I believe in art for art’s sake.
—E.M. Forster

Vaginoplasty!
—E.M.ilia Pérez

Like many, I learned about transness from film and television. Movies like Ace Ventura and The 40-Year-Old Virgin told me we should be mocked. Movies like Dressed to Kill and The Silence of the Lambs told me we should be feared. Movies like Dallas Buyers Club and The Danish Girl told me we should be pitied. And then, like lightning to the bolts on the side of my head, shows like Transparent and Sense8 told me we could be human.

After coming out of the closet, I continued to make sense of myself through the movies and TV shows I watched. I began to write media criticism and these early writings on Tumblr — and even some of my earliest published writing — fell into the kind of analysis that became mainstream in the 2010s. As we attempted to make sense of the inequities of the industry, art became a math problem. Do two female characters speak to each other about something other than a man? How many people of color speak in the Harry Potter movies? Can a dyke who uses she/her pronouns play a nonbinary person who uses they/them?

Almost six years ago, I wrote that last one, and I’m not here to criticize those questions being asked at those times. However, I would like to suggest that in 2024, as the streaming bubble bursts, Trump is re-elected, and the era of #representation comes to a close, that it’s time to move on.

If your question about a work of art is whether or not it’s offensive, you’re asking the wrong question.

Jacques Audiard’s Cannes winner Emilia Pérez is now streaming on Netflix. The initial wave of rave reviews predominantly from cis people has given way to a backlash from many trans viewers who are aghast that a movie with Oscar buzz would be this seemingly backward in its views of gender.

I reviewed the film in September out of TIFF. In this review, as trans critic Mey Rude pointed out in her defense of the film, I listed all of the tropes the film contains. But I also, notably, followed that up by stating: I’m not offended by anything on that list. It’s not about offense or something being not allowed. It’s that it’s boring.

Out of Cannes, trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón was praised and the film was categorized as Good. Now that more people are watching, it’s being categorized as Bad. Good meant positive for trans representation and Bad means offensive and harmful. These aren’t artistic judgments — they’re moral judgments.

As a community supposedly committed to breaking down binaries, I would like to plead that we let this framing go. Very few movies are Bad or Good, Offensive or Inoffensive, Positive or Harmful.

In their piece titled, ‘Emilia Pérez’ is Not Good Trans Representation, GLAAD recommends people seek out the documentary Disclosure to learn more about trans representation and harmful tropes. But one of the best parts of that documentary is how nearly every piece of media discussed has at least one trans person who found admiration for and connection with something that other people found damaging.

To ignore the variety of reactions people can have to art — as a work of ART, as well as a work of representation — does a disservice to what is deemed Good, as well as what is deemed Bad. As GLAAD states in that same piece, the recent Netflix documentary Will and Harper appears to be good counterprogramming since it’s a trans woman telling her own story. But to label that film Good is to ignore that it was also made largely by and for cis people and, like all art, is deserving of critique. To label that film Good is to end any discussion of it as a complicated, interesting work beyond its Positive Representation.

While Hollywood may continue to exclude us from their biggest films, the cultural landscape on-screen and off calls for a change in how our art is discussed.

No one is learning about trans people from Oscar-winning movies anymore. The Republican Party just spent around $40 million in anti-trans ads to help them win big in the recent election. The supposedly liberal New York Times regularly platforms uneducated writers who like to speculate about how trans people have gone too far only for those pieces to be cited for anti-trans legislation and anti-trans court cases. More people than ever know a trans person or know someone who knows a trans person or at least know about Laverne Cox, Elliot Page, and Caitlyn Jenner. We may continue to be at the margins in terms of our rights, but we are no longer at the margins in terms of visibility.

The stories told on-screen can work to counteract or support the rise in anti-trans sentiments, but no one movie — especially a 2+ hour opera largely in Spanish — is going to impact culture like 1992’s good-other-than-its-marketing The Crying Game. We have bigger concerns now than the latest movie garnering Oscar buzz. And one of those concerns is how this conservative backslide will impact artistic expression.

I’m interested in discussing art through a political lens, but only if we move beyond deeming work as Bad and instead go deeper in our analysis. Emilia Pérez has been compared to the work of Pedro Almódovar, a comparison I think is totally undeserved artistically, but is interesting when thinking about politics.

Almódovar’s work has long contained transgressive narratives that could be deemed Bad by many modern metrics. Queer people are often murderers, sexual assault is often treated as a joke, and even The Skin I Live in adopts the Emilia Pérez approach to gender affirming care where you go to sleep in one body and a master surgeon allows you to wake up in another. And yet, I would argue Almódovar is one of our sharpest political filmmakers. The ways his films have pushed boundaries — especially his early work in post-Franco Spain — was meant to cause discomfort, to reclaim stereotypes around queerness, and to disregard conservative values for a debaucherous celebration of freedom.

If any 2024 trans film deserves the Almódovar comparison it’s Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions. Despite being released by buzz-worthy distributor Neon, Hammel’s film has been far less discussed than other trans films deemed either Good (I Saw the TV Glow) or Bad (Emilia Pérez). Maybe that’s because it’s not a transition story or because it has less famous actors, but I also think it’s because it’s more difficult to categorize by these outdated metrics. It’s a movie about flawed people hurting themselves and others told with a cinematic poetry one might not expect from a low-budget Brooklyn-set indie.

There are movies I love that can still be discussed in the tired way we tend to discuss trans art, but Stress Positions is a movie I love that seems impervious to that treatment. It’s the kind of trans film I want to see more. I know trans people who also loved it and I know trans people who disliked it and nowhere have I seen a pressure to Support Its Good Representation or Cancel Its Dangerous Harm. It’s a movie, it’s a work of art, and its quality cannot be reduced to a tomato or a thumb or a headline.

I understand trans people responding to the backslide in trans acceptance with our own backslide in reaction. I implore you to resist that impulse.

As artists and audiences, we can be thoughtful about the politics and messaging of work without reducing the art or turning on each other for having different opinions. I believe art can change the world, but I also believe that’s not limited to the few works that create wide-spread tangible transformation. When I witness a movie that makes me think, that makes me feel, that makes me fall in love with this medium all over again, that changes my life. For a day, for a month, for a year, or beyond, it changes my life. That’s what I want queer people to have more than work that does or does not properly educate a cis populace.

We can critique a movie like Emilia Pérez for being regressive or trafficking in the same tired tropes. But we can also critique it for having flat characters, an inconsistent style, and a soundtrack that makes the La La Land guys seem like Sondheim. Or we can praise the movie for the reasons people seem to be praising it! Because, at the end of the day, opinions are not good or bad, right or wrong, cis or trans.

I’m less interested in whether or not someone likes a movie — artistically or politically — and more interested in why they feel the way they do. Then we can discuss, we can argue, we can understand or not understand. We can keep fighting for more of the art we want to see in this fucked up world. We can create.

In the debate between art for art’s sake and art as social change, my stance is emphatic: I’m nonbinary.

You can now watch Emilia Pérez on Netflix.

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