Transgender films

Although German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld popularised the word ‘transvestite’ and co-wrote the first explicitly gay film, Different from the Others (1919), before supervising the first sex reassignment operations, there is little which might be called transgender cinema before the 1960s, disregarding cross-dressing farces such as I Was a Male War Bride (1949) or Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959).

Although many of the first transsexual and openly transgender-identified people were trans men, the cinema, like newspapers and television, tended to focus on trans women, perhaps because the idea that people might voluntarily relinquish their male privilege mystified the men who controlled the western media. After Ed Wood’s risible Glen or Glenda (1953), which took the fame of American transsexual woman Christine Jorgensen and turned it into a semi-autobiographical story about a man who liked angora sweaters, came Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), based on Robert Bloch’s novel about serial killer Ed Gein, who killed over a dozen women and made a vest of their skins. The depiction of Norman Bates as a gender-troubled murderer set a template for the portrayal of trans people as psychopaths, with 2 further films based on Gein – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), besides Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980).

During the 1960s, underground filmmakers cast trans people – and not always in trans roles. Jack Smith put Mario Montez and others in short films such as Flaming Creatures (1963) and Normal Love (1963), as did Ron Rice, and Andy Warhol’s work included actors who challenged the gender binary. Later, in Europe, Pedro Almodóvar and Rosa von Praunheim cast transgender people in transgender roles, but this remains unusual: even when it aims for sympathetic portrayals, popular cinema continues to cast non-trans people in trans roles, for example Jared Leto’s Oscar-winning turn as Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club (2013), or Eddie Redmayne in Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl (2015).

BFI website