Revisiting Transamerica
Felicity Huffman in Transamerica.
The landscape for transgender people has changed dramatically since the release of Transamerica in 2005. While some change has been positive - greater visibility and wider acceptance have also led to more virulent pushback, putting trans people in the crosshairs of a conservative culture war.
Many on the right view this increased visibility as some trend, never mind the fact that greater visibility helps people not only feel more comfortable coming out but can also help them understand and articulate their identities in ways they may have been previously unable to. In 2005, trans people were more of a curiosity than a mainstream civil rights movement, even within the LGBT community, which favored the fight for gay marriage as the mainstream queer cause célèbre of the time. In many ways, Transamerica is a perfect encapsulation of how transgender people were seen at the time, and how we are still seen in many liberal circles today.
Felicity Huffman received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Bree, a transgender woman who, on the cusp of her gender confirmation surgery, discovers that she has a long-lost son from a one-night stand in college many years before. Now 17 years old, Toby (Kevin Zegers) is a hustler who spends his time turning tricks on the streets for drugs. After his arrest, Bree's therapist sends her across the country to New York to pick him up to reconnect with her past before she can go through with her surgery. Bree hides her identity from him at first, and the two embark on a cross-country road trip that brings them closer together, creating the family neither of them had ever been able to have.
Let's start with the inherent cruelty of the premise - that a cisgender doctor is holding Bree's gender confirmation surgery over her head as a bargaining chip to force her to reconnect with a son she didn't know she had, a surgery that took years to schedule and would take another year to reschedule if it is missed. It's something that is clearly vital to Bree's mental health, so to see this used as some kind of cutesy plot device to get a trans character where the filmmakers need her to be feel deeply insidious, especially given that the doctor is portrayed as the reasonable one who is only acting in her patient's best interest.
In fact, the entire tone of the film takes on a kind of patronizing view of Bree that is consistently frustrating at best and deeply offensive at worst. Bree is portrayed as a pitiable figure, a mentally ill curiosity who is wearing femininity as a costume, constantly fussing with her makeup, adjusting her stance, and adopting self-consciously prissy mannerisms that make every facet of her being feel exaggerated. She refers to her dead name in the third person and speaks of a previous life as if she was a different person altogether prior to transitioning, rather than finally realizing the true person she was all along.
Felicity Huffman and Kevin Zegers in Transamerica.
There can be, of course, a learning curve as newly out trans women navigate the newfound freedom to behave as they've always wanted after years of suppressing their femininity. Yet Transamerica, this comes across as deeply condescending. Huffman's performance, once widely hailed, feels stiff, a masquerade of masculine femininity. Bree is made to look frumpy and awkward, and Huffman's attempts to deepen her voice sound less like someone with a lower voice trying to raise it and more like someone with a higher voice trying to lower it, and the result is a performance that often feels quite stilted and unsure of itself - very much by design.
Naturally, this is the kind of thing once viewed by the Academy as transformative and brave, a beautiful woman unafraid to look unattractive. It's notable, then that Huffman is shown nude twice in the film, once with a penis and once without. The focus on Bree's genitals and her upcoming surgery as the ultimate transition into womanhood feels like a cisgender fantasy of what it means to be trans. Therein lies Transamerica’s biggest fault - this sense that its subject is a curiosity to be observed and pitied. It feels tailor-made for well-meaning liberals to gawk at the pain of a long-suffering transsexual like an animal in the zoo and pat themselves on the back for feeling sorry for her. In some ways, this feels almost more insulting than the outright hatred thrown at us from the right. That the film is ostensibly a comedy feels even more so; mining quirky comedy out of a trans woman being denied her gender confirmation surgery to force her to do something "for her own good" feels like the height of liberal paternalism.
And yet, and yet...it's hard to hate Transamerica. I find it a fascinating window into how cis people see us. I do not like how it portrays trans people as weak, helpless, and crippled by body dysphoria - that "true womanhood" can only be achieved through surgery as a key to happiness. But I also find Bree's relationship with her son oddly compelling, and the film ultimately lands on Bree being a perfectly well-adjusted person capable of living a normal life as a woman. What's frustrating is the idea that the only way that was possible was through surgery. Up to that point, writer/director Duncan Tucker treats her as the butt of the joke - her fish-out-of-water discomfort is the backbone of the film's comedy. Where the film really works, however, is in its portrayal of her relationship with her estranged family - struggling to be seen as the person she is while her family only wants to see her as the person she was. It's a note of truth in an otherwise phony film.
Yet that brings us back to the crux of the issue - the portrayal of trans people as objects of pity. That Huffman's performance was so widely praised at the time feels deeply indicative of the state of the culture in 2005. It gets so many things wrong about being trans, but removed from the fraught contemporary political landscape, it almost feels innocent, even naïve. It's a perfectly fine road movie, buddy comedy, what have you, but as a portrayal of trans-ness, it fails on nearly every level, well-intentioned but woefully misguided. You get the feeling that despite the main character being portrayed by a cis woman, that the filmmakers never fully see her as a woman. While weak attempts are made to differentiate her from a "transvestite," it's clear that the filmmakers see her as some sort of secret third thing, a severely mentally ill individual to be placated rather than embraced. In that way, it's not much different than how conservatives see us, really. While conservatives may see us as monstrosities to be squashed, liberals often see us as long-suffering victims to be pitied - neither one really affording us our own personhood or addressing our actual needs. Transamerica is certainly representative of the latter attitude, and while we may have come a long way in the nearly 20 years since it was released, it's remarkable to see how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
