Trans Universe

“Steady boy. Just keep telling yourself you’re a girl.” - “I’m a girl…I’m a girl…I’m a girl.”

“Hormones are hormones. Yours and mine just happen to come in purple little pills.”

“I don’t want IT in my house.”

“When a straight man puts on a dress and goes on a sexual kick he is a transvestite. When a man is a woman trapped in a man’s body and has a little operation he is a transsexual. When a gay man has way too much fashion sense for one gender he is a drag queen.”

“I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.”

“Well, a boy’s best friend is his mother.”

“Attica! Attica!”

“You know, I used to feel that way too until I found out that Alexander the Great was a fag. Talk about gays in the military!”

“I’m not a fucking drag queen.”

“I was a better man with you, as a woman, than I ever was with a woman, as a man. Know what I mean? I just gotta learn to do it without the dress.”

(The Break)

Those were lines from various movies that all had one thing in common . . . they had a transgender element to each of them. With the 80th Annual Academy Awards show on Sunday, February 24, 2008, my mind began thinking about all the films where a transgender person played an important part. My friends and I tried to put together a list, but I found a web site that has hundreds of films listed, but most had just brief transgender moments in them. It’s called JK’s Transgender Movie Guide. If you look at the list of the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Films of All Time, you will find five transgender-related films on that list. They include “Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Cabaret, Tootsie” and “Some Like it Hot.”

As to be expected with how society views transgender people in general, some of the characters appeared as either unbalanced or just plane evil, like in “Psycho, Silence of the Lambs” and “Freebee and the Bean.” Some movies played it for laughs, like “Some Like it Hot, White Chicks, The Birdcage” and “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar.” While others showed the stark reality of life as a transgender person, like in “The Crying Game, Boys Don’t Cry, Paris is Burning, Soldier’s Girl” and “Southern Comfort.” And, in both versions of the movies “The Longest Yard” they featured transgender prisoners who played cheerleaders for the team.

Over the years, some rather famous male actors have spent time in front of the camera portraying women. The list includes Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in “Some Like it Hot,” Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie,” Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo in “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar,” Nathan Lane and Gene Hackman in “The Birdcage,” John Lithgow in “The World According To Garp” and recently, Robert DeNiro in “Stardust.” Hell, Arnold Schwarzenegger donned a dress in “Total Recall” to escape the authorities and was pregnant in “Junior.” Hey, that’s switching gender roles, too.

Women actors have also played gender variant roles in the cinema. Hilary Swank played a convincing Brandon Teena in “Boys Don’t Cry,” Barbara Streisand played Anshel in “Yentl,” Felicity Huffman played Bree in “Transamerica,” Linda Hunt as Billy Kwan in “The Year of Living Dangerously” and Julie Andrews played the title role in “Victor Victoria.”

Why would anyone think that transgender-related films would be important to transgender people? The world gets a snapshot of any minority when they are depicted in films. Sidney Poitier played strong characters in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “In the Heat of the Night,” showing white America an African American man they had never seen before. In the movie “Little Big Man,” director Arthur Penn showed us Native Americans in a more positive light, including a transgender character. And, everyone can easily understand the importance “Brokeback Mountain” was for the gay community. The transgender community has had our important films over the years as well.

In my opinion, the strongest films that have come out showing transgender people in a good light are films like “Different For Girls, Better Than Chocolate, Adventures of Sebastian Cole, Normal” and “Transamerica.” I’m sure there are others that also did a good job.

The most tragic transgender films I have seen were “Southern Comfort, Boys Don’t Cry” and “Soldier’s Girl.” I personally know some of the people in “Southern Comfort” and I am friends with Calpernia Addams, the person “Soldier’s Girl” was based on. These three films made me cry uncontrollably and if I see them today, I will still cry.

There is one category of transgender films that seems to be Hollywood’s primary reason to get famous stars to put on a dress. The plot for these movies is a situation where a man has to dress as a woman in order to escape danger, or to accomplish something they cannot otherwise do as a man. Films like “Some Like it Hot, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Juwanna Man” and “White Chicks” fall into this category. “Yentl” has the same plot, but the roles are reverse.

One actor has the distinction of staring in five films that have a transgender element in them. He is Robin Williams. He actually dresses as a woman in “Mrs. Doubtfire,” but he is also in “Dead Again, To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar, The World According to Garp” and “The Birdcage.” So, the Best Actor Award goes to . . . Robin Williams!

I mentioned three films that we would rather forget about because of their negative depletion of transgender people, but “Psycho” and “Silence of the Lambs” are consider two of the best films ever made, as stated earlier. Others we would soon want to forget are movies like “Glen or Glenda?” and “Nuns on the Run.”

In several of the films, the primary transgender theme has to do with drag queens. Some of the better ones are “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar, The Birdcage, Wigstock, La Cage aux Folles, Midnight In The Garden Of Good and Evil, Flawless” and “Victor Victoria.”

Science fiction films that have a transgender connection are “Pitch Black” and “Stargate,” as do two animated films, “Shrek 2” and “Mulan.” Musicals include both “Hairsprays, Cabaret, Moulin Rouge” and or course, the classic of all classics, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

As time goes on, we will see more and more films that have a positive transgender character, like Bree in “Transamerica.” What I would like to see one day is a major motion picture that not only has transgender people as the stars, but also is produced and directed by transgender people. I haven’t won the lottery, yet.