“What is desire?” Sam Rockwell asks during a now-viral monologue from the third season of The White Lotus.
One of the main characters is reconnecting with an old friend when the friend’s explanation for his sobriety quickly goes off the rails. “I realized I could fuck a million women I’d still never be satisfied. Maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls,” he continues. “So one night I took home some girl who turned out to be a ladyboy which I’d done before but this time instead of fucking the ladyboy, the ladyboy fucked me. And it was kind of magical. I got in my head that what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls getting fucked by me and to feel that. So I put out an ad looking for a white guy my age to come over and fuck me. And the guy looked a lot like me. And then I put on some lingerie and perfume. Made myself look like one of these girls. I thought I looked pretty hot. And then this guy came over and railed the shit out of me.”
Since season one, writer/director Mike White (white, cis, bisexual) has been sharper in his takes on sex and gender than race. He’s writing what he knows, and what he knows are rich white people and sad middle-aged faggots. The response to this monologue has focused on how “weird” it is, but I think Mike White’s skill as a writer is his empathy for even the worst people he portrays on-screen. There’s a desire to understand people. A desire to understand desire.
I’m sure there are gender-bending Rachel Dolezal’s out there, but there is a difference between what Rockwell’s character is saying in terms of gender and what he’s saying in terms of race. It’s unclear if White is aware of this — and certainly much of his audience is not. Since this is a paywalled essay on a queer publication, I’m going to assume everyone reading this understands why gender and race function differently. (If not, here’s a TikTok.) But I’m less interested in critiquing White’s shortcomings as a cis white man, and more interested in our perception of this character’s gender. Here is a man who says he wants to be a woman, who dresses up like a woman to get fucked, and who then silences these feelings by turning to religion. Is he a man with a fetish or a trans woman fighting her deepest held desires?
Within this question holds a binary, a binary pushed forward by cis straight doctors and researchers — most notably Harry Benjamin — throughout the 20th century. Men like Benjamin approached transgender medicine on a scale of fuckability. Would I fuck this woman? Would she fuck me? True transsexual. Does she look too masculine? Is she a lesbian? Must be a fetishist. While heterosexuality — at the time, referred to as homosexuality — is no longer a requirement for medical transition, this binary has stuck around among the rightwing and among trans people. No trans girl wants to be associated with a man like Sam Rockwell’s character — especially those who have been one of his “ladyboys” — so it’s easier to create rules of exclusion.
“Okay but what’s not going to be AGP on me?” Adeline (Aoife Josie Clements) pleads in Louise Weard’s 2024 film Castration Movie Part 1.
“If I wear something cute, it’s AGP because it’s like anime schoolgirl fantasy. If I wear something that’s like not cute at all and is just trying to blend in it’s AGP because I’m not going feminine— What’s not going to be AGP at this point?”
“Anything but this,” Weard’s character Michaela says with a laugh.
In this scene and throughout the first part of Weard’s lo-fi epic, Michaela acts as the wise transsexual mentor to newer-to-transition Adeline. For all her cruelty, for all her reinforcement of self-destructive online speak, Michaela expresses a real tenderness toward Adeline. Good friend and bad friend is another false binary.
But Castration Movie Part 1 doesn’t start with Michaela or Adeline’s story — it starts with Turner (Noah Baker). The first hour and a half of this four-and-a-half-hour first part follows the most annoying PA on a film set as he spirals into becoming an incel. He pitches his coworkers bad movie ideas, he makes excuses to not hang out with his bisexual girlfriend, and he scrolls incel message boards, supposedly to make fun of them.
Early in this section, we observe Turner’s lack of sexual desire toward his girlfriend, and it feels like Weard is playing with her audience’s perception of a trans story. Awkward boy with sexual hangups? I’ve read Nevada. This must be a trans girl about to come out! Instead, Turner falls further and further into the pits of modern manhood. After his girlfriend breaks up with him, he shows up to her apartment unannounced, barges into her room where she’s making out with a girl, and has a meltdown as he refuses to leave. That night, he posts on one of his “joke” message boards with total sincerity. The incel transformation has been completed.
My first thought: How horrifying that I saw a horrible, anti-social man on-screen and thought he must be a trans girl.
My second thought: Why does my mind play into those tropes when that wasn’t even my experience? I had sexual hangups, I wasn’t as outgoing, but I was sociable and thoughtful even before transition.
My third thought: Why did I just feel the need to clarify to myself, and now to you the reader, that I was different from trans girls who were awkward before coming out?
When we meet Michaela, she’s telling her cis straight male roommate that he should transition. She calls him pathetic and explains that women have an easier time getting people to have sex with them. She quotes the term “transmaxing” from an incel board, and it’s not clear if she’s joking. “You can pull transbians, you can pull cis lesbians, and you can pull straight guys,” she continues. Her roommate insists he doesn’t want to hook up with men and he doesn’t want to be a woman. Michaela doesn’t relent. In the background, Adeline grows more and more uncomfortable. Weard lets this scene go on and on until Michaela begins to exclaim, “We’re having fun!” They most definitely are not.
This first half of Castration Movie is subtitled: The fear of having no one to hold at the end of the world. And as we follow Michaela, we’ll learn that, despite telling her roommate she “fucks all the time,” that fear is her own. Like Turner in chapter one, chapter two concludes with Michaela showing up at someone’s house unannounced. It’s not her ex-girlfriend; it’s her current boyfriend, and she doesn’t let herself in, she knocks. But the boyfriend quickly confirms her suspicions that the relationship is over and she begins to beg. She understands it’s over, but she can’t handle the rejection. She just wants him to fuck her one last time. She gets on her knees and begs. This happens right after she’s yelled at another man for not letting her suck his dick. So much for transmaxing.
While Turner’s confrontation with his ex is scary, Michaela’s is just sad. Is that because Turner is a man encroaching on a woman and Michaela is a woman encroaching on a man? Turner and Michaela both refuse to accept their partners ending a relationship, they’re both selfish and arrogant, they both read the incel message boards as a joke. Is the difference between them to be found in some sort of GLAAD-approved idea of Michaela’s innate womanhood? Or is it simply how they’re presenting in this moment and the lived experiences they have in the world?
In recent years, film and television have tried to prove the womanhood of trans girls by crafting perfect victims. But nothing has worked better than Weard’s portrayal of the unique ways we can suck. Except identity, appearance, and lived experience are all mutable. What if Turner started “transmaxing”? What if Turner realized he wanted to dress up like a woman and get fucked? Then what?
The most I’ve ever felt fetishized was with another trans girl, someone newer to transition who made me feel reduced to the transness of my body. The first close trans girl friend I ever had was often cruel, made me feel worthless, and touched me in ways that revealed her entitlement. Both of these relationships felt unique in their betrayal. How could people in my own community treat me this way?
Now I wonder if it was less about betrayal and more about my own personal shame. I didn’t want to be associated with these trans women who acted this way, who acted like… men. Nevermind that my worst experiences in dating and friendship have been with cis women. It’s one thing to be used by someone outside your group, another to receive confirmation that the judgments people pass on your own group can sometimes be true. We reject Turner and we reject people like Sam Rockwell’s character on The White Lotus not because they’re definitely not trans but because, if they were, it’d make us look bad.
Torrey Peters’ new fiction collection Stag Dance is all about the fluidity of trans and cis identities. The last novella The Masker — originally self-published in 2016 — is about a young sissy named Krys who goes to Las Vegas for a “trans feminine” event. There, she meets a trans woman named Sally, an ex-DEA agent as loyal to trans respectability as she once was to the U.S. government. Sally is okay associating with crossdressers — as long as she can create clear binaries between the two communities — but she insists The Masker shouldn’t be allowed. He’s a crossdresser who attends the events in a fetish mask of a female face. She calls him a pervert and references The Silence of the Lambs.
Sally wants to mentor Krys, but Krys doesn’t want to be like Sally. She judges Sally’s plastic surgery, the ways Krys still perceives her to be man-ish, her tendency to assert her transness in any given space. Krys is far more interested in Felix, a suave man who picks her up at the blackjack table. That is, until Sally swoops in to reveal that Felix is actually The Masker. “At least I can take my masks off,” Felix fires back at Sally. “You’re botched plastic surgery Barbie forever.”
As Krys returns to Sally’s wing, her distaste for the older woman grows. She doesn’t want to become this. She just wants to dress like a girl, feel pretty, and get fucked. That’s why when Felix knocks on her door, she lets him in. Actually, she lets him in because he calls her Princess.
She plans to have sex with Felix during the day and continue as Sally’s good little trans pupil at night. But then Sally starts talking about Krys’ parents, about Krys coming out, about letting Sally talk to Krys’ parents for her. Krys is horrified at the thought of being yanked out of the closet, at being associated with Sally. The choice between Sally’s full-time life and Felix’s clandestine fetish becomes clear. But the novella ends with Krys having to convince herself that hooking up with Felix while he’s masked is something she wants. She has to convince herself that staying closeted and accepting her transness as merely a fetish is something she wants too.
This is the problem with binaries. To decide that Sally is trans and Felix is not is to declare that to be trans is to be like Sally. But there are as many ways to be trans as there are to not be trans as there are to be everything in between. Krys condemns herself to be used by this man because she decides it’s the better of her two options. Maybe one day she’ll learn there’s a third option and a fourth and even a fifth.
While The White Lotus conflated gender and race with a tired 2005 era South Park approach, Castration Movie and Stag Dance are committed to their whiteness. This could be as simple as Weard and Peters understanding the limits of their trans perspective, but I think there’s something deeper about the white transsexual experience they portray. Every minority group experiences the unfair burden of their community’s actions. Whenever there’s a mass shooting, many people’s first thought and prayer is that it was carried out by a cis white man. It’s yet another form of dehumanization — rather than being allowed our individuality, we’re made to represent a whole. For the white people of Castration Movie and The Masker, their trans identity is their first experience with this sort of group blame.
Trans mentorship can be a beautiful and essential aspect to trans friendship and make the early transition years so much easier. But often the way Michaela and Sally act feels less like mentorship and more like turning these young trans women into copies of themselves. Michaela’s cruelty toward Adeline is a result of her need to turn Adeline into someone she can be associated with. Her insistence that trans women are the most fuckable is an insistence that she is the most fuckable.
White queer people who form insular communities of a new conformity aren’t just holding onto privilege — they’re also falling victim to the fallacy imposed by cis straight people that says everyone with this identity must be the same. Does Sally hate The Masker only because she finds his approach to gender grotesque? Or is it also because he’s Argentinian and that makes him just far enough from whiteness to disrupt the homogeneity of the group?
It doesn’t matter if Sam Rockwell’s character or even Turner is trans, because their transness wouldn’t change my desire to not be around them. Michaela and Sally are definitely trans, and I wouldn’t want to be around either of them. I meet trans people all the time who I don’t like, and my understanding of our shared experience doesn’t mean nearly as much as that same understanding with the trans people I love.
Trans is not a value judgement. It’s just a word that allows some of us to better describe our experience of the world. It’s an invitation for solidarity, but it’s not a demand. After all, does our shared humanness not offer the same opportunity for empathy and connection, embarrassment and shame? So let anyone be trans and anyone not be trans. Let that mean to them whatever it means to them. Choose curiosity over conformity. And remember: There’s more than one way to get trapped by respectability.
Castration Movie Part 1 and Stag Dance are now both available.
