I Saw the T-Rex Glow: Tammy and the T-Rex, 30 Years Later

On December 21, an unsung masterpiece of queer cinema turned 30, and I’ll be damned if I let that go unnoticed. Yes, the 90s sublime comedy-horror-romance, Tammy and the T-Rex, is now thirty, flirty, and thriving.

Tammy and the T-Rex might have the best plot synopsis of all time. High school himbo jock Michael (Paul Walker) is kidnapped by his girlfriend’s (Denise Richards) evil ex-boyfriend and fed to a pack of hungry lions in a nearby big cat sanctuary. Meanwhile, a mad scientist (Terry Kiser) is in search of a human brain to power his newest invention, a giant robotic T-Rex. Luckily, Michael’s freshly mauled corpse has just arrived in the town morgue and his brain is in remarkably usable condition. Understandably, Michael’s consciousness isn’t exactly thrilled to wake up inside the body of a mechanical dinosaur and he sets out on a bloody quest for vengeance. It’s up to Tammy and her gay best friend Byron (Theo Forsett) to find a way to get Michael back to normal before his new saurian body is destroyed or falls into the wrong hands.

If you aren’t sold after reading that synopsis, I don’t know what to tell you. Hopefully, you’re like me and are a gay Dinosaur Nerd™ with a soft spot for schlocky direct-to-VHS 90s cinema, in which case I’m delighted to tell you Tammy and the T-Rex can be watched in all its gory glory on Shudder, which proudly includes it on its list of queer horror films. And while it may earn its place on that list for featuring a gay character in a supporting role, I’d argue that Tammy and the T-Rex is an intrinsically queer film that asks, no, demands deeper analysis.

According to his own account, director Stewart Raffill (who is maybe best known for directing the infamous ET knockoff Mac and Me) wrote, directed, and produced the film in the span of two weeks to take advantage of the lifesize animatronic dinosaur used to create the titular tyrannosaurus before it was shipped out of the country. Given the film’s rushed production, it’s honestly impressive just how coherent of a film Tammy and the T-Rex is, which isn’t to say that it isn’t weird (and gay) as hell. The plot has a clear three act structure, but its breakneck twists and turns require that you question little and accept the unexpected. (Don’t ask why our villainous mad scientist wants to put Paul Walker’s brain inside a robot dinosaur, for example. You won’t get an answer.)

Tonally, Tammy and the T-Rex can’t decide if it’s a raunchy teen romcom or a hyper gory robot-dinosaur exploitation movie, but it somehow manages to do both, often at the same time. The costuming is also filled with all kinds of flashy, high camp looks. I’m particularly a fan of the floral bucket hat Tammy wears to go visit her recently deceased boyfriend in the hospital and the leopard print leotard Helga, the mad scientist’s main henchwoman, spends much of the final act in. Tammy and the T-Rex is the kind of flashy, bizarre film that practically demands a Heathers-style staged musical adaptation, and we haven’t even really talked about the queer stuff yet.

For functionally filling the role of Gay Best Friend in a low budget 90s film, Byron comes across as a surprisingly multidimensional character who is given a large amount of agency and focus in the story. Sure, the fact that he’s gay is loudly announced pretty much the second he walks onto screen, but Tammy and the T-Rex never treats Byron’s sexuality as the butt of the joke. There are plenty of moments where Byron playfully flirts with men or speaks in homoerotic innuendo, but Raffill, for all his many faults, never frames Byron himself as the joke. Our hero Michael, before and after his transformation into a mechanical prehistoric beast, treats Byron with a comfortable affection and even goes out of his way to ensure his safety. He even gets his own moments of heroism, particularly in the too long car chase that makes up the film’s climax. Maybe my bar is very low, but Byron’s characterization feels surprisingly progressive and normalized for a film of this sort.

While a surface-level queer reading of Tammy and the T-Rex may stop here, I’d argue there is a lot more bubbling beneath. For me, Tammy and the T-Rex feels inescapably like a film about gender, dysphoria, and a relationship struggling to find a path forward amid massive, unforeseen changes. Prior to his nonconsensual brain transplant, Michael is a well liked player on his high school football team, but he doesn’t really fit into the archetypical mold we typically see for these sorts of characters. He’s soft-spoken, kind, and wears so many crop tops that you’d think you were watching Sleepaway Camp. Michael is also almost immediately put into contrast against Tammy’s abusive ex, Billy, who dresses in black leather outfits, shouts every other line, and is prone to physical violence. For most of the time we know Michael in human form, he’s hounded by Billy and his gang of friends, which ultimately culminates in his murder-via-lion. If Michael is meant to represent a different kind of masculinity, it’s one very quickly threatened with violence and the fact that Tammy would choose this over Billy’s stereotypical badboy behavior unbalances high school gender norms.

And then of course, post-lion-mauling, Michael wakes up in the body of a mechanical tyrannosaurus. While Michael-Rex is suitably pissed and does take out his violent revenge on both his murderers and those responsible for his transformation, he spends just as much time forlornly looking at himself in the mirror or gazing sadly at his tiny new arms. A lesser film would’ve had Michael transform into a mindless killing machine, but Tammy and the T-Rex wants us to remember there is a good person inside this robot, frequently reminding us of the discomfort and sadness that comes with his sudden change. Raffill even has Michael’s revenge spree occur relatively early on into the film’s second act, leaving his dinos-phoria as the primary conflict as we move into the film’s climax and conclusion.

Once Michael manages to convince Tammy and Byron that it is in fact him inside the dinosaur that’s been tearing through the SoCal suburbs, our trio of protagonists rush into action to change him back. However, it becomes clear that Michael’s body is, well, not really in the position to accept new brains. There’s no way for Michael to return to his old self. So, in my personal favorite sequence in the movie, Tammy and Byron break into the local morgue and one-by-one present Michael-Rex with various new potential bodies to inhabit. While both Tammy and Byron have their own opinions on what form would be best for Michael, they agree it’s ultimately up to him to decide what his new body will be. Michael turns down every male body he’s presented with but spends the most time deliberating on the only woman he’s shown. While Tammy makes it clear this wouldn’t be her preference, Byron encourages her and Michael, noting they “could be like three sisters.” Michael does eventually turn down the woman’s body, but the question remains open, particularly because the arrival of the local police forces the trio to abandon their body-snatching quest before a solution is found.

It’s hard to read thematic intentionality into much of any of the story choices in Tammy and the T-Rex, but the fact that Michael is even open to the possibility of changing sex feels significant. I won’t spoil the absolutely bonkers conclusion to this film, but I will say that the question of Michael’s body and even identity is given a far from clear-cut answer. A trans reading of Michael and for the film is far from a reach and, if anything, feels like a missing subtext that helps tie much of the movie’s chaos together. (If we do ever get that stage adaptation, I’d argue for just making this full-on text — if not for the thematic weight of it all, then for the sheer amount of trans and testosterone related puns you could write from “T-Rex.”)

To me, the most endearing aspect of this storyline and the movie as a whole is the loyal and playful love affair Tammy and Michael maintain throughout the film. The two display an uncomplicated affection for one another that transcends form. I can’t help but be won over by the weird couple in-joke the two share that Michael has a habit of biting the heads off flowers. Tammy is just as in love with a T-Rex as she is with a boy, and while Tammy makes it clear she’d rather Michael not become a girl, she doesn’t fully discourage him from this option either. She quite clearly loves Michael for Michael, and who’s to say if that might not carry over should he decide to transition genders instead of species? Even still, if Tammy isn’t able to find a romantic or sexual future for the two of them post-transition, she loves Michael enough to support him and let him make his own decisions. Yes, I’m projecting here, but not by much!

So please, do consider giving this off-kilter, headscratcher of a film a watch this week. Celebrate its 30th in style and appreciate it for the unexpectedly affirming trans romance that it is. Or, just smoke a joint and tune in to watch Denise Richards in a red dress ride around on a robot dinosaur that bites the heads off people. That’s a good enough reason, too.

Disney+ Cancels First Star Wars Show Made by a Lesbian — Here’s Why That SUCKS

It feels like we’ve been here before… The latest Star Wars drops. It’s new, maybe a tad more challenging than your standard adventure in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, and happens to center women and POC characters. A population of online nerds lose their collective shit as a result of that last bit. Sure, they may claim that they have legitimate criticisms, but the hate seems pretty damn loud to just be the usual frustration with a flawed franchise entry. Anyways, Lucasfilm (and their Sith Masters, the Walt Disney Corporation) panic and course correct, pivoting to a safe and familiar follow up, which ends up sucking major Bantha Poodoo.

Anyways, word on the street this week is that Lucasfilm has pulled the plug on The Acolyte, just a little over a month after its first (and now only) season concluded. It’s a beyond disappointing decision not only for fans of the series and its characters, but also for how it speaks to the way major corporations like Disney decide what sort of stories they want to tell. Regardless of how you shake it, the Star Wars show that was produced by a lesbian, had a nonbinary lead and a cast of queer and POC performers, and a narrative that didn’t rely solely on nostalgia and brand recognition was given the axe. And that just sucks.

While director Leslye Headland purposefully wrote The Acolyte to comfortably sit as a single season narrative if it had to, the finale hinted at all manner of interesting ideas down the road and was decidedly open-ended in how it concluded most of its major character arcs. Amandla Stenberg’s Osha, former Jedi and one of our two twin leads, discovered the truth about the Jedi’s involvement in her family’s death and turned against her master, choking him to death and joining forces with the unnamed hunky Sith Lord played by Manny Jacinto. Meanwhile, Osha’s formerly villainous twin Mae (also Stenberg) had her memories erased but still found herself recruited by a rogue Jedi to hunt her sister and her new master down. Oh, and a certain super-secret legendary Sith may be keeping an eye on things. The potential for fun and thought-provoking stories is there, and if the first season of The Acolyte succeeded at anything (besides utterly badass lightsaber duels) it was in getting its audience to challenge and reconsider their preconceived notions of a series nearing 50 years old. But, I guess we’re not getting that now.

It’s almost impossible not to read this decision as a response to the overblown and bigoted reaction this series received from the worst corners of the internet. Review bombed to hell and back from the moment its first trailer dropped, the prejudice directed at The Acolyte never appeared remotely rational or proportional to the supposed sins the series had committed. Some of the infamous (and unbelievably mind numbing) complaints hurled at the series concerned a fire on a spaceship and the birthday for that one Jedi whose head kinda looks like a dick. This isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate criticisms to make about The Acolyte as a series, particularly in regard to its overall narrative pacing and occasionally clunky direction, but I could make the same observation about pretty much every single one of Disney+’s shows, Star Wars or not. The Acolyte was a good, sometimes great, show that was just starting to find its footing by the time its eight-episode season reached its end. It was by no means the sort of catastrophe that the 18% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes would lead you to believe.

The far right trolls of the Internet are already celebrating this decision. Elon Musk even responded to a post covering the cancellation with “Go ____, Go ____” (or “Go Woke, Go Broke” if you aren’t familiar with the kind of lingo that fascist billionaires are using nowadays). Similarly, Amandla Stenberg’s socials have been flooded with comments smugly deriding them for The Acolyte’s cancellation. Regardless of whether the far right backlash to the series played a role in Disney/Lucasfilm’s decision, the message has been received loud and clear by the worst sectors of the fandom. The bigoted assholes think they’ve won, and it sets a scary precedent for what’s to follow.

The only real behind-the-scenes factor I could see playing a role in The Acolyte’s cancellation is its absolutely absurd $22 million per episode budget. The Acolyte is a good-looking show. I love its practical sets, creature effects, and cinematic action sequences, but I for the life of me cannot figure out where that kind of money could be going. It’s not like each installment featured massive effects-heavy set pieces. House of the Dragon has CGI giant fire-breathing reptiles as regular cast members and somehow manages to cost less. Maybe some behind-the-scenes logistics called for that kind of money, but the reasoning escapes me.

Even still, there’s nothing to say that The Acolyte couldn’t have continued with a reduced budget for its second season. I, and many other fans for that matter, would have loved to see a smaller scale continuation that focused on our returning cast of characters and their personal drama over more intergalactic stakes. Sure, if we could get more stellar lightsaber duels like the ones in the series’ standout fifth episode and its finale, that would be wonderful, but I can’t imagine that good fight choreography is racking up multimillion dollar bills.

The Acolyte’s cancellation also can’t help but feel like the continuation of a bad streaming habit of giving shows the axe after a single season. Netflix has become infamous for canceling new series within a few weeks after the debut of their first season. While these are often expensive productions and it’s understandable that a company may want to hedge its bets, the skittishness about giving a show any kind of long-term lifespan feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. How often do you find yourself recommending shows under the caveat that the first season is a little bumpy? It sometimes takes a year or two for a creative team to gain their footing and signs of promise or potential deserve a chance to blossom into full on success. Two of the most beloved additions to the Star Wars canon — the animated shows The Clone Wars and Rebels — both debuted to relatively bumpy and divisive first seasons but went on to become hits that (for better and for worse) are defining parts of the franchise’s long-term narrative. New ideas take time to settle, and if the gradual decline in viewership for Disney+’s Star Wars shows is any indication, a little bit of fresh air is desperately needed.

Let me go on a bit of a tangent. As you’ve no likely guessed by now, I’m kind of a Star Wars nerd. I also happen to teach undergraduate students. Naturally, my love for lightsabers and X-Wings tends to come up in classroom conversation. One trend that’s taken me off guard is that my student’s favorite Star Wars film has far and away been the 2005 prequel trilogy installment, Revenge of the Sith. This always struck me as odd considering that most of my students were in diapers at the time of the movie’s release. I saw Revenge of the Sith in theaters as a 12 year old, presumably the prime age for nostalgia, and I’ve always considered it to be more or less okay, which is a sentiment echoed by most others my age. So why is it that Gen Z really seems to love this movie in particular (especially when there are like at least four better Star Wars movies out there)? Well, it’s because of The Clone Wars, the animated spinoff show that ran from 2008-2014 and covered the span of time between the second and third installments of the prequel trilogy. While these fans were too young to catch George Lucas’s big operatic space tragedy in theaters, they were exactly the right age to get caught up in the animated adventures of Anakin Skywalker and his plucky padawan, Ahsoka Tano, on Cartoon Network. And Revenge of the Sith just so happens to be the Star Wars movie that most resembles The Clone Wars in both visuals and story. A new generation of fans was brought into this universe by watching a very weird and at times controversial show that was pretty much only able to survive its regular cycles of backlash because it was practically financed in its entirety by George Lucas’s bottomless money pit.

I don’t see how Star Wars or really any of these giant pop culture mega-franchises will allow itself to develop that kind of audience again if they continue to direct their attention so insularly and skittishly. Sure, The Mandalorian may have been a pop culture juggernaut, but the series quickly devolved into a parade of expanded universe cameos and seems more than comfortable to let its previously endearing main characters transform into empty brand names that exist to perpetuate a recognizable status quo. It’s headache-inducing that Ahsoka, a tepidly received show that serves as a direct spin-off to three separate series (two of which are animated), was renewed for a second season while a show that requires little to no barrier to entry like The Acolyte is given the axe. I have no idea how that’s sustainable. I have no idea who wants that. I’m the sort of girl who has watched every one of these damn things and I can barely get myself to care about The Mandalorian movie or what other self-cannibalizing show that Disney+ is about to spew out at me in six months’ time.

Lucasfilm has once again told us that when faced with a tough decision, it will bow to the angry voices of racists, misogynists, and homophobes, even if that means abandoning exciting new stories. Their choice is depressing, cynical, and predictable, like so much of the content that they insist on creating. At least, for one summer, we had a Star Wars show made by a lesbian, and it was pretty dang good.

In Its Penultimate Episode, ‘The Acolyte’ Positions the Jedi Order as Colonizers

First off, I’d like to give Leslye Headland a quick apology. Apparently, we shouldn’t be calling the all women Force coven in The Acolyte lesbian space witches. My bad. “Lesbian space witch” is just a really fun thing to say. If we’re just supposed to call them a “matriarchal coven of emotionally close magical women,” I can roll with that.

Regardless of what we’re supposed to call Mother Aniseya and her followers, they’re a major part of the penultimate episode of The Acolyte. After returning to the present for three weeks (including an outstanding fifth chapter that paired 20 minutes of the best lightsaber action Star Wars has seen in decades with brutal Red Wedding-style plot twists), Headland finally pulls back the curtain to reveal the truth behind the traumatic events that forever altered Osha and Mae’s childhoods.

“Destiny” telegraphed pretty clearly that we were only seeing a very limited perspective of whatever happened on Brendok 16 years before the series’ start. In the episodes that followed, The Acolyte has seemingly gone out of its way to ask the viewer to consider how much we should trust Osha’s memories of these events. Was she simply missing important context about the fire that consumed her family home and the Jedi’s role in it? Or has she been made to believe a lie? Ever since Manny Jacinto’s swaggering Sith villain made his violent debut, The Acolyte has been signaling loudly that what actually happened to Osha on Brendok is an even murkier truth than we might have thought given Mae’s accusations that the Jedi have brainwashed her sister and Sol’s increasingly suspicious behavior.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say “Choice” bears the burden for much of the success of The Acolyte’s overall narrative. The violence that unfolded that night and the Jedi’s role in it sets off Mae’s present-day murder spree and was clearly traumatic enough to force two Jedi into exile and two others to maintain a decades-long coverup. There’s also just the simple, real-world fact that The Acolyte has spent two months teasing out this reveal and viewers have been getting justifiably antsy.

And “Choice” mostly manages to pull it off. While the events portrayed here don’t quite live up to the most nightmarish expectations and many of Kogonada’s clunky directorial decisions from “Destiny” are still present, “Choice” tells an unsettling and morally murky story about how a mostly well-meaning man inadvertently causes a violent catastrophe.

Perhaps the biggest reveal in “Choice” is that almost the entirety of the blame for the violence on Brendok rests on Jedi Master Sol’s shoulders. I remarked in my review of The Acolyte’s premiere that Lee Jung-Jae’s performance helped showcase a Jedi who was willing to let his compassion and care for others guide his decision making rather than adherence to dogmatic procedure or bureaucracy. Even “Choice’s” sister episode “Destiny” made sure to show how Sol’s patient and welcoming treatment of Osha was a key factor in her wanting to leave her family for the Order. Sure, previous episodes have hinted more and more that Sol might be a more flawed character than we previously believed, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how much “Choice” damns him. To be clear, “Choice” isn’t saying that Sol is an evil man, and this would have been an easy trap to fall into for a series that plays so openly with a binary understanding of morality. Instead, Sol’s arrogance, ignorance, and impatience leads him to make a series of flawed, if well intentioned, decisions that culminate in tragedy.

Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

“Choice” opens with Sol stationed on a thought-to-be-uninhabited world alongside present-day Jedi murder victims Indara, Torbin, and Kelnacca. The tedium of their mission, essentially a lengthy geological survey to determine why a formerly desolate planet now hosts an abundance of plant life, is interrupted when Sol stumbles upon a pair of twin girls wandering through the woods. In secret, he follows them back to their home and witnesses what he believes to be abuse and indoctrination by a coven of witches. Based on this partial knowledge, Sol determines that he must rescue one of the two sisters, Osha, and take her on as his padawan.

The anti-colonialist themes bubbling beneath the surface in “Destiny” become full on text in “Choice.” Through his role as a Jedi, Sol is able to enact on his misinformed and self-righteous feelings with, even in the best of circumstances, the intent of taking a young girl away from the only family and culture she has ever known. The parallels to real world Christian missionaries and the treatment of Indigenous cultures are clear. Even if someone believes they are doing good work in the name of what they believe to be holy, they are more than capable of causing irreparable harm to people they don’t and don’t want to understand.

Sol not only assumes the witch’s treatment of Osha is much more sinister than it actually is, but he also ignores the guidance of his fellow Jedi to emotionally manipulate her into joining the Order. The moments of empathy shown towards Osha in “Destiny” are revealed to be intentional professional oversteps with a predetermined outcome in mind. Sol has made up his mind about Osha and what he believes is right for her, regardless of her lived reality. This all leads to a failed rescue attempt led by Sol and Indara’s homesick padawan, Torbin, which quickly transforms into a massacre.

Some of what follows feels tragically inevitable. Misunderstanding her powers, Sol fatally stabs Mother Aniseya as she is trying to ferry herself and Mae away to safety. The witches retaliate by collectively possessing the Wookie Jedi, Kelnacca, who violently turns on his peers. Indara manages to free him from the spell but the effect of doing so seemingly kills the remainder of the coven. It’s a violent escalation of an unnecessary conflict and not far off from what many expected was at the heart of the Jedi’s secrets.

What shocks though is just how much Kogonada and Headland twist the knife of Sol’s culpability. In a crucial moment, Sol, despite his professed connection to Osha, isn’t even able to tell one twin from the other. Later, when faced with the difficult choice of trying to save both sisters or just one, Sol willingly decides to save Osha, letting Mae plumet to her apparent death. (A clear contradiction of what is shown in “Destiny” hinting that even more of Osha’s memory of that night might be incomplete or manipulated.)

Jedi Master Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, season one, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

Oddly enough it’s Carrie-Anne Moss’s Indara who stands as the voice of reason and ultimately compassion in “Choice.” Given she was Mae’s first victim and her relatively cold demeaner in “Destiny,” it seemed as if The Acolyte was setting her up to be one of the guiltiest parties in the tragedy on Brendok. However, while Indara mostly remains saddled to bureaucracy and procedure, she is regularly the one the check Sol’s impulses and encourage him to leave the twins and their coven alone. And even though she is ultimately the one to convince Sol to lie to Osha about the deaths of her family, her position ultimately comes from a place of empathy and compassion. Indara points out that Osha just lost her entire family in a single night, she shouldn’t also have her dream of becoming a Jedi crushed with the cruel reality of Sol’s mistakes.

We only have one episode of The Acolyte left and I’m honestly going to miss it. It undeniably has some rough edges, but I love it when Star Wars asks me think about its themes, characters, and mythology instead of just trying to show me a good time filled with recognizable iconography and spectacle. It’s a show that dares to make the viewer uncomfortable and to question their assumptions about some of the most storied concepts in contemporary pop culture and that’s pretty damn cool.

Gays in Space Updates:

• So, once again, I must report that there were no apparent queers in this episode. Aniseya and Korill still have what could be called a romantic relationship, but given that Leslye Headland doesn’t even want me to call them lesbian space witches, I’m going to assume that they aren’t.
• Abigail Thorn does appear here though! Well, she was also in “Destiny” but I forgot to talk about her then. And again, while her character isn’t textually trans, I like to think that this is an indication that the witches of Brendok have a more inclusive view of womanhood.
• Speaking of trans women! Jen Richards co-wrote this episode! Which is pretty cool, right?
• Also, because I didn’t get to talk about this a few weeks back when it happened, Dafne Keen mentioned in an interview that she believed her character, Jeckie Lon, had a crush on Osha and even hinted that this might be explored in future episodes. I have to think she was trolling given that Jeckie was killed off less than a week after she said this. Does it still count as bury your gays if your gay was never even confirmed to be gay? Who knows, but RIP little gay Jedi.

Did ‘The Acolyte’ Just Introduce a Coven of Lesbian Witches to the Star Wars Universe?

Earlier this week, a rumor started somewhere in the dark corners of nerd internet claiming that this week’s episode of The Acolyte was going to murder Star Wars forever. What exactly would deliver the final killing blow to this decades-old pop cultural behemoth was never exactly clear, but from what I could tell, the culprit was possibly going to be lesbian witches who would do something so gay with the Force that it would fundamentally break the canon of the beloved sci-fi fantasy soap opera. Unfortunately, The Acolyte’s third episode, “Destiny,” doesn’t kill Star Wars with the power of the homosexual agenda. In fact, it’s not even that gay. It’s just another pretty decent episode in a pretty good Star Wars show that has the potential to be a whole lot more.

After last week’s cliffhanger, the decision to flashback to Osha and Mae’s childhood for The Acolyte’s third chapter initially feels like an odd choice. However, it becomes clear pretty early on that showrunner Leslye Headland is attempting to pull off a season long Rashomon effect regarding the tragedy that instigated the plot’s present day murder spree. While “Destiny” may give us Osha’s perspective on the events leading up to and during the fateful fire that reportedly killed her family and placed her in the care of the Jedi Order, Jasmyn Flournoy and Eileen Shim’s script seems meticulously constructed to obfuscate the full truth. We may have a better understanding of the secrets buried within The Acolyte’s central mystery, but full answers still seem a while away.

What “Destiny” does give is a much better understanding of Osha’s childhood prior to her time with the Order. Both she and her twin sister Mae grew up among a coven of witches on the remote planet of Brendok led by their charismatic mother, Anisaya (Jodie Turner-Smith). Unlike the Jedi, this all-women sect refer to the Force as a Thread, a mystical filament that connects all living things in the universe, that cannot be wielded as a tool without affecting others it is tied to. Both twins, the only children present on Brendok, were raised under the expectation that they might one day become the future of their coven, even if Osha doubts whether she wants to dedicate her entire life to these beliefs. There’s also maybe something special going on with the two of them. Throughout “Destiny,” Anisaya and the other members of her coven make references to the exceptional circumstances behind Osha and Mae’s “creation” with the implication being that the two may have been woven into existence from the Thread itself. The exact manner in which this happened and its implications for the Star Wars universe as a whole is yet to be seen.

Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, season one, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

Jodie Turner-Smith is an absolute scene stealer in “Destiny.” She flows onto the screen exuding both magnetic charisma and a nurturing sense of calm and wisdom. It’s easy to see why she’s the undisputed leader of this coven and why her presence seems to command such immediate respect. Turner-Smith also serves as “Destiny’s” emotional heart. While there is much about Anisaya we don’t yet know and she may well end up being a far more sinister character than depicted here, much of Flournoy and Smith’s script follows her struggles to raise two very different twins as they enter into adolescence and test the limits of their independence. Buried beneath all the intrigue, mystery, and mysticism is a story about a mother guiding her daughter to take charge of her own destiny even if she might disagree with it.

Also, Anisaya is maybe gay? I mean, I’m pretty sure she is. She does seem rather affectionate towards her fellow witch, Koril, who also carried both Osha and Mae after their “creation.” But this is all disappointingly vague. Sure, viewers with any decent amount of media literacy could probably figure out that Anisaya and Koril are likely together, but The Acolyte never explicitly says so, nor is there any real physical affection between the two women outside of a tender touching of faces. I guess that counts for something? But given the fact that angry nerds spent the last week prepping me for the lesbian murder of Star Wars, I’ll admit I’m more than a little disappointed.

Where The Acolyte does continue to excel is in clouding our assumptions about the Jedi Order. While the two-episode premiere showcased an Order mired in bureaucracy and functionally acting as an intergalactic police force, “Destiny” zeroes in on the uncomfortable fact that at this point in time the Order is essentially a state-sponsored religion. While the Jedi seem to have no real legal authority on whether the witches of Brendok can practice their beliefs as adults, Carrie Anne Moss’s Indara makes it very clear they are explicitly banned from training children in their ways. The hypocrisy is obvious to anyone that’s been paying even moderate attention to Star Wars media over the last two decades. The Jedi not only train children (and in some cases turn them into literal child soldiers), but often take their recruits away from their birth families as toddlers. When Indara and the other Jedi arrive in the witches’ fortress, one of them even shouts in fear that the Jedi have come “to take away our children.” And while some Jedi like Sol may see this recruitment as a welcome homecoming into a culture of people with similar abilities and worldviews, it’s easy to see why other Force traditions would be so terrified of the Jedi’s arrival. There’s also an unsettling colonial subtext in the Jedi’s far-reaching influence. Aniseya rebuts Indara’s citing of Republic law with a reminder that Brendok is not a Republic member-planet, but this doesn’t stop the Jedi from attempting to recruit Osha and Mae into their cause.

It shouldn’t be that radical for a Star Wars text to question whether having a government-sanctioned order of superpowered monk peace-keepers is actually that great of an idea, but few have more pointedly and intelligently interrogated this than The Acolyte. The ideas that Headland is exploring here may be more interested in how we regard the Star Wars mythos itself rather than offering any real insight into our own culture, but it still makes for a smarter and richer story than has been offered by most franchise media over the last few years.

Even still, The Acolyte isn’t perfect. Although I place the blame more so on the script and Kogonada’s direction rather than the two young performers, Lauren and Leah Brady, cast to take on Amandla Stenberg’s younger counterparts, a fair amount of the scenes portraying the childhood bond of Mae and Osha feel stiff and awkwardly staged, which prevents a few major points in “Destiny’s” story from landing with the emotional weight that they should. Thankfully, Mae and Osha feel much more at home when playing off adult actors such as Turner-Smith or Lee Jung-jae, but it still leads to an episode that overall feels uneven due to how much it leans on its child stars to carry the drama.

But, even with that taken into account, “Destiny” didn’t kill Star Wars. It didn’t even bruise it. In actuality, The Acolyte’s biggest sin may just be whether it can live up to its own potential. At the moment, I may still like Headland’s ideas more on paper than I do in execution, but I appreciate that I’ve left each episode with something to think about and there’s absolutely still plenty of time for me to be won over. Anyways, I’m glad to be flashing forward to present day again next week. The end of “Revenge / Justice” promised we’d get Mae going toe-to-toe with a Wookiee Jedi, and I’m getting antsy.

At Long Last, ‘The Acolyte’ Gives Us a Star Wars Series Made by a Lesbian

The following Star Wars: The Acolyte review contains spoilers for episodes one and two.

In November of 2020, Disney announced over ten new series set in the Star Wars universe that would hit the streaming service in the coming years. Among these was The Acolyte, a mystery thriller set over a hundred years before the earliest set film in the series timeline The Phantom Menace. It would be helmed by Leslye Headland, the executive producer of the Netflix time-loop dramedy Russian Doll. The Acolyte was also unique among these announced shows in that it was pretty much the only offering that didn’t center on a previously existing character or serve as a spin-off to familiar shows like The Mandalorian. The Acolyte was an enigma, and that was an exciting change of pace for a franchise that has rightly been criticized in recent years for becoming increasingly self-interested and risk averse.

In the spring of 2023, Headland called her initial pitch for the series “Kill Bill meets Frozen” which is about as wild a logline as I can think of, but, oddly enough, it feels like a pretty accurate description. Although it does comfortably sit within a mystery-thriller framework, The Acolyte is just as much a martial arts revenge story about two sisters dragged into opposing sides of a mythic, centuries long conflict.

The series premiere “Lost / Found” opens up with a masked assailant, played by Amandla Stenberg of Bodies Bodies Bodies fame, attacking Jedi Master Carrie Ann Moss (she has an in-universe name but like, come on, it’s Carrie-Anne Moss) in an alien saloon. The fight that follows is sprawling, dynamic, and wonderfully choreographed. Rather than the familiar lightsaber duels or Old West style blaster shootouts, The Acolyte drops into a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-esque wire-fu set piece that sees Stenberg and Moss performing fantastical acrobatic flips, parries, dodges, and kicks. Given that Star Wars has pretty much always been about an order of magical space monks, it feels strange that it took almost 50 years for the series to try its hands at martial arts cinema, but it’s a natural fit and an absolute thrill to watch unfold.

Jedi Master Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

The fallout of this attack unsettles a universe where the Sith are nothing but an uneasy whisper of the past, the Jedi are at the height of their institutional power, and an attempted assassination on a Master of the Order in such a public setting by a mysterious Force user raises uncomfortable questions. It’s this change-up in the traditional series power dynamics that seems to most interest Headland. While traditional Star Wars narratives have almost always been underdog stories about outgunned heroes fighting against villains wielding overwhelming power, The Acolyte flips the script. The typically heroic Jedi are willing enforcers of the status-quo, and the powers of the Dark Side are forced to work from the shadows to survive. While Headland clearly isn’t trying to paint the Sith and their sinister allies as heroes, The Acolyte does aim to muddy the script a little. Even if it faltered in its execution, George Lucas’s prequel trilogy of films showcased a Jedi Order that was too caught up in political maneuvering and detached from the lived realities of everyday people to protect themselves and others from their enemies. We see the beginnings of that institutional failure here. The Jedi still might be guardians of peace and justice, but they certainly act a whole lot like laser-sword wielding cops, who are quick to judgement and too comfortable falling back on dehumanizing regulation and procedure when faced with harder questions. It’s a far cry from the spiritually attuned and morally altruistic knights that Obi-Wan Kenobi opined to Luke about back in 1977.

It’s in this dynamic shift that Headland allows the central conflict of The Acolyte to really come into focus. The masked assassin is mistakenly identified as former Padawan Osha Aniseya, also played by Stenberg (you should probably be able to tell where this is going), who left the Order under mysterious circumstances several years prior. Osha’s former master Sol, portrayed by Squid Games’ Lee Jung-Jae, is tasked by his superiors on the Jedi Council with bringing her in for questioning, even if he doubts that she is the real assailant in question.

Mae (Amandla Stenberg) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, season one, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

As opposed to his more dogmatic fellow Jedi, Sol comes across as an empathetic man who can express his emotions and affections for those close to him while balancing his spiritual and professional duties. Jung-jae sells Sol’s warmth and wisdom with ease and quickly earns the viewer’s trust as one of the emotional hearts of The Acolyte’s ensemble. Yet, he too is maybe hiding darker secrets. We learn midway through the premiere that Sol was present during Osha’s recruitment into the Order as a child and that during this incident her twin sister, Mae, perished alongside her parents in a violent fire. However, as the Jedi present alongside Sol at this incident begin to drop dead and the masked assailant at the center of the murders is revealed to be a very much still alive Mae, it becomes clear there is much more to this story than we are being told. The Jedi have been covering up something awful, and the consequences of this lie are finally coming to roost. And Mae isn’t working alone. She’s been trained for this quest for vengeance by a mysterious figure who wears a black, grinning mask and wields a red lightsaber.

Stenberg is the clear scene-stealer in The Acolyte. While she hasn’t had the opportunity to do much Parent Trap-style acting off her digital double as of this point in the series, Stenberg still succeeds in selling Osha and Mae as connected but undeniably unique people. Osha comes across as warm and sometimes playful but hides a tired world weariness within her. Mae, in contrast, is steely and deliberate in her actions, driven by a violent passion. In both roles, Stenberg excels. They feel as at home in Mae’s martial arts heavy assassinations as they do in Osha’s melancholic reunions with her former Master and fellow Jedi. While the larger implications for Jedi and Sith history are likely enough to keep most Star Wars die-hards hooked on The Acolyte, the story Headland and Stenberg are telling about these two lost and hurt sisters looks to be the emotional hook that will carry the series going forward.

It also, unfortunately, is where The Acolyte is stumbling the most at the moment. Seeing as the mystery at the series’ center isn’t so much a “whodunnit” as a “whydunnit,” it makes sense that a certain degree of our characters’ pasts will be hidden from the viewer until the pieces begin to fall into place. But at times, it does feel like Headland is asking a bit too much of the viewer given that almost every central character, particularly Osha and Mae, is motivated by secrets that are only beginning to be teased out. While The Acolyte is mostly able to skirt by given how well its cast sells the emotional context of each scene, the degree of narrative withholding Headland is attempting here threatens to undermine a lot of this otherwise strong character work. In turn, this confusion makes some of the rougher editing and pacing decisions made across the two-episode premiere feel a bit more apparent than they might be otherwise. This might all be smoothed over as The Acolyte pulls us deeper into its web of secrets and hidden agendas, but the success of this will come down to execution and in the moment storytelling. Maybe I’ve just been burned by watching too many shows fail to deliver on satisfying answers to their central mysteries, but I’m not quite ready to place my trust in The Acolyte to pull this all off.

Osha (Amandla Stenberg) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, season one, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

It does help that The Acolyte looks great though. While previous Star Wars outings offered by Disney+ have often felt claustrophobic in their CG-heavy digital sets or perhaps a bit too grounded to be a part of such a traditionally colorful setting, The Acolyte feels tactile but also alien. Its sets are constructed with a clear attention to hand-crafted detail and are populated with all manner of wonderfully designed alien creatures and droids brought to life with a delightful mixture of creative costuming, puppetry, and digital effects. If you are a viewer that looks to Star Wars for spectacle, The Acolyte has you covered even as it aims for a more intimate take on this universe and not the grand scale visuals that define some of its cinematic counterparts.

But, this is Autostraddle, so you’re likely waiting for me to answer the most important question of all: “Is it gay?”

Well, it certainly has the potential to be. No Star Wars production ever has had this much prominent queer talent on screen and behind the scenes. Stenberg is joined by Charlie Barnett, who formerly worked with Headland on Russian Doll, and Rebecca Henderson, star of Single Drunk Female and Headland’s wife, who both play more straightlaced, by-the-books members of the Jedi Order. And although they aren’t present in the two-episode premiere, we do know The Acolyte will feature trans YouTuber and actress, Abigail Thorn, in a supporting role and that Jen Richards (Mrs. Fletcher, Her Story) will be co-writing at least one episode of the series.

It remains yet to be seen whether any of this will actually translate to queer stories on screen. Even though Headland more or less agreed the series could be “the gayest Star Wars yet,” the jury is still out. Granted, it wouldn’t take much for The Acolyte to claim this title given that its sharpest competition is Andor, which features two (admittedly badass) lesbians in its rather sprawling ensemble. The queerest aspect of The Acolyte so far is a very brief reference to the fact that Osha and Mae had two mothers (who are already long dead by the time the series has started), but we do still have six episodes to go this season, so this all could very well change.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped the ever-present and always obnoxious arm of the Star Wars fandom — who are convinced Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy is on a personal crusade to eliminate all straight cis white men from the Galaxy Far, Far Away — from losing their collective shit about The Acolyte and review bombing the show on various sites and platforms like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. It’s all a part of the unfortunate paradox that the franchise seems unable to escape from. Somehow, despite the series’ fairly lackluster history of queer characters on screen and a slightly better, but still fraught portrayal of women and people of color, Star Wars has managed to become an inflection point for culture war grifters who claim that it’s become a radically queer Marxist text. I fucking wish. (Oddly enough, this description would more or less apply to Andor, but the grifter crowd seem to find that show too boring to actually have much to say about it.)

Given how vocally nasty the fandom has become over the last decade, I respect a publicly visible lesbian like Leslye Headland for agreeing to make The Acolyte in the first place and even more so for casting a nonbinary person of color as her lead. Sure, it may not be an act of extreme bravery to take a showrunner job for the biggest media conglomerate on the planet, but in no reality was Headland not aware of the sort of online abuse that would be thrown her way during her time making this show. The fact that she’s remained such a warm and positive public presence throughout her time working on this show is commendable.

And, thankfully, the show is pretty good! There are some rough patches and, like most mysteries, much of the success of The Acolyte as a whole may come down to just how dramatic the secrets hiding at its tangled web turn out being, but this is undeniably a Star Wars story with a vision, mythic ideas, and loads of visual spectacle. The fact that we have six more episodes to go of Jedi murders, creepy Sith, Force Kungfu, and, hopefully, space gays, is enough to keep me happy at the moment.

Short Fiction Collection “Girlfriends” Presents Expansive, Nonlinear View of Transition and Dysphoria

The first few years of being trans can’t help but feel a little like your teens, and I’m not even referring to the whole HRT-induced second puberty thing. The start of transition is just a uniquely awkward, unsure, and overwhelming time. People start looking at you differently, you reevaluate relationships with even your closest friends, you don’t really know what kinds of clothes you like anymore, and for some reason way too many people expect you to have your shit together. It’s easy to feel like there’s an essential part of yourself that you’re only just beginning to understand, but the rest of the world is refusing to slow down and give you the time you need to figure it all out.

It’s this feeling of disorientation and unease that I most associate with Emily Zhou’s debut short story collection, Girlfriends. Through seven narratives, Zhou assembles a collage of young, newly out trans women as they navigate hookups with barely-acquaintances at crowded parties, complicated roommate love affairs, co-dependent queer friendship, and the general what-the-fuck-are-we-doing nights that make up one’s early twenties. In “Performance,” Lara balances sex work, the unwanted attention of her friend’s long-term boyfriend, and a burgeoning romance with a friend of a friend. Kieran helps her father and his trans former co-worker turn an inherited home into a bicycle store in “Do-Over.” “Gap Year” follows a college-age narrator’s intense yearslong crush on Genevieve, a straight trans girl attending the same school.

The trans women in Girlfriends often find themselves stuck in the spiderweb of someone else’s drama or self-implosion. Even as they become tangled up in their own love affairs or drunken misadventures, Zhou’s protagonists stand witness to the busy world around them. Their point of view allows each story to float through scene to scene as both character and portal. Reading Girlfriends can feel like people-watching at a particularly eclectic party while your insightful, biting, and painfully self-conscious friend whispers judgment and gossip in your ear. Through her whispered or slurred commentary, we learn that everyone at this party, cis or trans, is just as confused as everyone else, especially those who want you to think otherwise.

No one is quite on stable ground in Girlfriends. Childhood best friends evolve into abusive adulthood situationships. Friends drop, pick up, and re-drop partners. Parents or queer elders are just as prone to upheaval and delusion as the young adults they want to guide. Across her collection, Zhou depicts a fluid and complex queer social scene through appropriately murky fiction. These stories are never content to conclude with resolutions that are steeped in personal clarity or epiphany but instead with moments of quiet, tender respite, closing with late night bottle rocket shows, nights of quiet insomnia, or conflicted bathroom escapes. It showcases Zhou’s confidence in her fiction that she so readily leaves her characters in that dramatic sweet spot between cohesion and unease that defines the best work of the genre.

What Zhou seems to suggest is that none of us ever “figure it out.” In fact, for some, there may be no need to at all. There’s a passage in “Do Over,” the collection’s closing story, that I find myself returning to again and again:

Dysphoria is a scary word, and for a long time I thought it was reserved for moments adjacent to desperation, madness, disintegration – I read once about a trans woman back in the day who cut her own junk off when she got denied surgery. Now I think maybe the thing with dysphoria is that it doesn’t begin or end anywhere in particular. I wonder about that woman – I could see myself doing something like that if I was less afraid of pain, if only to force this fine mist of vague unease to coalesce into something, like holding a magnet up to metal shavings. Does the magnet reveal the true nature of the metal, or just one of the properties it happens to have?

Our current language around dysphoria has always felt so trite and insufficient to me that I always appreciate whenever other trans writers attempt their own definitions, but Zhou’s prose offers more than simple explanation. While it might initially feel a bit too on the nose to say that everyone, regardless of gender, in Girlfriends is dysphoric, Zhou demands that reading. We are taught to think in terms of big catalysts that kick start even bigger changes. Too often, I hear cis friends ask me about my life “pre” and “post” transition, and I find myself explaining that it’s not nearly that simple. Transition, like puberty or aging in general, isn’t so much a single catalytic act, but a stumbling and awkward road filled with many smaller realizations, changes, and revisions. If dysphoria isn’t something with a beginning or end, then attempts to combat it are just as nonlinear and unending. And while not every character in Zhou’s fiction is reckoning with gender, all are dealing with their own feelings of displacement, distress, or unease. Each is waiting for a magnet to appear and sort their shaved metal selves into more easily understandable forms, but Zhou knows that isn’t going to happen. The story is in those moments of confusion and the quiet breaths we take in between.

Girlfriends by Emily Zhou is out now.

“People Collide” Throws Everything You Thought You Knew About Body Swap Stories out the Window

There’s often a clear purpose to body swap narratives. When mother and daughter, siblings, or Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds, wake up one morning to find themselves as, well, not themselves, there’s often a clear lesson to be learned. Whether it’s a reminder that things aren’t always greener on the other side or to extend a little empathy and patience to other people, there’s almost always a clear purpose and goal to the swapping of bodies. And once said lesson is learned, said parties return to their lives changed for the better.

Which is to say that I went into Isle McElroy’s new novel People Collide, which swaps a recently married but already stagnant straight couple, with a certain set of expectations. Sure, I expected that a writer as nuanced and inventive as McElroy publish something more complex than Freaky Friday, but I still anticipated there being at least a little inkling of the usual body swap hits. Within its first few chapters, People Collide has balled up your expectations and nonchalantly tossed them in the trash.

We may begin in familiar enough territory. After three years of dating, Eli and Elizabeth, two emerging writers in their late twenties, decided to get married to ease out the logistics of Elizabeth’s new government sponsored teaching job abroad in Bulgaria. It’s a union born out of legal necessity and ultimately built upon a foundation of insecurity and envy. Or as Eli puts it: “We married to take advantage of a system. No matter how much Elizabeth loved me – and we told each other every day, deep, honest expressions of love, looking-you-in-the-eyes kinds of statements – I could never shake that I was, for her, like a supplementary arm grafted onto the center of her stomach.”

While neither have yet to break it in the literary scene, Elizabeth has landed more than a few publications in prestigious magazines and has already started fielding calls from interested agents. In contrast, Eli has a few pieces up at a no-longer-existent online publications and has spent much of the last several years working a series of odd service jobs. While there may not be outright animosity, the two are clearly at a low point as a couple, with Eli feeling particularly rudderless.

It’s a prime set up for a traditional “look how good you have it” / “maybe things on the other side aren’t easy after all” style narrative. And yet, even when Eli suddenly finds himself in the body of his wife as she’s midway through delivering a lecture to a class full of confused Bulgarian children, McElroy has naturally swerved away from our typical set up. There’s no inciting argument. No mystical McGuffin or spellcaster that has passed judgement on our protagonists. Just a sudden, inexplicable rearrangement of the universe. It’s an event that occurs out of nowhere with seemingly no purpose, no end goal, and no indication of undoing itself. Things get even more complicated when Eli learns that his own body, presumably carrying the consciousness of his wife, has disappeared, leaving him thousands of miles from home with a new life, an unfamiliar sex, a different family, and no idea of what to do besides try and find his wife/self.

People Collide never really allows the reader to feel settled. Sure, there’s something of a mystery to be solved, but McElroy isn’t interested in providing clues or teasing out reveals. There’s a randomness to the plotting of this novel that seems to suggest the swapping of bodies is really no more bizarre than any number of strange events or coincidences that happen every day of our lives. Instead, People Collide is much more interested in exploring just how two people, who are equally lost in their own ways, rebuild or fail to rebuild themselves after such a dramatic change.

The one expectation of mine going in that People Collide did meet was its nuanced approach to gender. Yes, there have been many, many books, movies, tv episodes, comic books, video games, etc. of presumably cisgendered people swapping bodies with other cisgendered people. I was rarely if ever satisfied with how these stories actually discussed gender. Often, the results felt didactic: Boys learned about periods, make-up, and misogyny, and girls learned about toxic masculinity (presumably something most of them had some understanding of beforehand). How exactly a supernatural shift like this actually affects someone’s identity was never really a discussion. The fact that a nonbinary author like Isle McElroy had decided to tell a story like this gave me hope for something a bit more, and thankfully they delivered.

There is much about Eli’s early fumbling days as Elizabeth that felt familiar to me and the early days of my own transition and the first times I could see that the world was seeing and treating me like a woman. Eli abandons hope early on of telling anyone the truth about what has happened and instead tries his best to live as his wife for as long as necessary. This of course means living convincingly as a woman, and while his first attempts are clumsy and confused, Eli begins to build an identity and presentation for himself and his new sex that proves separate from his wife. He develops his own taste in clothes, he finds himself surprisingly drawn in to the flirting and attention of men, and he finds himself discovering new depths to some of the few friendships he has made in Bulgaria. While my transition into womanhood was done intentionally and far more gradually, Eli’s story feels appropriately informed by a trans femme experience, and it ends up being an essential part of what makes People Collide work as well as it does.

That’s not to mention just how funny, emotionally complex, and sexy this novel becomes as it winds its way to its pitch perfect but appropriately open-ended conclusion. I won’t give away the specifics, but I will say that McElroy recently wrote about the art of the sex scene for a reason. A uniquely enjoyable read, People Collide most importantly does that rare but incredible thing of exploring cishet relationships by and through a queer vantage point without feeling glib, trite, or silly.

People Collide by Isle McElroy is out now.

The Need for Trans Girl Trash

feature image photo by Maryna Terletska via Getty Images

There are days when I just need some good garbage. Look, I love prestige dramas, arthouse independent movies, meticulously researched journalism, and literary fiction as much as the next writer. I adore media that challenges or surprises me. But sometimes, especially in these last few shit-burger years, I find myself really craving the entertainment equivalent of a handful of fast food fries. It’s a hunger that’s best filled with reality dating shows, sexy novels, slutty dance music, and sloppy teen dramas. When I just couldn’t bring myself to watch Station Eleven or to finally make a dent in my ever-growing TBR pile, I turned to Love is Blind or a marathon relisten of the Normal Gossip podcast. My addiction to absorbing as much gossip, drama, and mess as possible is maybe my biggest personal vice and my number one way to drown out our uniquely terrible moment.

When I say I want good garbage, I’m asking for something that is melodramatic, sexy, or scandalous in ways that don’t ask me to engage more than the simplest parts of my brain. I’m not looking for comfort media that makes me feel soothed and wrapped up in a warm, sentimental blanket. The best trash media feels like jaw-dropping, “shut-the-fuck-up” second hand gossip your half-drunk friend offers up about some couple you’ve never met and likely never will.

The problem I keep bumping into is that the best media junk food is overwhelmingly cis. Hell, seemingly all of the shitty junk is cis. Finding quality trans trash is surprisingly hard, and it really shouldn’t be. My trans friends, and I say this lovingly, are some of the messiest people I know. When I hang out with other trans girls, the topic of conversation inevitably spills over into our own personal stories of ill-advised hookups, nights out filled with bad decisions, comedically disastrous early attempts at exiting the closet, or just gossip we’ve picked up about some other equally messy t-girl. Sure, we also chat about art we like and, if we’re up to it, the anti-trans panic sweeping the country, but more often than not we spend our time sharing trashy (often self-mocking) stories.

But for whatever reason, there just isn’t much good trash out there for trans people. Sure, there are plenty of trans novels like Nevada or Detransition, Baby that tell the stories of aimless, disaster trans women, but I could never in good conscience call these books trash. They’re too thematically rich and formally inventive to illicit the sort of head-empty thrill I look for in my junk entertainment. Especially with the fact that horny novels (even queer horny novels) seem to be the top-selling works of fiction at the moment, I kept hoping there would be something for us messy transes to sink our lecherous teeth into.

I thought I had found my trans trash when I picked up the regency romance novel A Lady for a Duke. I’m normally not a bodice ripper girl, but I’d loved the raunchy sexual drama of Bridgerton (especially when it was paired with string covers of Taylor Swift songs), and I figured maybe the fact that the protagonist for Alexis Hall’s book was a trans woman would win me over. And for a while, it was working on me. My heart fluttered at the first kisses and tender hand holdings. (By the way, that heart flutter is really only something I’ve felt myself in the last few months after having been on hormones for about four years? Bodies are wild.) I bought into the will they/won’t they of this Victorian trans lady and the moody Duke her childhood best friend had grown into. I couldn’t wait until the two finally fucked. A Lady for a Duke made me read well over 300 pages before any steaminess happened. It was a buildup I tolerated, because I had convinced myself I would be rewarded with some sex that was at least as lengthy as the teasing that came before, even as that seemed less and less mathematically possible. But what I got was a single hookup that was so stilted, awkward, and outside the experience of most trans women I knew that it ended up ruining the entire thrill. While Alexis Hall had done a serviceable job at writing a trans character up until that moment, it was in the messy intimacies that the illusion shattered, and I could no longer ignore the fact that this was a book written by a man who mostly wrote romance fiction for cis women.

I left A Lady for a Duke feeling so deflated that I found myself looking up the bylines for many of the raving reviews I’d seen logged for the novel online. Most praised the novel for its supposedly  great representation and romance, but I struggled to find any published by a trans femme critic. It was hard not to read the praise as a bunch of backpatting cisqueers applauding themselves for reading a decidedly okay love story about a trans woman. And while I do know that there are horny novels written by and about trans women, none of these have received remotely the same level of public praise, attention, or marketing that A Lady for a Duke and its many, many cisgender siblings do.

The TV landscape doesn’t fare much better. Despite the massive landscape of reality TV, you’d be hard-pressed to find a trans feminine person on any series that wasn’t about drag. And that’s not to say that there shouldn’t be shows about trans drag queens, but when do we get to be included in the seemingly hundreds of real housewives and dating shows? Yes, I am absolutely excited to binge The Ultimatum: Queer Love with my girlfriend, but I did spend a good hour going frame by frame through that recently released trailer looking for any visible trans femmes without success. The cast has been announced, and while the show’s description notes that it features nonbinary people, it’s unclear if anyone is trans feminine. I’m not getting my hopes up, especially considering the first bit of marketing for the series literally opens up with a Harry Potter reference. Given that reality television spent much of the 90s and aughts exploiting trans women for shock value and cheap thrills, reclaiming this genre feels oddly necessary and not just for the drama hungry souls like me.

I’m equally starved for scripted trans trash. While The L Word: Generation Q included trans femme actresses in its cast, I was and continue to be put off by its commitment to creating a cis unless otherwise stated status quo for its characters. Yes, in some ways I understand the importance of a trans actress playing a cis woman, but at the end of the day, its most empowering first and foremost for the performer. It does little for us at home, especially viewers like myself who want to see trans femme stories incorporated into the narrative. I was a bit more encouraged to see there was a trans woman as one of the principal cast members of Showtime’s Queer as Folk reboot, but I dropped the show after the first episode closed with a mass shooting at a queer nightclub. Look, I’m not violence-averse in my escapism. I’m down for some murderous love triangles or revenge killings, but I’m not necessarily looking for hate crimes to serve as a major plot point in my junk TV. Even when Euphoria decided in its second season to make every plot point that wasn’t about Rue’s drug addiction a glitzy, high budget soap opera, Jules, Hunter Schafer’s trans sex worker who was at one point billed as one of the show’s leads, barely appeared outside of being a prop for the creation of drama for the series’ cis cast.

Oddly enough, the most I’ve enjoyed the depiction of a trans femme character in a show like this was Josie Totah’s Lexi on the reboot of Saved by the Bell. While you could debate the merits of a Gen Z reboot of a classic 90s teen sitcom for hours (I personally found it surprisingly funny), I hope you can see why Totah getting to play an explicitly trans queen bee, mean girl archetype is so great. Lexi gets pissy zingers, has romance story arcs, and gets roped into the same stupid shenanigans that the rest of the ensemble does. In terms of head empty comedy escapism, Lexi inhabits a space I don’t get to see many other trans femme characters do: be undeniably trans and entertaining. Much of this is likely due in no small part to Totah serving as a producer for the series’ regrettably short runtime. But no matter how refreshing a character I find Lexi to be, she’s still a supporting player on a streaming only nostalgia reboot comedy series aimed at teens. I wouldn’t blame many trans viewers for deciding to sit this one out.

At my most cynical and frustrated, I read this overall lack of trash aimed at trans femme people as profoundly trans misogynistic and gender essentialist. Cis women, especially cis het women, are pitched a veritable feast of delightful garbage media from their preteens all the way through adulthood. I mean, the CW and Freeform practically created an entire subgenre of steamy, back-stabby, pulpy teen dramas. And sure, there’s a lot to unpack about the fact that these are the kind of stories American media corporations have decided are what girls and women want — I still want to be included in that cohort. If we insist, as the most basic of pro-trans adages say, that trans women are women, then how come women like me never seem to be in the conversation when these shows, even the queer ones, are created? If media that’s traditionally targeted at women, whether they are queer or not, isn’t making a space for the girls like me, then where exactly are we expected to look for entertainment that keeps us in mind?

At the end of the day, it seems like we have to be the ones to make our own trash, but I’m not convinced that there are many avenues for trans femme media that aims only to entertain. I’m grateful for the existence of Pose or the many trans writers I know who are telling inventive and artistically daring narratives in fiction, but what trans narratives get released and marketed to the mainstream really seems to come down to having the right ally to champion your work or perceived palatability for a cis audience. There’s apparently little room there for mass market trans trash.

It’s partly why I always find myself returning to Kim Petras for my hot girl walks or suffering woman runs. Even though a voice in the back of my head reminds me there are plenty of trans music artists who aren’t working with industry predators like Dr. Luke, Slut Pop was still one of my most streamed albums of 2022. I love that Petras not only releases incredibly catchy dance pop, but that so much of it is unabashedly sexual and risqué. Sure, you could call it vapid, but if we are going to cheer on songs that reclaim cis women’s sexuality, I sure as hell am going to be here for my trans bangers about boobs, blowjobs, and BDSM.

I know when the existence of trans people is under attack throughout the country, the need for trashy trans media may seem like a low priority issue. I could even understand members of the community arguing that media centering sloppy trans women making bad choices maybe isn’t the best content to pump into the cultural ether right now. But when things are awful and I’ve done everything in my power to fight and scream for our rights, I sometimes want to stuff my face filled with microwave popcorn and binge watch hours and hours of trans femme melodrama.

Andor’s Lesbian Couple and the Messy History of Queerness in the Star Wars Universe

In early October, Twitter user Star Wars Queers Watch and I half-jokingly debated whether a newly introduced character in Andor, the franchise’s most recent live-action television series which wrapped up its first season last Wednesday, was actually giving off seriously gay vibes. Vel Sartha, played by Faye Marsay who is maybe best known as that girl who smacked Arya Stark with a stick for like two seasons straight on Game of Thrones, was a poncho-sporting, no-nonsense backwoods resistance fighter who seemed to maybe be a little more than friendly with a woman who was also one of her fellow comrades in arms. Queers Watch, I, and the rest of Star Wars’ queer fandom were hopeful — but skeptical. We’d been burned many, many times before by Lucasfilm’s messy attempts at making the Galaxy Far, Far Away just a little bit less hetero, and there was no real indication that the Disney subsidiary was about to change course any time soon.

But, come Andor’s fifth episode, “The Axe Forgets,” the answer was made very clear. Vel is queer. She is in fact sleeping with fellow rebellion fighter Cinta Kaz played by Varada Sethu. And while they weren’t exactly having steamy lesbian sex on a Disney+ series, their relationship is explicitly woven into the fabric of the show. Other queer fans and I were understandably cynical about how Vel and Cinta’s romance would develop. Given the high stakes and often action-packed plots of Andor, showrunner Tony Gilroy had more than one opportunity to bury some gays. However, with each passing episode, it became clear that Andor deserved our attention and confidence and that at the very least it was a significant step forward for a gayer galaxy.

To say that Star Wars’ march toward having any sort of visible queer representation has been fraught would be an understatement. Unlike its rival space series Star Trek, which was incorporating queer themes into its narratives as far back as the early 90s, Star Wars never seemed quite sure what to do with its queers. Its first canonically queer character is the lesbian redeemed Jedi, Juhani, in the classic 2002 video game Knights of the Old Republic, but given the relatively small role her queerness plays in the RPG’s admittedly massive story one couldn’t really be blamed for flat out missing this. Even then, Juhani’s legacy was complicated by later community statements made by Knights’ production company, Bioware. In the long role out for the game’s MMO sequel, The Old Republic, Bioware community managers made the bizarre and inescapably homophobic statement in 2009 that gays simply don’t exist in Star Wars in response to forum users noting that threads discussing queer characters and themes were routinely blocked and deleted by moderators. While Bioware did eventually capitulate after the game’s release (well over three years later) and feature romanceable characters for queer players, the message had already been loudly made that queers weren’t welcome in this space.

Things would luckily take a turn for the better following Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012 and Star Wars’ canonical resetting that followed. Star Wars novels started to regularly feature queer characters. Gay freedom fighters. Lesbian Imperials. Bisexual bounty hunters. Quirky enby smugglers. It was a change that predictably was met with a decent amount of pushback from homophobic fans who had grown accustomed to the franchise’s willing ignorance toward queer characters, but the publishing side of Lucasfilm marched on forward with its army full of weird space gays.

The most notable queer addition to Star Wars canon was, and arguably still is, the comics anti-hero Doctor Aphra. Created by bisexual comic writer Kieron Gillen, known for writing the gayest iteration of Young Avengers and the overstuffed with queers mythological mystery The Wicked + the Divine. Doctor Aphra is a chaotic lesbian archaeologist who frequently runs awry with galactic treasure hunters and the ghosts of long dead Sith Lords. Think Indiana Jones if he was a queer Asian woman with a very questionable moral compass. Aphra originally began as a supporting character in Gillen’s Darth Vader comic before spinning out into her own long-running series, which sported Star Wars’ first ever depicted lesbian kiss. Aphra’s comics are effortlessly queer, not only in how they depict Aphra’s own messy love life but in the sprawling queer supporting cast that Gillen and later writers Si Spurrier and Alyssa Wong have populated her adventures with. A long-running antagonist was a vengeful space detective whose cyborg boyfriend Aphra left for dead after a particularly bad job. Wong’s current arc has a team of Aphra’s former flings and enemies trying to save her from a rogue AI that has taken over her body. Doctor Aphra is to this day the only Star Wars media to win a GLAAD award, and it feels deserved.

It’s beyond frustrating then that the film and television side of Lucasfilm has floundered so badly in comparison. Perhaps most famously, fans around the world have lobbied for John Boyega’s Finn and Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron to shack up ever since they first appeared in 2015’s The Force Awakens. Finn and Poe’s chemistry was infectious, and Isaac was not subtle about his intent to play the dynamic between both characters as romantic. This of course culminated in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker seemingly inventing two women to pair off both characters with, shutting the book on the two leads becoming boyfriends. Isaac in particular was outspoken in his disappointment in Poe’s straightwashing chalking it up to institutional cowardice on Disney’s part. Director and co-writer JJ Abrams did assure queer fans that there would be something for them in the trilogy capper, but this ended up being a split-second kiss between two women extras in the film’s final moments. It was a move that was so transparently trivial and easy to remove for foreign censors that it immediately became a source of mockery and derision. The best of which is Twitter user Lyra Silvertongue’s viral tweet highlighting a sluglike alien’s apparent disgust at the whole development.

Rise of Skywalker does have one perfect moment, it’s that right after they show the first gay kiss in Star Wars (for 2 seconds) they immediately cut to this frowning slug monster for twice as long. 16/10, no notes pic.twitter.com/B0KlKteZrr

— Lyra, Esq., is NOT DAREDEVIL (@PinkRangerLB) February 21, 2022

This is of course not even accounting for Donald Glover’s assertion that his portrayal of classic character Lando Calrissian is pansexual, which in the context of the film just seems to mean that he’s fucking a robot played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

And sure, there are slightly less problematic moments like the epilogue to animated series Star Wars Rebels implying in the loosest of terms that two male characters are now maybe kind of a thing or the comedic relief fussy alien couple portrayed by Bobby Moynihan and Jim Rash in the children’s series Star Wars Resistance. But again, if you weren’t a queer viewer starving for any small hint of space gays or the kind of fan who reads mountains of interviews with cast and crew, you could have easily missed all of this.

This is all to say that Andor simply having an on-screen queer couple whose role extends beyond a winking reference or quick cameo is already leaps and bounds ahead of anything that Lucasfilm has bothered to offer up to date. But Andor is a particularly rare beast. Actually great, thoughtful, Star Wars. The series, which on paper is a prequel to 2016’s Rogue One, follows Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor as he is brought into the fold of the very early days of the rebellion against the Empire. Andor not only stands above pretty much everything that Disney Star Wars has churned out in the last half decade in terms of its grounded production design, great cinematography, and nuanced performances, but because it’s the first Star Wars media in a long time to be about something besides itself. As enjoyable as it might be to watch Pedro Pascal’s Mandalorian bond with a baby Yoda puppet, Star Wars has absolutely gotten itself stuck in a self-referencing nostalgia loop. Sure, it sometimes excels at celebrating itself or even deconstructing its own myth, but Star Wars has been about Star Wars and only about Star Wars for years now. And while Andor is a spin-off of a spin-off, Tony Gilroy’s show is much more interested in showcasing what the early days of resistance against a fascist Empire actually looks like. Whether it be depictions of the corporate stooges or ladder climbing bureaucrats, Andor revels in the banality of its evil and is unflinching in depicting the recognizable horrors of a government that believes itself too big to fail. It’s anti-cop, anti-prison industrial complex, anti-colonialism, anti-incremental resistance, and restlessly pissed off at the state of the world, whether that be our humble little planet or a galaxy-spanning dystopia. As much as Star Wars has always had a slight political edge to it, Andor is the first iteration of the series to make its anti-fascist underpinnings the front and center focus of its story.

And thankfully this nuanced and surprisingly grounded approach extends to our space lesbians as well. While we first meet Vel and Cinta as backwoods revolutionaries, their relationship is defined by their fight against fascism. Cinta, whose family was murdered by Stormtroopers prior to the start of the series, is clearly the more driven of the two. She’s the most eager freedom fighter to blast away Imperials and is more than willing to make personal sacrifices for the sake of burning down the fascist establishment. More than once over the series’ 12 episode first season, Cinta opts to stay behind to clean up the messes of revolution while Vel’s work takes her elsewhere. It naturally becomes a point of contention between both women. Vel is eager to find whatever moments of happiness that the two can eek out amid the growing violence, but as Cinta tells her, “I told you upfront, the struggle always comes first. We take what’s left.”

Vel in contrast hails from the aristocratic and socially conservative world of Chandrila. Cousin to long-time Star Wars supporting character, Mon Mothma (played wonderfully here by Genevieve O’Reilly), Vel lives a double life as the heiress to a centuries old family fortune. Where Cinta’s work often has her skulking in the shadows of dark apartment buildings or dank alley ways, Vel finds herself rubbing shoulders with the galactic elite. And it’s here that Andor throws maybe it’s most interesting wrinkle into Vel’s character. As we learn throughout the season, on Vel and Mon’s home world of Chandrila arranged (straight) marriages among teens are common and a cultural norm. Mon’s own arranged husband, a Mitt Romney type that just can’t seem to get why his wife is so upset about the fascist evil wizard running the government, even remarks on how strange it is that Vel continues to be single well into adulthood. The knowing glances shared between cousins let us know that Mon is well-aware of the real reason why Vel has yet to find a man, but the point has already been made. Vel is living another double life. Not only in her work as a revolutionary, but also that she’s a huge les. It’s the first hint that at least in some corners of the Galaxy Far, Far Away that life in the closet is a very real thing.

And while I’m not exactly glad that homophobia exists in the Star Wars universe, its inclusion in Andor still feels important and maybe even necessary. While the abundant queerness of Doctor Aphra is definitely a delight, the casual acceptance of its gay, lesbian, and nonbinary characters can’t help but feel oddly segregated given how starkly cishet the rest of the universe is portrayed to be. It’s joyful escapism, but it can’t help but feel oddly hollow. In a galaxy that is rife with conflict, crime, and inequality, the open acceptance of queer characters in the Star Wars publishing wing feels inauthentic not only to our own world but to how Disney/Lucasfilm have decided to craft their fiction. Just as how Andor shows us the banal evils of the Empire and its supporters, it feels right that we at least acknowledge that queer identity isn’t always easy and that sometimes those most sympathetic to the authoritarian rule are those most willing to enforce cishteronormative values, intentionally or not.

Andor’s portrayal of Vel and Cinta isn’t without its problems. As clearly communicated as their relationship is, the two don’t kiss or do much of anything physical besides tender hand-holding or caressing one another’s shoulders. To be fair, this isn’t that different from how Andor showcases any of its heterosexual relationships. Andor may be the rare Star Wars media that actually acknowledges that sex exists, but its hook ups and love makings always happen just off screen. If anything, it may just be a sad symptom of just how sexless so much franchise media has become over the last decade or so. This is a Disney production after all. I mean, when a stale dry humping heterosexual sex scene in The Eternals makes headlines, you know we’re in a particularly chaste era of blockbusters.

All the same, the ease at which Tony Gilroy and the rest of his creative team portray Cinta and Vel’s relationship marks a far too late, but much needed step forward for this franchise. Andor manages to walk the delicate line of featuring undeniably queer characters in a lesbian relationship without making their inclusion feel like a pandering bone thrown to fans. They exist as characters with their own individual arcs and a relationship that is believably flawed but at times still remarkably tender. And thankfully (spoilers) both Vel and Cinta live. Whenever Andor finally manages to grace our screens again, which by all accounts seems to be at least two years away, we will get to see more of both women. That’s two years for the rest of the Star Wars galaxy to get its shit together. I’m not exactly holding my breath, but hey there’s hope. A new hope, maybe, for the gays to strike back.

Interview With a Tranpire

Horror Is So Gay // Header by Viv Le

I did many embarrassing things in my teen years, but none may be more cringeworthy than the fact that I used to watch remakes before originals. I know — I’m a disappointment. Teenage me was exactly the kind of person that slick Americanized remakes were made for. And this is how I first came across Matt Reeves’s 2011 film Let Me In. I was aware at the time that this was not the first version of this tale of love and friendship between a young boy, Owen, and a centuries-old adolescent vampire girl, Abby, but I had loved Reeve’s other monster movie Cloverfield, so I ignored the fact there was supposedly a better version of it lying out there. And the result was good. Nothing truly exciting, but it was a well shot vampire tale that I enjoyed and quickly forgot.

It would be almost five years later, during a Taco Bell-fueled late-night horror movie marathon with my brother that I finally saw Let the Right One In, the original 2008 Swedish film. On first glance, the two movies are remarkably similar. If anything, outside of some slick cinematography, Reeves’s take maybe adheres a bit too close to the source material to justify that it needed to exist in the first place. That is with one big exception. During a particularly vulnerable moment between boy and vampire, Oskar and Eli this time around, Eli disrobes and reveals a snaking castration scar across their pubis. Where the American version of this story featured what was clearly a heterosexual relationship between a boy and cisgender vampire, Let the Right One In is inescapably queer. And what struck me, being a closeted trans girl with lots of gender feelings rumbling around in her head, was just how intentionally fluid and undefined Eli’s gender is. Castration, of course, does not negate male identity, but Eli seems to comfortably shirk their masculinity. While they do insist to Oskar that they aren’t a girl, Eli spends most of the film dressed as one and letting the world think of them as one. In some ways, this helps them in their hunts for human prey, but it’s hard to watch their interactions with Oskar and the other characters and not see that Eli exists outside a gender binary.

In a way, we see Eli in conversation with one of the longest running themes in vampiric narratives. While it certainly didn’t invent the vampire, Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic novel Dracula undeniably defined much of our contemporary understanding both for its title character but also for all his blood-sucking ilk. While it is perhaps better known for its many adaptations and the tropes it inspired in future takes on the character, Dracula is a novel bursting with anxiety about gender and sexuality. This manifests both in its discomfort with the monstrous women who shirk Victorian gender roles but also in the homoerotic acts of seduction carried out by its title character. Stoker, by many scholars believed to be a closeted gay man, makes Dracula, both novel and character, a personification of these fears both of the enforcement of gender roles and also the consequences of shirking them.

“When I first reencountered Dracula in grad school, after I had moved through my feelings of revulsion and anger about the text, I started really thinking about the role of femininity in these characters that Bram Stoker wrote,” says poet Chase Berggrun. Berggrun, a trans woman, is the author of Red, a book of erasure poetry that uses the text of Stoker’s novel to reclaim and refocus its women characters. “What is perhaps most terrifying about the vampire to Stoker is that it doesn’t conform,” Beggrun says.

This extends not only to Dracula’s portrayal but also the women of the novel, primarily Lucy and Mina who offend through their sexuality and competency. Berggrun’s Red responds with: “Women all their lives are interrupted    considered hysterical / summoned to make children for the strong and manly / and for his sake must smile and not speak / Now this man I began to think a weak fool.”

The vampire as a manifestation of gender panic is thankfully a trope that has faded over the century-plus since Dracula terrified the hell out of Victorian England, but the queer themes present in this ever-popular species of monster remain and, if anything, are becoming more prominent as trans storytellers are given their chance to play with the vampire canon. And this comes in both the reclamation of harmful tropes but also in the manifestation and redirection of that gendered anxiety.

It’s not hard to see the connection that trans readers and storytellers can find in vampire media. Vampires are beings that exist outside a binary of life and death, and their status as creatures of the night and underground certainly feels familiar for people who have so often been forced to live in societies margins. Even the transformative nature of vampirism feels intertwined with transness. The bargain of a temporary death for a former closeted self in exchange for an eternal life as a hotter, stronger, and more powerful version feels all the more tempting. Hell, there’s a reason why the term “deadname” is so common among the community.

Berggrun points to how writing Red not only helped her to challenge the misogynist themes of Dracula but also helped her come to terms with her own identity as a trans woman: “In like the weirdest, most uncomfortable way, I have Stoker to thank for moving me in a particular way. Because I was writing this book while I was sort of figuring out and learning to define and understand my own womanhood. Part of that was sort of [rebelling] against this really oppressive and saltifying version of what it means to be a woman and realizing that whatever woman I was to become was never going to fit into these kinds of boxes and learning how to really exalt in the possibilities of that.”

Alex DiFrancesco performs a similar act of reclamation in their short story “The Pure,” which appears in the collection Transmutation. “The Pure” depicts a romance between a runaway trans man and a trans woman vampire who takes him under her wing. Here, DiFrancesco’s characters view the transformation from human into vampire as an extension of their own gender transition and a way to further express their personal identity. The titular Pure refers to a force of conservative propaganda and mistruth, which in this instance lumps vampires and the queer community into similar enemies against a supposed safe and undiluted America. DiFrancesco was inspired by a real world alt-right Facebook meme depicting a clawed hand labeled “the LGBT” reaching out to attack at a white, straight family and wanted “The Pure” to give form to this monstrous view of the queer population supposedly threatening the bastions of right wing values. In this case, that means that vampires are a haven for displaced queer people and a means to fight back against the forces of transphobic hate.

We see a similar move in the 2019 indie horror comedy Bit. Starring Nicole Maines of Supergirl fame, Bit follows an all women group of vampires who feed on the bad men of the world. Maines’s Laurel becomes the team’s newest recruit, which not only lets her thrill in the battle against patriarchal evil but also offers her a sisterhood with other, mostly queer, outcasts. To Laurel, a trans girl and recent high school graduate, there’s a certain fulfillment in how naturally her fellow vampires accept her as a woman and a fellow member in their crusade. Laurel’s difficult transition during her teens also allows her to have a blasé acceptance of the revelation that vampires do in fact exist. “My life’s already been kinda like a horror movie, well most of it,” she quips. She even does battle with an evil male vampire who is a not so subtle stand in for Dracula. And while Bit may muddy its message a bit at the end, it’s all the same a fun rebuttal to Stoker’s anxieties and a delightful trans power fantasy — especially for one written by a cis man.

In contrast, Morgan Thomas’s short story “Transit” uses vampirism as a window into themes of misgendering, dysphoria, and dysmorphia. While no living vampires appear in Thomas’s piece, Blue, the story’s nonbinary narrator, is mistaken for one by a stranger during a long-distance bus ride. Blue, having just left a treatment house for girls with eating disorders, plays along with this case of mistaken identity to refuse an offer of a shared snack and also almost as resignation, knowing that this woman with her emo-band haircut is going to insist that they are a vampire no matter what.

According to Thomas, one of the major themes of “Transit” is “the sort of ridiculousness of looking at someone and thinking that you know something about their internal identity and sense of self.” In this sense, Blue is misread as a vampire in the same way they are misread by the world at large as a girl and not nonbinary. “The light misgendering that happens to me still is such a fabric of society in a way that I don’t think is often commented upon or recognized in day to day life and [“Transit”] felt like a way to access that experience,” Thomas says. Similarly, Blue, like Thomas during their own grappling with gender, is more confident in admitting what they are not rather than what they are. In this case, Blue knows for sure that they are not a vampire, even if their gender identity is something they haven’t quite figured out.

There are also more complicated and murky pairings of trans identity and vampirism. Isaac Fellman’s novel Dead Collections follows Sol, a trans man vampire archivist, and his attempts to balance work, a new relationship, and the logistics of living with long term vampirism. What’s unique about the world Fellman creates in his novel is how known but also unknown vampirism is within the rest of society. It’s a known affliction, but the world isn’t built to accommodate bodies that cannot enter sunlight. When Sol runs afoul of his job for hiding from the sun in the archives during daytime, his employer expresses sympathy but not practical solutions. Where Dead Collections is less clear is how the reader is supposed to view vampirism in tandem with Sol’s literal on-the-page trans identity. It offers a symbolic reading that doesn’t always connect with the totality of Sol’s character.

KM Szpara’s horror novelette Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time succeeds a little bit more readily in this regard. Like Dead Collections, Szpara’s story also follows a trans man vampire in a world where vampirism is a publicly known and regulated health condition but instead uses its protagonist’s transformation as an explicit commentary on the medical establishment’s almost willful ignorance of trans healthcare and how self-administered medicine is, for many, a necessity.

Part of the joy of vampire mythology is just how flexible but also iconic a subgenre it can be. Despite what some nerd boy whining about Robert Pattinson’s bedazzled skin might have you think, vampires are a more fluid and versatile monster than we may give them credit for. They have strict rules — until they don’t. They are monstrous until we want to screw them. They are evil until we want to them to be heroic. They are sad until we want to fix them. Vampires do whatever the storyteller needs them to do, whether that be horror, action, comedy, or romance. Sometimes we have masterpieces, and sometimes we have Morbius. Cisgender writers have had well over a century to play with Dracula and his ilk, but given the queerness that’s so essential to the genre, it feels only right that we hand the bloody mic to trans storytellers. Reclamation and empowerment are rightfully at the forefront, but I can’t wait until we start mining the genre for more. I want trans Vampire Diaries where a blandly attractive trans girl must compete for the attention of a rogueish trans masc vampire and his do-gooder enby sibling. I want big gothic mansions filled with pissy and petty tranpire roommates. I want a trans vampire hunter who kills cisgender vampires. I want to see the genuinely unnerving and body-churning horror that I know only trans writers really get. I want something me and my brother can watch while chowing down on way too many Crunchwrap Supremes.

Horror Is So Gay is a series on queer and trans horror edited by Autostraddle Managing Editor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya running throughout October.

Investigating the Bionicle-to-Trans Pipeline

In my favorite ever TikTok, creator Cris King puts on her best Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth impression and announces that she has perfected a device that will turn the user into a girl. Her invention? The cult-favorite Lego toy line, Bionicle.

On TikTok, Twitter, or really any online space where trans femme people gather, Bionicle is a common meme, and so is the “Bionicle-to-trans pipeline.” For whatever reason, especially for trans women in their twenties or early thirties, these little buildable action figures have somehow become a part of trans girl culture.

And I’m not immune. Not only did I own dozens of Bionicle sets growing up, but I also watched and rewatched the animated movies, read every single novel, comic, and lore book front to cover multiple times, copy and pasted every online serial into my own single master document with a detailed visual encyclopedia of every mentioned character, and was active on the popular Bionicle web forum BZPower when I was barely ten years old. And yes, I am a trans woman. I too was turned into a girl by Bionicle.

But why? Why did this toy line with an absurdly complicated mythology become a touchstone for what seems to be an entire generation of trans people? There is no clear answer. Even when I reached out to Greg Farshtey — former Bionicle story lead and author of the vast majority of series’ novels — for comment, he more or less responded with a confused shrug and an admission that he wasn’t even aware of the phenomena.

I guess the easy answer to all of this would simply be that Bionicle — from its debut in 2001 to its quiet cancellation in 2010 — was a highly popular toy line. Children, cis and not, bought a lot of Bionicles during those years, and maybe us Zillenial trans folk are just assigning meaning to something that was ubiquitous to a lot of early aughts toy boxes. But that’s the boring answer, and it ignores the fact that cracking open a new Lewa Nuva cannister bears more than a passing resemblance to my little Estradiol pill bottle.

So, naturally, the question required research. And by research, I mean digging out my old novels, my disassembled Bionicle figures, and chatting up trans Bionicle nerds on Twitter. Real scholarly stuff.

As a starting point, I think it’s worth noting just how non-gendered the majority of the Bionicle line was. Without any prior knowledge, I doubt anyone could really tell you by just appearance which characters in the series were meant to be male or female. To the untrained eye, they’re just robots. Some are red. Some are blue. Some are white. This one has hooks for hands. This one can kick a rock. This one has a flame sword and surfs on lava. If you looked at the box, you might know the names of the characters and that the little ones were called Matoran and the larger superhero-styled characters were called Toa. (As a note: the naming conventions of the franchise have also gone through a few iterations. In 2001, Lego faced a lawsuit due to the company’s decision to use traditional and culturally significant Maori language in the Bionicle toy line. In a response to the justified criticism of cultural appropriation, multiple characters, terms, and products were renamed and rebranded.)

Likely to the frustration of many confused parents at the time, the toys mostly just look like interchangeable mask-wearing robots. Unlike most other contemporary toy series, including others released by Lego, Bionicle on its surface didn’t scream that it was a toy for boys or girls. It screamed that it was a toy for dorks that liked mystical robots.

As Daniel, an agender Bionicle fan, puts it: “You could honestly forget about gender while reading and watching Bionicle, which was a lot harder with many toys and shows from the era, meaning people who felt anxiety about gender could have a reprieve, and maybe why many trans women and nonbinary people stuck with it.”

But if you were to even dip your toes into the Mariana Trench of Bionicle lore, you would quickly realize that gender did in fact exist in these little robots. (I guess I should stop calling them robots given that the characters are specifically stated to be “bio-mechanical” beings…but robots is just easier.) While the vast majority of characters were gendered male, each wave of toys tended to include at least one female addition to the cast. Typically, this ended up being the blue-colored figures, beginning with the hook-handed Toa of Water, Gali, in 2001. Again, you would be forgiven for guessing the gender of any Bionicle incorrectly, but I did in fact have more than one playground debate where I loudly insisted that some ignorant child please use Gali’s correct pronouns. And while the pretty consistent 5-to-1 gender parity is something that fans have critiqued since day one, the simple fact that Bionicle had male and female heroes existing in roles that were virtually indistinguishable from one another definitely appealed to trans kids wading through the intensely binary toy aisles of the aughts. (The one explicitly gendered exception to all of this being the 2005 villain, Roodaka, who can be best be described as a chainmail-bikini-wearing dominatrix velociraptor who rocks a pair of stiletto heels and rules over a horde of marauding giant spiders, but she’s a special case.)

More than one trans fan I reached out to in the process of writing this essay expressed that this particularly blasé approach to gender in Bionicle was instrumental in their own coming to terms with their identity. “…That line of thinking, for me, probably wouldn’t have come around had it not been for Bionicle,” says Kit, a trans woman fan. “The series that made a [bunch of] Matoran and Toa who all looked largely the same, and decided ‘this one’s the girl’ when in reality, any of them could be and nothing would really change. Tahu could suddenly decide to use she/her pronouns if he wanted in the series and, literally, not a thing would really be different in a way that’d matter other than the character deciding ‘this is what makes me feel more comfortable.’ Society won’t collapse, fire won’t rain from the heavens, god doesn’t give a fuck. Hell, Tahu doesn’t even need to feel pressured to adhere to cisnormative gender structures, because frankly, they all look the fucking same.”

In-universe, gender mostly followed this role as well. In keeping with the series’ color-coded branding, culture in Bionicle is typically segmented into different societies connected to corresponding elements such as Fire, Water, Air, Ice, Stone, and Earth. (Please don’t ask me to define the difference between Stone and Earth. I’ve been stumped by that for 20 years.) Each of these cultures in turn had a corresponding gender, with all but water being male. But, again, gender mostly only ever meant a change in pronouns and, in audio-visual media, voice. Whenever asked, Farshtey routinely stressed that gender in the decidedly non-sexual world of Bionicle was not connected to any kind of physical body but instead something psychological or personal. And while Farshtey does end up using this to enforce some fairly binary ideas of “feminine elements” such as water being better suited for more stereotypical traits such as “peacekeepers,” the mere idea that gender is something separate from body was pretty mind-blowing to my little closeted trans girl self who was still decades away from cracking open Judith Butler.

Despite how many fans may have wanted to see characters within the Bionicle universe buck their own particularly gendered system, there are no real examples of Matoran or Toa that shirk the common gender of their culture. Gender variance or transition narratives don’t really exist in Bionicle’s universe. That is, with one big exception.

Almost every Bionicle fan I spoke to had quite a bit to say about Takua, the protagonist of the series’ first animated movie Mask of Light. Takua first made his appearance as a primary character in the online adventure game and animated web serials that made up a large chunk of the franchise’s narrative in the first two years of its existence. Interestingly, despite being gendered male and having the red-colored form normally associated with the fire society of Ta-Koro, Takua sported a blue mask, which I’ve hopefully made clear is the “girl color” in Bionicle. In a world where characters were often identified and segmented by monochromatic designs, Takua immediately stuck out as someone unique. This sort of mismatched visual design fit into Takua’s character as well. Despite being an honorary member of Ta-Koro, Takua spent most of his time wandering around his island home of Mata-Nui, not really sure where he was supposed to fit in. In Mask of Light, Takua’s blue mask is even shown not to fit properly, often shifting and twisting on his face.

“Takua’s story is one about queerness and isolation. He doesn’t fit in anywhere on the island, he’s an outsider but because of that he can do what others can’t,” says Morgan, a trans femme fan. He’s a literal misfit and often only seems comfortable operating as the Chronicler of the island’s stories and history, which gives him the ability to move between the islands various cultures and biomes without question.

In the plot of the film, Takua discovers a mysterious Kanohi, the magical masks that almost every Bionicle character wears, that seems to be the legendary Mask of Light. This mask is said to belong to a mysterious seventh Toa who will help defeat the series’ big bad, Makuta. From early in the film, Takua knows pretty clearly that he is the mask’s intended owner given the bright light it emits whenever it’s in his presence. But he spends most of the story avoiding this destiny, trying to pass off the Mask to his friends or undergoing a winding shaggy dog quest to find anyone else who might take it off his hands. When Takua finally does accept his responsibility and don the Mask of Light, he is transformed into a shining, golden hero, Takanuva. His voice even shifts from an awkward, cracking adolescent whine into a something angelic. When I watched the movie for the first time at my Bionicle-themed 10th birthday party (look, we’ve already established how far down the rabbit hole I was), a friend of mine even groaned, “Ew. He’s a girl now.”

And while Takanuva does remain “male” and Greg Farshtey and the rest of the Bionicle story crew are unlikely to admit that the character was written with any kind of intended trans narrative, it hasn’t stopped trans fans from latching onto this reading. “In the climax of the movie, he pulls aside the ill-fitting mask and puts on the [Mask of Light], ushering in a dramatic transformation as he fulfills his destiny, changing his name to Takanuva in the process. The trans allegory isn’t subtle,” Haley, a nonbinary trans woman, argues. There’s even the fact that the figure that Takanuva’s Lego set most resembles is Gali Nuva, who again is the only female member of the team. It’s there. You can’t deny it, Greg.

There’s even more to pick apart in the actual play and creation of Bionicle. When you take home a new Toa or any number of new annual baddies, you are quite literally constructing bodies. And while, like all Lego products, there are instructions guiding you in how to build the marketed character, you are just as encouraged to experiment and develop your own characters, creatures, vehicles, whatever. And it certainly helped that the main characters themselves were always evolving physically. Out of universe, the transformation of certain characters from year to year was clearly a way for Lego to essentially sell the same character twice. (You liked Tahu? Well, he fell into some magic platinum goo, and he looks like this now. That’ll be another $12.) But it also showcased that bodies were always in flux. That identity could be as singular or fluid as you like. That the body itself can alter in ways you don’t expect. For a generation of closeted trans kids, having any kind of way to hack and shift a body was exciting, and Bionicle not only offered the tools to experiment but also a canvas to put these new bodies into. It presented an escapist universe that was almost void of gender as we understand it but instead filled with imagination, creation, millennia long conspiracies, cyberpunk dystopias, underwater warlords commanding armies of sharks and crabs, and a sick ass commercial set to All American Reject’s “Move Along.”

So like, did Bionicle turn a generation of kids trans or were there just a lot of young, confused trans kids who found escape in a franchise about elemental robot super heroes? The answer is really both and neither. More than a few fans I spoke with did say that if it weren’t for Bionicle they may not have come to understand their gender when they did. I’m not really sure if I’m ready to make that conclusion for myself, but there is a certain joy in realizing a shared childhood obsession. Not a day goes by where I don’t mourn the fact that I didn’t have a traditional girlhood. As comfortable as I may now be in my gender, I still often find it hard to relate to women who talk about their own childhoods and the media and toys that were a part of it. The fact that there were other closeted girls and trans folks who also felt drawn to the same biomechanical characters as me, enough to make it an in-community meme, feels almost welcoming. So, no, Bionicle may have not made me a girl, but it may have helped me feel as close to one as I could have in a time when I and so many others were still hiding behind our masks.