and my own mother.
“Having an outside force, sometimes even a cis man who doesn't know what he's doing, having someone else's perspective on a situation that you might be so emotionally invested in, even if it's ridiculous, can sometimes help to bring that spark that can bring everything back together. And I thought that he was such an interesting way to speak about that outsider voice, but also make a film about queer identity that doesn't completely exclude the experience of a cis person who is grappling with these identities. I mean, I loved writing him and I'm glad you found him complicated and interesting because that was so much of my driving force.”
We keep hearing from Republican lawmakers about how if they were growing up today they would pretend to be trans in order to get into the girls’ locker room and so forth, and that's seen in two different ways in the film, because there are the big muscular guys who want to do that and they're really obnoxious about it, but there’s also Alex, who is obviously really, really uncomfortable once he gets into that situation, and hasn't thought it through. it’s an interesting contrast and way of thinking about what might happen in the real world.
“Yes, that was so much of what I think we were all going for in making this movie – taking those conservative talking points and playing them out how it might ‘happen in real life’. And I do feel that it is important to contrast the ideas of different versions of masculinity in that space, because I also wanted to talk about the inherent discomfort that a cis man is going to have upon putting ‘putting on women's clothing’. Because so much of this idea is baseless. And by being able to contrast those two ideas, I feel like it gives somewhat of a holistic picture of how absurd that idea really is.
“Someone like Alex is going to be put in that position and it's going to fundamentally undermine who he is as a person and everything that makes him comfortable with himself. And these other boys, while they may be wearing the right clothes, are still just boys trying to do awful stuff that is agnostic to the clothing they are putting on. And I feel like by putting those two things against each other, it not only helps to exemplify that the boys are going to act like boys, regardless of the clothes they have on their bodies, but I also feel like it helps to tell the spectrum of how a cis man would engage with this specific concept.
“Honestly, when you put them in those situations, they're still going to act the way they would always act. I wanted to foreground the idea earlier in the film that the jock boys are already trying to gain access to this space, agnostic to the clothing that they are wearing, and that the actions of another boy are truly what catalyse their decisions rather than the transness or the clothing or anything like that.”
I tell them that I love the scene later on when we see them walking around together in girls’ clothing, because there's a long comedy tradition of laughing at men in women's clothing and that's become problematic, but that scene very effectively conveys their gender. It's funny to laugh at them because they are cis men in women's clothing, and it doesn't become problematic. We never once look at a trans character that way and say that she shouldn't be wearing that clothing just because of what her body perhaps looks like.
“I'm so glad you feel that way,” they say. “That image, to me, is one of the central theses of the movie: that we can still make a joke that has historically been made and it is still funny. But you have to put it in the right context because in a certain context it is transphobic. But when you are making the joke, the misdeeds and the fallacies and idiocy of a cis teenage boy, it is funny because watching a cis teenage boy do dumb stuff because he just is dumb is funny. It's a funny image. And so I think so much of the movie is about recontextualising those images that we've heard and seen forever into a space where we can still laugh at the stuff we've always laughed at, but just show future creators, or at least a future audience, a version of that joke or a version of that image that has longevity and is not exclusionary, at least to the trans community.”
To me, that was kind of a comedic parallel to one of the more dramatic themes of the film, which is the exploration of attraction to gender as opposed to just bodies. Was it intended that way?
“Oh, very much so. So much of what I like to explore within transness is that a lot of attraction – especially since this movie is acknowledging the existence of attraction, and attraction to gender, because that's important to the central theses of the film – I feel like in acknowledging that attraction, we also have to have a dialogue about how attraction is a complicated relationship between aesthetics and actual gender identity. Because sometimes the aesthetics of a person don't necessarily align with what you would assume their gender identity is.
“I feel like by having both the comedic counterpart of Alex, a cis boy, being attracted to a cis girl, is a necessary counter to the complexities of putting the conversation around attraction to gender versus attraction to aesthetics in the mouths and the faces of trans characters. Because by putting it with trans characters, it feels like it allows us to acknowledge and converse about the complexities of that subject, but through voices that actually understand what they're talking about. And I do feel like that part, especially those conversations, are a serious topic. They are something that is harder to make a joke about. And so while still maintaining the rhythm of a comedy, I thought it was important to allow those beats to have severity and be serious, but to contrast them with a conversation that has similarities and can almost make the jokes that you would want to make in that serious conversation, but without undermining that serious conversation itself.
“That’s also so much of why the film is such a two hander between Alex and Ethan, because it allows the same conversation to happen in a duality, hopefully throughout the film, around gender, but also around attraction, while providing those contrasting forces so that there's not one voice or specifically one trans character who needs to do the double duty of making jokes about themselves while also being serious about their identity.”
We talk about Ethan’s mother and the way that the film also makes room to explore gender and sexuality from the perspective of a middle-aged cis woman.
“I think that intersectionality is quintessential to the trans experience because by being trans, you are immediately overlapping with so many marginalised communities. But also, in order to support any marginalised community, all marginalised communities do need to band together. I think that that does overlap with the way that cis women, especially cis older women are not only excluded by culture from sexuality, but are excluded by movies from sexuality. And so while it is not the foregrounding element of this film, I did want to try to bring in that experience as well, because I'm trying to also acknowledge the reality of being an older woman and of being a single mother and of how that marginalisation will dovetail with some of her beliefs or some of her misdeeds.
“People, from my perspective, are made up of such a multiplicity and complexity of emotions that a lot of what she then turns around to bring at Ethan, especially in her disapproval of Ethan's identity, is mostly informed by the oppression that has been levelled upon her. So by being able to both include her sexuality and include her identity as an older woman, it also, I hope, helps to inform her biases that may lead her to act out against her daughter. They're just the same oppression that is fixating on all of us, trickling through her into Ethan.
“It was important to me to acknowledge the reality of what it means to be a parent, but also what it means to have lived with an oppression and then have to deal with how that oppression will affect your children and your loved ones and how that oppression specifically on your own attractiveness will then trickle down to your loved ones.”
There’s a point at which she’s clearly confused as to why anybody would want to be a woman if they had a choice.
“That's a sentiment that I have heard voiced by many older women I grew up around. A lot of older women who generally skew conservative in their voting behaviour, are conservative in their ideologies. A lot of them are single women who have been left by their husbands or who have had complicated relationships with sex and sexuality and their own attractiveness. But because that was so much of my childhood, I feel it did really inform this movie. I do feel like I have had those sentiments levelled upon me and levelled upon my friends because that's what everyone questions when it comes to transness, at least to some extent. Especially if they've been oppressed. Why would you want to engage in this thing that's been so hard for me? And I do want to treat that with empathy and with acknowledgement, because I absolutely understand where that's coming from.”
There’s a magical moment in the film when Ethan first sees herself dressed as a girl. That's a very difficult moment to capture. It's very effectively captured. It's a huge revelation, and obviously there's a euphoria that comes out of that. We talk a lot about dysphoria in trans circles, but, I suggest, not enough about euphoria.
“The whole movie, the entire goal of this film, at its core, came out of a deep desire to provide trans kids with a sense of joy and a sense of belonging, to create a movie about transness that was filled to the brim with joy. Because a lot of trans representation up until this point has acknowledged both dysphoria and also a lot of the oppressive forces that are upon the trans community. And it's incredibly important to acknowledge those. But we knew when we started making this movie a year ago that there was a high likelihood that by the time the movie was in festivals, we would be in an environment that was trying its hardest to hold trans children down and strip joy from trans life.
“From the jump, so much of our driving initiative was to create trans joy, to foreground that. And that moment specifically of cracking your egg is quintessential to the film, but also quintessential to representing that ultimate pinnacle of trans joy when you see yourself and you can finally realise who you are. It is a complicated thing to register. It's an uncomplicated thing to film. I mean, we were incredibly lucky to have Misha in this film because she, in her own personal journey, was able to dovetail with the work in such a way that that moment, while it is acting and while we are all on set, there is also an element of truth just in that moment and in what was happening on screen that I think is undeniable.
“Our costume designer is a trans woman as well, and Misha and her worked together for months leading up to the film to make sure that that garment was just right and felt just right on Misha's body, so that it wasn't just Misha performing that when we actually did that, on the day we were in that room – that that garment on that body was going to provide a genuine sense of euphoria in that moment.”
So do they feel that filmmakers, and perhaps creative artists in general, can do something in this political moment to help trans youth and to give people that space and to help people get through it?
“Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the only way through this is to make art, and especially to make art that is joyous and euphoric, because the world is going to try to hold us down. But I do think one of the things that is quintessential to queer resistance is that for as long as we have been doing this, it has been centred around joy and centred around celebration. It's interesting because the first Pride was a riot. The first Pride was protest. But through that protest, our queer elders have always, always, always, always shown us how to rejoice in the face of this oppression.
“I know so many people who grew up through the AIDS epidemic and who grew up through the Reagan years and who during that entire time, during death and destruction and oppression, just kept showing up to be happy and to be joyous and to make beautiful, joyous, incredible art. It feels so interesting that someone like Keith Haring has come to be this symbol of euphoric art, despite the reality that all of his art is acknowledging the pain of the time. And I think that it would be remiss to say that by making joyous queer art, we are not creating protest art. But I do not think that we need to fully dig down or acknowledge that pain in every piece we make, because by acknowledging joy and by foregrounding joy, there is an inherent awareness of that oppression. But we at least can still, I think all of us as artists writ large, remind the queer community and remind oppressed communities that we are still human, there is still joy to be had in our experience, and no matter how hard they try to keep us down, we are going to keep existing.”
So how do they feel about reactions to the film?
“It's been a fascinating experience already to watch how this film has been received. And I know that it's only going to get more complicated as time goes on. I mean, I definitely see this as a follow up to the history of queer cinema, like John Waters or But I'm A Cheerleader, that I would hope has a long life in indie cinemas. If I could be 50 and this movie could still be playing at midnight showings and people know these lines, that would be the perfect culmination of this film for me. If it can follow those trajectories of the people that I grew up respecting so much, that would be my ideal arc. I mean, I want this thing to live in cult cinemas and in cult queer spaces for as long as it possibly can.”
