Trans Cinema 🏳️⚧️
Streaming selections for 2025's Pride Month
I would be remiss in not acknowledging that today is also Father’s Day in the United States! If you want to read a recent newsletter rounding up some of my favorite movies about fathers, children, and what passes between the generations, might I direct you toward…
We’re now halfway through Pride Month, which I previously commemorated in the newsletter back in 2022 with a roundup of 10 films that offer narratives beyond pain and suffering for the LGBTQ+ community.
Needless to say, the climate has shifted a bit in the intervening three years…
This weekend’s programming focus, along with today’s newsletter, highlights a group that has come under significant threat this year: transgender individuals.
Far beyond merely rolling back rights and protections safeguarded under previous administrations, the second Trump administration has put in overtime to erase and remove trans people from public life. It goes beyond undermining visibility — it threatens their very safety to live openly and freely as an expression of who they are. I would recommend reading through this thorough overview compiled by The 19th of actions taken in 2025 that put our friends and neighbors at risk.
I know there will be a wide range of opinions on here about some of these issues, but one thing I will firmly and forever stand for is the value and dignity of all human life, no matter what someone has chosen as their gender expression. Your talking point or culture war issue is someone else’s safety and security, just as valuable as anyone else’s.
If you feel compelled to support this cause monetarily, I would look to organizations like The Trevor Project and Trans Lifeline to help the community. But if you’re just looking to flex your empathy to learn more about a group that has always and will always exist, I’ve rounded up 10 films that will help you understand.
Cowboys, Amazon Prime Video
Here’s a film that qualifies as a great Father’s Day watch, too! Perhaps slightly to its detriment, Cowboys shines a light on the experience of a parent in Steve Zahn’s Troy as he tries to help his young trans son, Joe, find acceptance in the world. That means fleeing Montana and heading for Canada, setting off a police manhunt that reveals his mother won’t confide in the authorities that her child might be presenting as a boy. It’s a moving adventure about acceptance and understanding that makes space for cisgender characters to work through their feelings without ever losing sight of the vulnerable person in real danger.
A Fantastic Woman, Peacock
“It’s about walking down the street and people looking at you, or the fear that people can take you away in a car,” A Fantastic Woman star Daniela Vega told me about bringing her life experiences as a trans woman into Pablo Larraín’s film. “It was […] about bringing sensations I’ve felt into new contexts.” The Oscar-winning Chilean film follows Vega’s Marina as she navigates the fallout from the unexpected death of her older boyfriend. The actress’s grounded, humane performance helps Larraín navigate the swings between depicting the ordinary tasks of grief and loss and the extraordinary capacity Marina has inside.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch, available to rent from various digital platforms
"Drag is a mask available to all, and that's why anyone should be able to play Hedwig," said the role’s co-creators John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask. Hedwig and the Angry Inch might not lend itself particularly well to celebration or condemnation as the titular character’s gender assignment comes as the result of coercion and non-consensual agreement. Mitchell’s film goes beyond the glitz of the glam rock background in which Hedwig Robinson performs, exploring both the pain and joy underlying all the artifice and performance. There’s a bit of punk energy, dare I say, that renders her odd odyssey accessible to a wider range of viewers who see binaries as foolish constructs by which to abide.
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Max and Criterion Channel
This recommendation needs a bit of context, so hear me out a bit. The trans community has often had to squint and read between the lines of a text to find themselves represented in a story. (See: the films of the Wachowskis.) The subtext written in invisible ink has become text for many trans viewers. There’s been a slow process of clarifying the transness inherent in Kiss of the Spider Woman, a 1976 Argentine novel turned 1985 Brazilian film … plus a 1993 Broadway musical being turned into a 2025 film (releasing later this year). The effeminate prisoner Luis Molina, played to Oscar-winning effect here by William Hurt, swoons over the larger-than-life screen queens to escape his reality. There’s a guardedness to Hurt’s embrace of what that means as he narrates the story of Luis’ favorite film to his cellmate, Raul Julia’s hardened revolutionary Valentin. It’s clear he identifies with the leading lady, but future incarnations of the story have more fully embraced what that means for his character’s gender identity and expression. I think it’s helpful to understand where this story has been to more fully appreciate what the revelatory Tonatiuh does with the character in the new film. (I’m quoted in the trailer gushing about him!)
Kokomo City, Paramount+
“I created this film for so many reasons, and one of those reasons was my being ostracized [after transitioning] from the music industry from producing for 15 years,” documentary multihyphenate D. Smith told me of Kokomo City, her film about the Black trans sex worker community. “In this film, I went looking for girls, not victims, not crybabies, but girls who really never had the opportunity to speak in such a safe, clear way.” It’s a film built around her talkative subjects, one of whom was tragically murdered shortly after its world premiere at Sundance in 2023. Their wild anecdotes all coalesce to underscore a larger truth superseding their individual experiences. Black trans women existing — and men desiring them — explodes white-centered hierarchies of race and gender that make many people extremely uncomfortable.
No Ordinary Man, available to rent from various digital platforms
The documentary No Ordinary Man runs through the events of the past fairly quickly. American jazz musician Billy Tipton achieved notable success in life, but in death, his truth as a transgender man was revealed. Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt’s film rescues his story from the tabloidization and sensationalization that eventually subsumed his legacy. But it’s also firmly rooted in the present tense as a group of assembled trans male artists, some of whom seem to be auditioning for a fake biopic about Tipton, reflect on what it means to grapple with a complicated figure in their community’s highly invisible secret history. The editing does a great job of collapsing time altogether to convey what it means to connect the past to the present to have a future.
Orlando, available to rent from various digital platforms
In Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography, the eponymous English protagonist and poet manages to transcend time and gender over several centuries while interacting with various literary luminaries. Sally Potter’s film takes Woolf a step further and embraces the androgyny and the ambiguity of the character through star Tilda Swinton, who seems to exist outside of gender altogether. The film embraces a style of magical realism but never feels the need to “solve” the character’s gender like it were some kind of problem. It’s simply a mode of experiencing history here.
The Queen, Metrograph at Home (and available to rent from various digital platforms)
If you think RuPaul’s Drag Race just fell out of a coconut tree, then educate yourself on the history of drag further with Frank Simon’s 1968 documentary The Queen. This mid-century look at cross-dressing competitions captures the cattiness and campiness, sure, associated with sending up gender performance. But it’s also deeply compassionate, especially in the way it captures unguarded conversations between the performers reflecting on the nature of their gender and sexual identification. At barely over an hour, too, it’s an easy way to gain a sense of the continuity in the community.
Tomboy, Criterion Channel
Everyone trying to legislate trans children out of existence would be advised to watch Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy (though I’m under no illusion this scenario would ever happen). This deeply humane story of a young boy moving to a new town and trying to conceal his assigned sex at birth rings with the deeply personal, specific circumstances of transgender passing. Yet the struggles of trying to fit in and make friends who like you for who you are will be familiar to anyone, regardless of gender identification. This is empathy incarnate.
The Wild Boys, Tubi (free with ads)
I will give away the game a little bit on Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys because, admittedly, I didn’t fully “get” the central artistic gambit before I watched it. The film features five female actors playing delinquent boys being sent for punishment to a mystical island where they will be changed … into women. There’s a subversiveness baked into the very fabric of this fable-like French film that raises fascinating questions about the fluidity and flexibility of gender itself. It’s riotously fun, too!
I reviewed Ballerina for The Playlist, which could have been so much worse.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
I don’t even watch Andor, but I saw an excerpt of a quote from showrunner Tony Gilroy’s appearance on conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s podcast and decided to give the full thing a listen. It didn’t disappoint, in part because Gilroy did not always accept the framings he was given.
A lot of this album, too, in celebration of recently departed musical genius Brian Wilson.
You’re welcome, Zoomers — per The New York Times (gift article), “Everything Millennial Is Cool Again.”
I found this Atlantic piece from a Victor Hugo biographer to be a great read about the irony of Trump’s love of Les Misérables.
Back next week with some fun stuff!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall