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“It wants to turn me into something else. That’s not too terrible, is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else”, Seth Brundle reassures his concerned girlfriend in response to his monstrous transformation in The Fly (1986). “To become the new flesh, you have to kill the old flesh”, Nicki Brand instructs Max Renn, traumatized by his bodily changes in Videodrome (1983). “I don’t like what’s happening with the body, in particular what’s happening with mine,” grumbles Saul Tenser, dawned in black clothing fully concealing his skin and form in Crimes of the Future (2022), “Which is why I keep cutting it up.”

Much like how many gay people have reclaimed “monster-queers” in horror films, embracing historically queer-coded villains and celebrating their defiance to the dominant (hetero)normativity of their narratives, many transgender people have done the same with body horror cinema, seeing themselves reflected powerfully in the mutated and the grotesque. As the subgenre primarily focuses on the horrors of the body acting against one’s will, feeling foreign in one’s flesh and losing control and autonomy through hideously painful and unwanted transformation, it is a subject matter trans people unfortunately know intimately. In fact, what a cis person would describe as “body horror” many trans people would simply call “puberty”, and as transgender film critic Willow Maclay describes, “puberty is hell, but the puberty you never asked for is deadly”. While many body horror films can be read as transgender metaphor, perhaps none reach the subtextually transsexual heights of the films made by the man considered by many to be the father of the genre itself, David Cronenberg.

When I first saw Crimes of the Future in 2022, it was a very special occasion. Not only was I seeing a newly-released Cronenberg movie in a theater for the first time in my life, but I had just started hormone replacement therapy a few months prior. I had heard rumblings of alleged transgender subtext in the film prior to seeing it, and had assumed so given its famous slogans “SURGERY IS THE NEW SEX” and “BODY IS REALITY”, but nothing could have prepared me for how much of a transsexual allegory the film truly was. A child murdered by his mother due to his “naturally unnatural” body sparks an underground revolution of people who are either born or undergo surgery that allows them to consume plastics in order to accelerate human evolution. This does not come without political backlash, as the government (the New Vice Unit) policies, monitors and actively eliminates those working towards bodily liberation. Saul Tenser, a performance artist with “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome” lives a painful life of misery and shame, rejecting the changes of his body by having his new “novel” organs removed in front of an audience as well as doubling as a secret informant for the New Vice Unit, complicit in the extermination of his own community.

Throughout the film I was hearing language used in the countless phone calls and doctor visits I was experiencing at the beginning of my transition journey — Hell, the introduction of our main characters includes Saul’s partner Caprice informing him that “There’s a new hormone in your bloodstream.” Tenser is booked for a consultation regarding a “medical problem” dubbed a “political problem” by the woman who made him the appointment. Cronenberg even uses the term “transition” when describing the underground group modifying their bodies in order to safely consume microplastics in a Notes on a Scene video with Vanity Fair. Tenser himself seems like a walking metaphor for gender dysphoria, as he is constantly uncomfortable in his day-to-day life, covers his body up completely while in public, and does everything he can to correct his bodily difference through removing his new organs entirely, brimming with self-hatred while saying that the growth of these organs “doesn’t seem to be my decision.”

At the end of the film, Tenser gives in and tries one of the synthetic bars the evolutionists developed as a replacement for regular food, and he is able to digest it without any pain. The tears of joy welling in his eyes after doing so reminded me of when I first injected my first .05 mL of testosterone into my thigh — my life had officially begun, and I was finally at home in my body. Pure (gender) euphoria.

Transsexual imagery and allegory is nothing new in Cronenberg’s filmography. In the world of Cronenberg, men have vaginas and women have penises, albeit as monstrous mutations fitting for the horror genre. Max Renn of Videodrome has a pulsating vulva-esque orifice appear on his stomach, his immediate reaction being to point his gun towards it. Rose of Rabid (1977) wails, “I’m hideous, doctor. I’m crazy and a monster!” before revealing to him her vampiric armpit phallus. Even in The Fly as Seth Brundle transitions into a whole new being his penis gets left behind, found in his medicine cabinet, a.k.a. the “Brundle Museum of Natural History”.

In The Politics of Everyday Fear, Steven Shaviro argues that the destruction of binary oppositions, including the gender binary through “new arrangement of the flesh” is “the major structural principle of all of Cronenberg’s films'' (Shavino, 115). This point is expanded upon further by Scott Loren in his essay “Mutating Masculinity: Visions of Gender and Violence in the Cinema of David Cronenberg”, wherein he argues that “the most fixed notion of gender to be found in (Cronenberg’s) work is that gender is mutable'' (Loren, 152). In an interview in 1991 documented in the book The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg, the horror auteur was asked directly about the “interchangeability of the sexes'' present in his filmography, and while he explicitly denies that his comments related to “transsexual operations”, it sure does sound like it, as he predicts a future wherein people can “swap sexual organs” and where society’s strict gender binary would fade over time (190-191).

Besides breaking down binaries, another consistent theme spanning the majority of Cronenberg’s filmography is the policing, regulation and surveillance of people’s bodies by their government, institutions and corporations. There’s the military company Consec exploiting the Scanners’ telepathic and telekinetic abilities in Scanners (1981), the shady Spectacular Optical who produce the tumor and hallucination-inducing Videodrome, and of course the New Vice Unit and their new office The National Organ Registry, responsible for the documentation of new organs in Crimes of the Future. The control of citizen’s bodies in Cronenberg’s films show up in more subtle ways as well, such as when Veronica has to argue with a doctor for her right to an abortion, threatening that she’ll do it herself if the doctor denies her one in The Fly.

Many instances of both political regression and controlling of bodies in Cronenberg’s works reflect real-world discrimination against marginalized groups, acknowledged by Cronenberg himself in his Vanity Fair “Notes on a Scene” episode, stating: “Strangely and sadly it has huge political repercussions right now. When I wrote (Crimes) twenty years ago I wasn’t thinking about that specifically but this is always a go-around, about who controls the bodies of the citizens, who controls women’s bodies, who controls the bodies of transgender people — It’s like ‘Are you allowed to do that?’ Can the government actually tell you what to do with your body or not? Even if it doesn’t affect anyone else?”

Despite being considered the godfather of the genre, Cronenberg doesn’t particularly care for the term “Body Horror”, instead referring to it as “Body Beautiful” in an interview with the CBC. Despite the oftentimes gruesome and disturbing imagery dubbed “Cronenbergian”, both he and his films often view bodily transformation as empowering and liberating — A character in Crimes of the Future even reassures Tenser regarding his personal struggles with his body by affirming “The creation of inner beauty can never be an accident.” Linda Ruth Williams argues in the book The Body’s Perilous Pleasures that “For Cronenberg, anatomy is anything but destiny” (39), and as a trans person, how relieving is that? That we possess the power to mold and shape our bodies in our own self image; that not only is a better future possible, but a future where we are able to exist as we are.

And how does Cronenberg respond now regarding the “interchangeability of sexes” when compared to his comments in 1991? Well, we get an answer quite beautiful, including what has now become one of my all-time favorite quotes regarding the transgender experience. When asked by Vulture if he was aware of the “transgender movement”, Cronenberg thoughtfully replied, “Yeah, well I observe it. I’m not really engaged with it directly. They’re taking that idea seriously. They’re saying ‘body is reality. I want to change my body.’ And they’re being very brave and they’re investing a lot in these changes, especially the ones that are not reversible, which most of them aren’t. I say, go ahead. This is an artist giving their all to their art.”

As I am writing this, I am lying in bed two weeks into recovery for gender-affirming surgery. As I run my fingers over my freshly cut top surgery scars, I think about how agonizing it was for me to get here. How I spent years and years hidden away out of fear of being perceived, socially isolated out of dysphoric disgust for my own body mutating out of my control, turning me into something only I knew I wasn’t. How the increasing visibility, awareness and representation of people like me is discussed in the media and by government officials like a sweeping social contagion. That the euphoric healing that comes with accessible transgender healthcare is considered irreversible mutilation that should be made more difficult or impossible to access. That by merely existing in my body is political. That the “cure” to my “condition” is eradication. However, much like David Cronenberg, what society considers to be “body horror” I consider to be “body beautiful”.

And as I feel inner peace for the first time in my life as my identity finally feels in my control, I sigh with relief while repeating a famous film mantra in my head: “LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!”