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boringkate · 1 year ago

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Here’s a bunch of junk for you trans girls to watch

Update: there used to be a link to a mega folder here, but it got taken down.

///TGIRL FEATURE FILMS (alphabetical order)

Adam (2019) it's about a cis boy who's mistaken for a trans boy and rolls with it. Big cast of trans characters including a tgirl played by a tgirl who everyone wants to fuck. Directed by a trans dude. Highly legit. If you're still hung up on pre release speculation based on the novel then you're the most annoying person alive.

Assassination Nation (2018) The first half is Euphoria and the second half is The Purge. ONE OF THE BEST TGIRL MOVIES OF ALL TIME.

Bit (2019) Lesbian girl power vampire movie where the main character is a tgirl played by a tgirl. It's solid. I find it frustrating that they hint at her being trans without explicitly acknowledging it (and she's passing as fuck, so it's easy to not notice), but I know that's what some of y'all want.

Boy Meets Girl (2014) Cis dude for trans girl love story. Pretty normie, but also you see her fully naked (gock out) at the end.

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) Extremely 60s. Cool as hell.

Lady Daddy (2010) South Korean romcom about a trans girl played by a cis girl who tries unconvincingly to back pass when she finds out she has a kid. Very cute.

Lingua Franca (2019) written directed and starring Isabel Sandoval. An undocumented trans woman immigrant in New York deals with a cis dude partner being a cis dude. Which is also the plot of The Garden Left Behind (2019).

Myra Breckinridge (1970) Raquel Welch is a trans woman and her goal is the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood! It's Fight Club! It's Hackers! It's divisive, but it's probably my favorite movie!

So Pretty (2019) Literally the first scripted feature length (non pornographic tho it does have cock) film to feature two trans women played by trans women kissing eachother.

Something Must Break (2014) THE OTHER BEST TGIRL MOVIE OF ALL TIME. Drugs. Crimes. Gock. Slow motion pissing. Slow motion park Fucking. Genuinely the most beautiful sex scene I've seen in any movie. And she makes it to the end still alive and more sure of herself and at peace than ever.

Tangerine (2015) Groundbreaking and also a bunch of the secondary characters are real life pornstars (which I think is neat).

The Garden Left Behind (2019) This and Lingua Franca (2019) really are tgirl twin films, but (like with Antz and A Bug’s Life) the vibes and details make them distinct (I assume tho tbh I’ve never watched Antz).

///TGIRL DOCUMENTARIES

Bambi (2013) about a trans girl showgirl in 50s/60s paris

Paris is Burning (1990) basically it's Pose.

Shinjuku Boys (1995) Trans dudes working in a tokyo club that caters to tboy chasing cis girls. There's at least one trans girl in the mix too.

///FORCED FEMINIZATION

A Reflection of Fear (1972) They raised her as a girl and it made her do murders! It drags in places, but the girl in it is so ethereal and it has ageplay vibes and daddy issues.

Memory Run (1996) A very fun direct to video scifi action flick about fighting fascism by blowing up your pre transition self with a rocket launcher + it's based on a novel written by a trans woman.

She-Man A Story of Fixation (1967) Notable for being such a cliche sissy maid fantasy while also coming out so early + it was Bob Clark's first film lol.

Sleepaway Camp (1983) A more famous version of Reflection of Fear.

Surrender Dorothy (1998) A MUST WATCH. I personally bought a physical DVD and made an ISO of it for you because I was unsatisfied with the quality of the only copy that seemed to exist online. I ALSO PERSONALLY CREATED MY OWN SUBTITLES FOR IT BECAUSE EVEN THE DVD DIDN’T INCLUDE ANY! WHICH TOOK HOURS TO DO!

The Skin I Live In (2011) A rapist is kidnapped and turned into a girl by a mournful vengeful plastic surgeon. Which was also the plot of Victim (2010). I never really vibe with Pedro Almodóvar movies, but I recognize this is the preeminent forced feminization film.

///SHORT FILMS

Gender Troublemakers (1993) Some 90s Toronto trans girls fucking and discoursing. Explicit tgirl on tgirl action. This is the only one on the list that I haven’t actually watched yet. I’m hyped to watch it tho. Seems mindblowingly rad af.

Happy Birthday Marsha (2018) It's about Marsha P. Johnson.

I don't Know (1971) I'm obsessed with the trans girl in this one she just keeps popping up in all kinds of early 70s stuff. Directed by Penelope Spheeris (who is the sister of the cis gf in it).

Mesmeralda (2019) AN ABSOLUTE BANGER HOLY FUCK THE VIBES ARE OFF THE CHARTS! PLS WATCH THIS! I refuse to apologize for it being 15GB. It’s worth every byte.

Pat Rocco's Changes (1970) It's that same girl again!

Queens at Heart (1967) I can't get over that hairdresser girl thinking she's back passing. Most adorably weak boymode ever.

Shangri-La (2021) Another Isabel Sandoval joint.

The Yellow Wallpaper (2021) Freshly post op girl with a supportive boyfriend goes unhinged.

Undress Me (2012) Jana Bringlöv Ekspong did a few short films. Give janabringlove a google after watching this.

///JUST LIKE BTW

Some of these would be tough to find elsewhere, but most of the movies are also watchable on fmovies and/or can be torrented in higher quality.

After you've worked your way through the folder then just start doing Google searches for trans films. Look at IMDB keywords and letterboxd lists. There are so many more out there. These are just like my personal picks.

#trans #trans girls #trans films #queer films

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queerprojectionist · 5 months ago

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I Saw The TV Glow

As always, a little housekeeping to start things off. This is not a “review” in the traditional sense but a discussion of the themes and the experiences of a film. It is not impartial or impersonal, and there are lots of spoilers though I will try to leave you some reason to watch for yourself. Queer and trans people are deeply affected by the media that does include us, because we’ve fought for so long just to have that. As such, my experience of cinema and my identity cannot be fully untangled and must be presented in it’s gnarled, multifaceted whole. Here there be trauma, folks. Tread lightly and enjoy. I Saw The TV Glow

Jane Schoenbrun, A24 Films, 2024

It is rare within recent queer cinema that a film doesn’t end with some variation on the lesson of you can choose this, if you want to. Coming out of the closet is a choice, just like the bigotry and intolerance queer people face just trying to live an authentic life. The predominant thinking towards coming out is that the independence of that discovery is sacrosanct; we may suspect our friends, family, or lovers are queer, but we can’t make them acknowledge that, before they’re ready to see it for themselves.

I Saw The TV Glow doesn’t agree. It is a burning ice-cream truck of hard truths, about the urgency, the utter consuming need to let our true selves live. A beautifully shot, sumptuously themed fever dream soaked in neon and teenage dysphoria, Schoenbrun’s latest demands that we reconsider; that not only can we choose our true selves, we must.

The backdrop for this proposal, The Pink Opaque, is a television show in the vein of Are You Afraid Of The Dark? (how’s that for a reference, 90s kids?). Tara and Isabel are summer camp friends who share a psychic connection, which they use to confront the forces of Mr. Melancholy, a terrifying celestial god who wants to drag them back to The Midnight Realmand bury them alive. Crucially, it’s their connection with each other that is the force that keeps the Realm at bay, a connection that is deeply sapphic coded. The show takes place across a ghostly, always-night surburban hallucination, an eerily perfect backdrop for Mr. Melancholy’s monsters. It feels deeply and directly queer in a way most shows of the era couldn’t be.

Owen becomes fascinated with the show after seeing advertisements for it, but the show airs after his bedtime, so he isn’t allowed to see it. He then meets Maddy, who he spots reading a book about the show, and strikes up a conversation, despite being in Grade 7 to Maddy’s Grade 9. He convinces his mother he’s gone to a sleepover at a friend’s and joins Maddy and her friend to watch the show one night, altering his life forever.

For two years, Maddy tapes the show’s episodes and leaves them in the darkroom at school for Owen to take home and watch, which he does surreptitiously, fearing that at any time his parents might find them and ask him questions he doesn’t have answers to yet. Isabel asks Tara how she knows things she shouldn’t, and if she’s going crazy, but Tara reaffirms her, telling her never to let anyone call her that. Their experiences are such because they are The Pink Opaque. In the following scene, Owen asks to join Maddy again to watch the show with her rather than on tape, and Maddy asks if he knows she’s only into girls, and who he’s into, which Owen can’t answer. He tries to describe how it feels like where that should be, there is only empty space where someone has carved out his heart with a shovel.

When they meet again to watch the show, there are the beginnings of recognition, understanding why Isabel, Tara, and the Midnight Realm feel “more real than real life”, in Maddy’s words. She suggests they run away together, to escape their own version of the Midnight Realm, and to better understand themselves, but Owen isn’t able to, and within a couple weeks, not only has Maddy left, but The Pink Opaque is cancelled.

The depths of Owen’s fear of who he is, something so many trans people experience, is not subtly suggested; they loom over Owen’s dissociative state much like Mr. Melancholy looms over the suburban terrors of The Pink Opaque. Maddy comes back for Owen years later, when he’s settled into a dissatisfying job and a nondescript life as a ghost of himself. She explains that she disappeared into the show. And there she makes it plain: they are Tara and Isabel, one of whom can’t look at himself long enough to allow that truth to escape. One of the most beautiful and brilliant sequences in the entire film is Tara’s impassioned plea to realize that Isabel is not lost; Owen is she.

But before Owen can fully accept Isabel, he bolts, pushing Tara to the ground in fear and running for home. It is rare for me to cry out in pain during a film, through great big tears no less, but I did so right there. Isabel is so close to realization, but she can’t make it outside of Owen before he stuffs her back into a dark and dissociative corner of his mind. It’s yet another sequence that trans people who fought their own truths for so long will feel like a punch in the guts. Tara leaves for good this time, but leaves a message for Owen on the street outside his house in chalk.

There is still time.

Tara sends Owen one more tape in the mail shortly after their encounter, the Season Five finale, the last episode of the show. In it, Mr. Melancholy captures Isabel, forces her to drink a sedating formula, and buries her alive. He cuts out her heart and puts it in an industrial freezer. The Midnight Realm wins. And it breaks Owen to see the parallels between Isabel’s death in the show and her suffocating inside of himself. Once again, the dissociation is broken only long enough for Isabel’s pain to escape, which it does, viscerally and violently.

I have walked this very road, as a trans person who didn’t make it out until her 30s. There were several times where I tried to re-bury who I was, between flashes of recognition that were both painful and terrifying. We watch Owen try to get on with his life, hold down a job, “become a man” and a “productive member of society” in his words. Just like I tried to start over several times after massive breakdowns where my Isabel almost escaped.

Which is what makes the ending so brilliant. During an episode he later blames on his meds, Owen cuts open his chest to discover the TV’s glow emanating from where, all those years ago, it felt like someone dug out his heart with a shovel. It’s the film’s final message to us, not to be afraid. Isabel and Owen’s path after that isn’t clear, but the overwhelming emotional release Isabel gets after so many years in hiding is so evident on Owen’s face and in his body language that I truly believe this is finally her moment. Schoenbrun leaves that up to us to decide.

Being transgender in a world designed to exclude, demoralize, and devalue you is messy and painful. I often took refuge in my own fictional worlds, not unlike those of The Pink Opaque, and my truth, my Isabel, was so ready to emerge, only for me to stuff her back down before I’d even recognized who she was. Unlike Isabel, I didn’t have a Tara, or a Maddy. I didn’t have anyone who understood the hole in my chest or why I’d routinely dissociate in the middle of conversations or visits with the few friends I kept close.

And I really wish that I had. The true horror of Schoenbrun’s work here is not only what we do to ourselves through dysphoria and fear, it’s also the people we lose, our trans siblings, to the belief that everyone needs to figure this out on their own. How many Isabels are never found, and how many lives are only partially realized . Which is why Tara tries so hard to get to Isabel and turn her gaze inwards. When she reappears in Isabel’s life, she has gone through that death and rebirth, burying herself alive only to emerge, not Maddy, but Tara. And she knows that Isabel is trapped, that Mr. Melancholy is everywhere and is driving her into the ground. He drives us into the ground.

As queer folk, we often recognize other queer and trans people, before they recognize it themselves. We call that being an “egg”, and the realization that they’re not cisgender or heterosexual is known as cracking said egg. I Saw The TV Glow is going to crack some eggs for sure, but it won’t be the only thing that is required for some of us to get to that stage. We also need to start dismantling the decades of trauma that have lead us to the belief that we can’t hold space for and help other queers find themselves. Because our Isabels never truly die, but if they never truly live, then isn’t that the same as dying, in the end?

There is still time.

It was similar words that finally unlocked the closet door for me. I was depressed, scared of who I might be but hating who I thought I was. I had spent fifteen years living a persona I created in high school to cover up my Isabel such that she would never get out again, having been tormented in elementary and junior high schools for my effeminate nature and general distrust of boys. If I had to be one, I just had to make it livable, much like Owen says he’s “becoming a man” by sinking into his work and trying to ignore that everything that brings him joy is dying. I had been married, had several failed relationships, and had no schooling, money, or joy to my name. I was ready to give up for good.

But a friend of mine, a playwright, finally reached me through their art, and gave me the keys to my destiny, an experience that I’ll always be grateful to them for. Sometimes, the pain of dissociation and loss is too great for us to bear alone. And that’s what I Saw The TV Glow was for me. A call to action, to take up arms against the Midnight Realm with our Taras and our Isabels and be there for our trapped fellow queers. Because we can’t expect a world whose hatred for us deepens every day to provide all of the tools and clues necessary for self discovery. I know this won’t be a message that sits well with everyone, and I’m not suggesting the only solution to teenage discomfort is to be trans, but it may well be the only the solution for those of us trapped under the shovel and spell of Mr. Melancholy. That should be enough to try. There may still be time, but purgatory, the Midnight Realm, will sap us of all we have to live for, and as trans people, we deserve better than that, because we are The Pink Opaque.

#queer cinema #queer films #i saw the tv glow

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