[Pride 2021] Transmasculinity in Horror

As trans man who avidly enjoys queer horror media and criticism, I had long assumed that transmasculinity is rarely discussed in LGBT horror analysis simply because there isn’t much to talk about. After all, trans men rarely appear on screen in any genre. But with extra time on my hands during COVID-19 restrictions, I decided to search for representations of trans men or other transmasculine people in horror. To my surprise, I found a handful of characters who could reasonably be classified as trans men, taking the misconceptions about transgender people that were (and are) culturally prevalent into account.

The oldest example I found came from Homicidal, a 1961 thriller directed by B-movie master William Castle. The film follows the murderous escapades of Warren, the heir to a wealthy magnate’s fortune. Warren was assigned female at birth but raised as a boy by his mother so that his sexist father would favor him in his will. After his parents die, Warren creates a female alter ego and, dressed as her, tries to murder anyone aware of his assigned gender so that his inheritance will be secure. 

Transmasculine characters also appear in Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), Private Parts (1972), Girls’ Nite Out (1982), and Strange Circus (2005). Because I was familiar with how horror movies typically treat trans women, I wasn’t shocked that many of these films conflated being transgender with being violent and deranged. I was, however, surprised by how much fun I had watching these campy, queer narratives, and by how much I often related to the plight of horror’s forgotten trans men. Like other monster queers and gay-coded villains, Warren and his brethren appealed to me because of the radical threat to the cisnormative status quo that they embodied. 

Since the beginning of 2021, however, it has been harder for me to watch the knife, needle, and chainsaw-wielding antics of trans horror antagonists without reflecting on the real horror of the reactionary backlash against trans rights. Transgender killers might have faded from popularity in today’s horror movies, but the attitudes that birthed the trope have proved harder to exorcize. I don’t hold decades’ old films responsible for the current state of affairs, but it saddens me that contemporary discourse is haunted by the same biases as B movies made in the Stonewall era. 

In current debates about trans rights, parents who support their transgender sons are frequently accused of manipulating cis girls into transitioning or incentivizing them to do so by raising them with oppressive notions about gender. Many of the films I watched present an exaggerated version of this scenario, with wicked caretakers forcing girls to transition so that they can have the son they always wanted. Just as actual trans men are interpreted by transphobes as both victims of internalized misogyny and threatening vectors of “gender ideology,” trans men in horror are commonly depicted as simultaneously pitiable and frightening. 

For example, Paul Bartel’s Private Parts presents its voyeuristic trans photographer George as a tragic outcast who resents his transformation and the deviant urges that accompany it. George’s obsession with injecting his blood into nonconsenting women is attributed to his supposed inability to engage in “normal” sex as a transgender man. Like Warren and Four Flies’ Nina, George didn’t choose to transition but was made to by his woman-hating mother. George and the others are portrayed sympathetically because they have “been transed” by external forces. Living as a gender that is not their own is so distressing to these characters that they are driven to madness and murder. Ironically, these films acknowledge the pain of being perceived as a gender that is incongruous with your sense of self and of having to conceal trans status in a hostile society…but only when people who technically aren’t transgender experience these problems under outlandish circumstances. 

And sympathy for those forced into gender nonconformity only extends so far. As if they were infected by a werewolf’s bite, George, Warren, and Nina must be destroyed to save the social order. Crossing the boundaries of assigned gender, even unwillingly or temporarily, is a fatal transgression. A kind of irreversible damage, one might say. 

When the parents aren’t to blame, mental illness or sexual deviance are usually identified as the cause of gender-transgressive behavior. In Girls’ Nite Out (1982) and High Tension (2003), sexually repressed, unstable women target attractive, feminine victims while inhabiting male personas. These killers presented as frenzied, delusional, and out of touch with their own identities. Girls’ Nite Out’s Barney lasciviously stalks co-eds, believing that she is her own dead brother. In High Tension, Marie’s (gender) identity crisis is attributed to repressed lesbianism. As she battles her own rampaging alter-ego, Marie grapples with the embodiment of her attraction to her female friend, but also with the worst aspects of masculinity that she is trying to repress and deny in herself. Because they reject traditional femininity, Barney and Marie are depicted as self-hating imitators of men who may harm themselves and other (acceptably feminine) women due to internalized misogyny and homophobia.  

The only outlier I found that didn’t treat female to male transition as a form of child abuse, delusion, or self-hatred was Sian Sono’s Strange Circus. The film tracks the mental deterioration of Taeko, the author of a grotesque series of erotic novels about a young girl named Mitsuko. In Taeko’s latest work, Mitsuko is abused sexually by her father Gozo and physically by her mother Sayrui. Taeko is increasingly convinced that her stories are repressed memories of her own childhood. She suspects, but is not certain, that she has been Mitsuko all along. Taeko’s narrative is challenged by her assistant Yuji, who was hired to investigate her past. In the final act, Yuji announces that he was really Mitsuko, and Taeko is Sayuri, his abusive mother, who buried her memories out of guilt. After growing up and transitioning, Yuji, has returned to wreak vengeance on his abusers. 

Strange Circus is a rare horror movie in which a trans man not only survives but is given a chance to reflect on his own identity. Yuji explains that “To me, the body is a vase you put your flowers in…I wanted to be a vase that compliments the flowers.” His transition is presented as an expression of his body autonomy. It is his mother’s attempt to control Yuji’s image and mold him into a replica of herself that is shown to be monstrous. Despite its inaccuracies (if you want to know what top surgery results are like, don’t look to Strange Circus for a realistic idea), the film is empathetic to the horrors experienced by a transgender character. Watching Yuji rev his chainsaw, liberated at last from his father’s abuses and mother’s lies, rekindled my hope of seeing more and better interpretations of trans men and transmasculinity in horror in the future.  

PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING TO
THE GAYLY HELPFUL FUNDRAISER FOR THE TRANSGENDER LAW CENTER