Welcome to Trans Tuesday! Tillyvision stops for no one (except for me, when we get to the end) in THE UNINTENTIONALLY INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF LISA FRANKENSTEIN, part 5! This week we’ll examine the hell we’ve been trapped in, and confront a part of ourselves we’d left for dead!
I don’t know how many times I’ve got to tell you, but you def need PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, and PART 4 first. If you start here at part 5, listen, I won’t be held responsible for your confusion.
Ready? Heck yeah! Go!
25:47 – Lisa climbs out onto the roof and we get our first look at the house she lives in, is trapped in. It’s gender conformity allll the way down, with only more gender conformity and dysphoria inside. Look at how the symbols just below both house peaks look like a uterus! They’re the highest points, for the woman at the top and the girls beneath her. Making babies is what women are for, and that includes you Lisa, because you’re a woman!
And the two oval windows, in places of prominence, that look like vulvas!
This house is nothing but conformity and dysphoria for a trans man. Again, trans dudes don’t need to have bottom dysphoria, but this is metaphor… and Lisa sure seems to have bottom dysphoria.
26:18 – She falls, and Frank is there to break her fall. Supertext? You better believe it.
And there they are, face to face. But he’s sure hard to see clearly, isn’t he? The neighbors hear Lisa screaming and think nothing of it because “[Lisa’s] very odd.” Not worth helping when you scream, not if you’re gonna be all trans about it. But they think Taffy’s “adorable. And what a figure!” (ew)
This is how society reinforces its gender norms and compulsory cisness, and we absorb that our whole lives and learn we’d better be good little cis folks or people will never help us. (How sad it is that we’re at a point where just not helping us feels like it’d be a step up from everyone always attacking us).
To learn more about the ways society programs these things into us, see IMPLICIT QUEERPHOBIA.
26:55 – Back in the house Lisa sprints past the mirror, and it once again splits and breaks her reflection. She picks up the red phone to call 911… but hears Frank on the phone? He’s grunting into her dad’s shoe-phone from the other room, where he sits on the floor. She’s going to call for help, and the man she is, or wants to be, is there for her. He’s the help she seeks.
“Strange” by Galaxie 500 plays again. We previously heard it in Lisa’s dream… her dream about becoming her true self. That it plays again here, when she finally meets him, is telling you lots. Are you listening?
Frank’s missing a hand. The man she truly is doesn’t have all the body parts you might expect a man to, or doesn’t look the way society tells you that men look. And she’s immediately no longer afraid of him.
27:35 – Look at the pink and blue under the stereo, right next to Frank. Transness!
Lisa mentions the shoe phone was a free gift with her dad’s subscription to Sports Illustrated, more conforming to gendered expectations. Does Lisa seem sporty to you? Like she wants to play sports? No. That is also not the kind of man she wants to be, but that’s what society says men have to be, and this shit really messes you up when you’re trying to figure things out.
No shade if you are a trans guy who likes sports, I like sports and I’m a trans woman! Like what you like! But also there are things society says we have to do and like to be men and women, and that’s bullshit. Did you notice that the golf club Lisa grabbed to defend herself had a green-blue dysphoria cover on it? Being a sports dude is not the kind of man she wants to be either.
Frank gives Lisa her lost slipper back. This guy you are inside and want to be? He can help you, Lisa.
28:26 – They talk about the music, she asks him if he likes the song (the song about how living a lie brings no joy!), she says she has The Cure and Frank is excited and holds out his hand-stump, and she meant the band, not the cure to gender dysphoria, but that music can cure him emotionally.
But she does have the cure to Frank being incomplete! Letting him out and transitioning can make you whole.
28:33 – She takes Frank to her room and says, “We’ve got to hide you.” Yeah we know what happens when you let your inner man out, your mom becomes dead to you and vice versa. “Definitely no one can see you.”
We only let our true selves out for minutes at a time at first, hidden behind closed doors.
When they enter her room, aka subconscious, in the background you can see a poster for The Mummy on the wall. Remember how she wrapped herself up in blankets when Frank was brought back to life?
This’ll come up again. It’s something that’s on Lisa’s mind.
Frank spots the rubbing from his gravestone, and points to it to let her know that’s him. It’s you Lisa, the true you. Back from the dead. It’s not too late. To confirm he pulls Lisa’s mom’s rosary out of a pocket. He kept it safe just like she asked.
Reconnecting with her inner man that she thought was dead brings back all those feelings, from her mother, that kept her trapped. Now she’s feeling all those things again.
29:28 – Lisa: “You? You’re him? Well, why are you here?” I didn’t ask for this, why is this happening to me? He lifts her hand to kiss it, and she pulls away, disgusted. Sadly society teaches us to be disgusted with ourselves, that our transness is something wrong, to be ashamed of, to hide behind closed doors. She’s not ready to fully accept. Oof that INTERNALIZED TRANSPHOBIA hits hard.
29:47 – Lisa: “When I said I wished I was with you, I meant I wished I was in the ground, dead. Life sucks and people are jerk-offs.” She wished her false girl shell was dead so she could be with the boy she’d been pretending was dead all her life, and now he’s here, alive.
Also, realistically, a lot of trans people feel so attacked by society and their own friends and family, and are left to suffer, that many can think death is their only way out. And that’s extra horrible and sad because happiness is attainable if we’re just supported.
Lisa clarifies she was only looking for that way out, and didn’t realize there was another way out of her pain and misery… through him. Frank is saddened by the news, he cries. He’s sensitive.
And the smell overwhelms her.
Now look, she was kinda into the smell of the guy she thought she wanted to be, Michael Trent. What would it be like to smell like that?
Here, her true man has a smell, and it revolts her. Remember that the tanning bed shed is our metaphor for HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY.
One of the first things to happen for a lot of people who go on HRT is that our smell changes. Really early on in my medical transition, I just started smelling like a girl! For trans people on testosterone, it goes the other way.
I imagine everyone’s familiar with the smell of boy funk. It is, generally, somewhat less pleasant than girl smell. Some people undoubtedly like it! But Lisa was not prepared for her smell to change, and possibly “worsen” in her opinion. It’s also possible that suddenly smelling like a boy spiked some INTERNALIZED TRANSPHOBIA, so do read that if you haven’t yet.
30:37 – She takes him into the bathroom, he picks up a douche, and she’s like… no. He drops it. Many trans men would like to not have the body parts those are used on, I’m just saying.
Again again again, you don’t have to need or want bottom surgery to be trans, okay? Just clarifying. This is metaphor remember. You will find no TRANSMEDICALISM here.
30:43 – The mirror in the bathroom is fixed already, but through this scene you never see them in it. But here you can see Lisa’s looking at it… but she’s not looking at it straight on. She’s looking at an angle… she’s looking at Frank. Even though he doesn’t at all look like the man she recognizes or wants to be, she can see him in it!
30:56 – Lisa says she hasn’t talked this much in a long time (or in the entire movie so far), and couldn’t talk at all for a while, which all started after her mom’s “death.” She asks Frank if he’s going to talk, and he only… moans. He cannot talk. When did that happen to Lisa? After she talked to her mom about her gender feelings.
And here she is, encountering her inner man, and he cannot talk either.
31:16 – She turns on the shower radio for him, not Taffy’s station “for beer sluts” (lol), but she turns it to the college radio station (often indie, counterculture, unrestrained, nonconformist) and says “it’s for people like us. With feelings.”
”Like us”, Lisa? With feelings? What kind of feelings? This is a newly undead man you know nothing about! How could you know he had the same taste in music? Unless…
Yeah.
31:48 – “Up the Down Escalator” by The Chameleons plays as Frank showers, and over the next scenes. With a title like that you know it’s a song about not conforming to what society expects, not taking the easy way of doing things the way they want. Here’s a choice snippet of lyrics:
They sit at their tables and throw us the scraps
For Christ’s sake leave us something!
Now they can erase you at the flick of a switch
How long now will it take now?
There must be something wrong boys
There must be something wrong boys
They’re dragging me down
And they’re dragging me down
They’re dragging me down
You either swim or you drown
You either transition or you succumb to dysphoria. Yeah, there’s something wrong, boy.
32:09 – Cleaned up and closer to the real him, looking more alive, Frank wears a lady’s robe! Lisa opens her closet and dresses him in a bunch of her different clothes, because when you transition, at first all you have is all your old clothes from the gender you never were.
Lisa’s closet has the man on the moon with the rocket in his eye on it, from her dream. She keeps a poster of it in her room, as a reminder, an aspiration… like a vision board. But every time she puts Frank in the closet (supertext), the moon is split. And then forms a barrier keeping them apart.
She’s never going to get there by keeping him in the closet.
But she closes it, leaving him in there.
He opens it, in a White Sox baseball jersey. Which she just already happened to have? Pristine and new because she never wore it, because she’s not a sports guy.
He opens it again, and comes out in a kind of western cowboy shirt. It’s blue, as are his pants. He has cowboy boots on. All of which she just already happened to have?!
He opens it again in a red and blue collared shirt, jeans, and red shoes. All male-coded.
WHICH SHE JUST ALREADY HAPPENED TO HAVE??
He pops out in a pink satin robe, and Lisa says she loves it, but Frank doesn’t.
She’s tried a bunch of different guy clothes and none of them felt right, so she went back to gender conforming in a women’s pink robe, and her inner guy said no, that’s not right either.
He comes out in a pink and red getup, male-coded, that is also not right.
WHICH SHE AGAIN JUST ALREADY HAPPENED TO HAVE.
Then Lisa has an epiphany, and gives him a stack of clothes that include a Violent Femmes band t-shirt (what might society say about a perceived woman who refused to conform and said she wasn’t a woman at all?) under a men’s blazer…
WHICH SHE ALREADY JUST — look, you get it already, this whole bit… she had these clothes because she’d already been experimenting with dressing in guy clothes because they gave her gender feelings, possibly even left over from when she first realized and came out to her mom, which went disastrously.
These are the whole early stages of transition, trying out so many things that don’t work or aren’t right, backsliding, jumping forward, trying to find what feels like you. See FINDING OUR TRANS STYLE for more.
We don’t do it in one night, or in a montage set to music, but y’know, this is art and not real life.
32:37 – She’s brushing his hair in the bathroom, trying it different ways to see what looks best. Here, finally, we see them together in the mirror, looking at each other. He grunts toward his missing hand and she says “I can’t do anything about that. I’m not a doctor.”
Yeah, some of us do need medical transition. Lisa: “But it’s okay. They’re just things that make you different.”
So she’s telling herself, here, that the fact that she doesn’t have the body you might expect a man to have is okay, it just means she’s different. It doesn’t mean she’s not really a man. And if you think that’s a stretch… I beg you to please keep reading.
Lisa then goes on to explain there’s a character with an eyepatch on a soap opera that’s very cool and his eyepatch doesn’t define him. But his name is “Patch,” and she realizes our terrible society sadly does define us by our differences.
I’m always seen as trans before I’m seen as a woman or a wife or a mom or a writer or anything else. See NO ESCAPE (from reminders I’m trans) for more on that.
Also look how neither of them are really happy yet… just because you start transition doesn’t mean you instantly start seeing the real you in the mirror. It took me years of transition until it started happening regularly.
You can watch it happen for me in real time, in PHOTOS 2: THE SELFIE APOCALYPSE.
34:05 – Lisa’s parents come home and we hear them yelling from downstairs (about the broken glass and mess from Frank) and Lisa gasps and instantly tells Frank: “Get in my closet!” Well it was fun to experiment alone when nobody was here and now back into the closet we go so my parents don’t find out.
34:12 – Lisa comes down the stairs reassuring them that she’s fine, but they’re not at all concerned about her, only about, again, the way this has affected them (it’s CIS GRIEF again, all up and down).
Lisa makes a (hilarious) bad excuse to cover up what she was really doing. Janet: “Lisa got a lot of attention when the tragedy happened. So now she’s, well, recreating the scene of the crime.”
When Lisa’s mom “died” it’s when Lisa first revealed a piece of her truth. But clearly we “only do it for the attention” (so many Republicans think we actually do this, or that trans kids actually do this, because it’s “popular” or we just “want attention”).
And so here’s Janet… correctly piecing together that there’s a connection between Lisa revealing a piece of her truth when her mom “died” and what she’s been up to tonight.
I told you, I FUCKIN’ TOLD YOU!
Janet: “She has been ransacking our home, little by little. The cake stand, the bathroom last night, and now this.” Why won’t you damned transes see how this is affecting me, a cis person, and the only one who matters when you come out?!?
“She needs help. Residential treatment. She needs to go somewhere.” Get this trans out of my life and out of society, can’t you see what they’re doing to ME and MY HOME (never once showing an ounce of concern for the child she’s supposed to love and care for).
35:18 – Frank hears this, and he’s stumbled out of the closet. Lisa’s inner self has more CONFIDENCE than the false shell, and can’t stand the way they’re being treated.
35:43 – Lisa: “I’m not crazy.” No she’s not! Her dad: “Nobody said that.” Taffy: “My mom actually just did!” Dad: “No, she would never say that.”
That’s SOCIETAL GASLIGHTING in action, it’s real and it fucking sucks. Janet: “You’re either crazy, or you’re just goddamned inconsiderate.” Me me me, why won’t you think about how your trans nonsense affects me.
36:25 – Lisa retreats to her room, back to the despair box of bed, the gender conformity of the pink wall, the fear light framing the photo of her mother, the danger right in front of her. Phew.
Frank gently comes out of the closet, between the moon with the rocket in its eye. Lisa rolls away from him, tears in her eyes, rejecting the truth she was starting to find again, because cis people put their feelings over her needs and hurt her. Her family hurt her and it’s making her reject her truth. This happens to so many of us, sometimes even from those who supposedly love us the most. See CIS SPOUSAL AND PARTNER SUPPORT to learn more.
But this is the actual goal when cis people treat us this way, even if they don’t know it consciously. It’s to make it too painful for us to continue existing as our true selves, so we’ll reject our truth and we will suffer so cis people don’t have to be made “uncomfortable.”
Those who do that to us do not care about us. No one who would ask us to suffer for their convenience actually cares about us, no matter what they may say or think.
So Frank retreats back into the closet, and closes the door. And now even the idea of GENDER EUPHORIA, of flying up to that moon… is in that dysphoric green-blue, glowing in the dark. All she can see.
Come back next week to see transition begin! And how that opens you up to a whole new world, in ways both good and… dangerous.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com