TRANS REPRESENTATION IN 2025 MEDIA part 1: MOVIES
Welcome to Trans Tuesday! It’s time once again for my annual report on the good, the bad, and the yikes in popular culture. Here comes TRANS REPRESENTATION IN 2025 MEDIA part 1: MOVIES!
These reports have become some of the most popular essays and podcast episodes across Trans Tuesdays, and that’s fab. I talk about this stuff because nothing will ever get better if we don’t discuss these things.
Pop culture holds enormous power in shaping the thoughts and feelings of those who see it, this is famously the entire point of art. And how trans people are portrayed in our most popular art forms tells us a lot about where society is (and is headed), and helps us see shifting opinions on us in society.
My past reports have shown a decline over time in good, authentic trans representation on screen, and behind the scenes, while showing a corresponding increase in jokes at our expense. See the 2022, 2023, and 2024 TRANS REP IN MEDIA reports for more on that. These reports actually predicted (or mirrored?) the shifting political headwinds as trans people became a larger target of the bigoted Republican party in the US. You could see the shift in our artistic representation happening, and then the 2024 election corroborated the shifting viewpoints in the results.
Movies and television take a long time to make, and much of what I will report on was made in the year(s) prior to the year of release. So again we see that shift happening as public perception of trans people more drastically shifted, as the propaganda and lies about us increased. It’s fascinating! And bad. Bad bad bad.
Every Trans Tuesday is someone’s first, so if you’re new to my trans rep in media reports, here’s the standard disclaimers. I’ll mention the title of the movie or show, and how many trans and nonbinary people (or jokes about us) appeared.
This report covers only scripted films and television that are fiction. I do not cover documentaries or “reality” tv, as the point is to look at how we’re appearing in the stories we tell and at whose stories are allowed to be told in popular media. I also am only reporting on films I saw all of, and shows I saw an entire season of. If I don’t see the full story, I can’t have an accurate picture of things.
This report covers only if trans people appeared (and in what context), and is not meant as a comment on the show or film’s overall quality. Plenty of things I love may have had moments of bad representation, or even no representation at all. Also I can only count trans people who are out as trans, for obvious reasons. Trans people who are stealth, or eggs who haven’t cracked yet, obviously cannot be determined.
In fact, as you’ll see, “no trans people at all” is the most common finding. There are also times when representation happens, but it’s in something I really don’t like. Sometimes it’s in things that are actively harmful to the entire trans community. See BAD REPRESENTATION: EMILIA PEREZ for more on how sometimes it is actually preferable for cis people to just… not do the thing they want to do with a trans character.
When this report talks about jokes at our expense, you need to understand they’re almost never overt “I hate trans people!” jokes. They’re implicit trans jokes, in that the people making them likely do not even know their joke is punching down at trans people.
Our society tells us men and women are “supposed” to be a certain way, and any deviation from that is to be mocked. Most often these are things like “that man has no balls or a small dick” or “this woman is talking about having a penis.” Most often, you’ll see this show up any time a perceived man does something that is perceived as feminine, or appears feminine, or is compared to a woman in a derogatory way. And every single time, if you stop to ask yourself why those are meant to be funny, it’s because our society has trained us all that the very idea of those things is just fucking hilarious.
Those jokes are absolutely about mocking the reality trans people live in, but the people making those jokes (mostly) have no idea. They’re just perpetuating what society trained them to think, and in perpetuating those things, are training everyone watching to perpetuate it further.
If you want to know more about how implicit biases work and worm their way into us all (yes, all, even me and even you), see IMPLICIT QUEERPHOBIA, where you’ll see a cishet person’s reaction to queer and trans media illustrate this effect perfectly.
Also please note that I am but one exhausted and very hot woman, logging every single thing I watch for an entire year. It is so much work, and also I am bound to miss things. This is actually why addressing that a character is trans in-story is so important, because if you don’t, people are likely to miss it… even a trans screenwriter and director who is specifically looking for it. I’m trying my best!
Also also, this is not necessarily only things that were released in 2025 (though it largely is), but it’s things I saw in 2025. Our oversaturated media landscape makes it impossible for anyone to see everything that’s released, and sometimes you don’t even hear about something until a year or two after it’s out.
So everything in this report is either from 2025, or was released within a few years of 2025. I’m trying to find modern trends and representation, not stuff from older media.
At the very end of these four trans rep in 2025 media essays, I will tally and post the totals, and then we’ll compare with past years and look for any trends. Will rep get better? Worse? Stay about even? Stick around and find out.
And the final disclaimer: to talk about these things, we have to talk about these things, which means spoilers abound. Be ye warned!
All right, let’s dive in, starting with:
MOVIES
Boiling Point – 0
Captain America Brave New World – 0
Companion – 0
The Day the World Blew Up – 0??
This is a Looney Tunes animated film, which contains a plot point that Daffy Duck has to lay eggs. He is… male. He has always been portrayed that way since his first appearance in 1937, 89 years ago. And in case you were wondering if they might’ve changed that for this film… Daffy confirms he’s a dude in this movie’s dialogue.
He also loses all his feathers at one point and has… nipples. WHY?! Ducks do not have nipples! So either this is an instance of the oft-repeated “Ha ha wouldn’t it be funny if a man could get pregnant” (which some trans guys actually can) “joke,” or… Daffy Duck is transmasc.
Do I think Warner Bros. is making a statement that Daffy Duck is trans? Y’know what, I do not. So this is our first count of an implicit joke at our expense.
Deep Cover – 0
Emily the Criminal – 0
Fantastic Four First Steps – 0
Flow – 0
Frankenstein (GdT) – 0
All Frankenstein adaptations are kinda transy, in my opinion, and the story in this film is kinda transy, but there’s no actual representation happening.
Good Boy – 0
The Gorge – 0
Hundreds of Beavers – 0
Jules– 0
Kpop Demon Hunters – 0
No transness here, but a lot of people think it’s a trans allegory. I have… thoughts about that, but they’re probably not what you think! Look for a report on it later this year.
M3gan – 0
Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand Steps – 1
Suzie Eddie Izzard plays… the voice of a goose. So we can’t count this as character representation (though to be honest, what trans person doesn’t identify with geese, amirite?), but it’s actor rep.
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things – 0
Mickey 17 – 0
National Anthem – 2*
Trans woman Eve Lindley stars as Sky, and nonbinary icon Mason Alexander Park has a big supporting role. I suspect there are more trans or nonbinary actors in this cast, but it’s an independent film that got a streaming release, and so information on a lot of the actors in smaller roles was difficult to find.
It’s about a little refuge of queer and trans people living together in a house… well no, strike that. It’s about a cis white guy who discovers them and has a queer awakening, and falls in love with Sky.
It’s written and directed by a cis man, based on a monograph he wrote while interviewing people at rodeos (a rodeo is featured in the film), after loving them as a kid and then being surprised at how queerphobic and transphobic they were.
This isn’t a trans story you’re getting, per se, but it’s a very queer one, and the trans rep feels authentic to me, perhaps due to it being based on those aforementioned interviews the creator did with trans people, or perhaps from his own personal experience if the film is more autobiographical than fiction. To be clear it is fiction, but we know it was at least in part based on real conversations he had with real people, so the line in there is fuzzy.
But if you’re looking for a (mostly) gentle and contemplative indie film with good trans rep, you could do far worse than National Anthem.
O’Dessa – 0
So this isn’t a trans film, but it’s a very trans film, if you catch my meaning. I’d really love to do a full trans allegory deep-dive on it, but it’s so very unknown that I think it’d not really be helpful to a lot of people. And not only is this a super trans film, it is very gender. Here’s some highlights:
The main character is the titular O’Dessa, a girl. And her father says to her, “Pecker or no, you’re the seventh son.” Like, how trans is it? Very trans.
There’s a man who wears high heels, like, all the time.
It’s a musical, and in one of the songs it talks about “Mother Nature’s beard.”
O’Dessa cuts all her hair off to look less like a girl. She sleeps in boxer shorts and a tank top.
She ends up being pretty butch, and is in love with a very feminine man. When they’re going to get married, she wears a suit and the guy wears a veil. The preacher then calls her the “prodigal son.”
It’s incredibly stylistic, has a lot to say about fighting conformity and fascism (directly!), and the songs are actually… really good? It stars Sadie Sink from Stranger Things, and the girl can sing (who knew?).
Definitely worth checking out.
Red Sonja – 2
This film was directed by trans woman M. J. Bassett, and trans woman Danica Davis has a small role (the character is not mentioned as trans).
Saving Buddy Charles – 1*
Non-binary actor (and friend of mine!) Analesa Fisher plays Clara, who’s a cis girl. This has a lot of the two main cis girl characters calling each other “dude” and “bro.” And I get that’s how today’s teens talk, but also that sure is gendered, ain’t it?
I tracked more of that in last year’s report, but honestly it’s not specifically trans-related and it happens so much that I gave up on tracking it all. But once you look for it, you can’t help but spot it. And you never really see words that actually mean women being applied to people regardless of their actual gender, do you? It’s part of our society implicitly saying men are the default and what everyone should aspire to be. Stop doing it, maybe! See CIS IS NOT A SLUR (there is no default human).
Anyway, Analesa’s so good, so if an indie teen road trip is your jam, go see them give a truly great performance. It’s on Tubi.
Sinners – 0
Spinal Tap II – 0
A music promoter says Kpop is really popular and that he works with a Kpop band… but they’re not really Korean, they “identify as Korean.” Boooooooooo. Listen, this one is really insidious, because obviously people who are not Korean cannot identify as Korean. That’s not how it works. But that is how gender works, because gender’s a social construct. Gender, and yes, sex, can change. But this joke basically intimates that gender and sex cannot change, and that makes it entirely full of bullshit.
Star Trek: Section 31 – 0
Superman – 0
There’s no trans rep here, but the movie is very quietly trans-affirming. Essay about that coming in a month or so.
Thelma – 0
Thunderbolts – 0
Train Dreams – 0
Wake Up Dead Man – 0
There’s a bro who wants to be a Republican politician, and to whip up votes he says he tried “the trans thing” and “the pronoun thing.” But they’re literally in the middle of a long list of things Republicans get performatively mad about, to score points with bigots. They’re not at all at our expense, so no issues here.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair – 1
Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, who is nonbinary. And the film is absolutely about gender dysphoria, much in the way Schoenbrun’s next film, I SAW THE TV GLOW, was. I did a full write-up on IStTVG, but I don’t intend to for this film.
The allegory here is a little more obtuse and obfuscated, which makes sense as Schoenbrun said they didn’t realize the film was actually about dysphoria until partway through shooting it, when it cracked their egg.
That doesn’t mean they weren’t intentionally making a film about gender dysphoria, mind you, just that they were exploring it subconsciously and didn’t consciously realize it until filming, when they realized they were trans.
There is a trans woman who briefly appears on-screen, but she’s not an actual character and has no lines.
The Wild Robot – 0
Wish – 0
You Hurt My Feelings – 0
So across thirty-four new (or relatively new) films, I found seven trans people, two confirmed trans characters, and… two jokes.
It’s kinda dismal that we don’t have more representation in there, but there was nothing actually harmful, and that even those extremely low counts of trans people and characters outnumber the jokes is actually pretty stunning.
Will that hold up as we progress through all the television I watched?
Only one way to find out! Come back next week as we dive into 2025 trans rep in media part 2, television part 1!
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com