I didn't even know the words as a child. I didn't have a phase as a small child where I sought out girl clothes, nor did I try make up or insist I was a girl. I wouldn't have had any idea that that was an option. The vague hints from childhood that I recall are either minor, superficial things (I still wish I knew where that She-Ra toy ended up) or barely remembered preferences (when playing pretend, I would pretend to be a girl sometimes when my brothers were gone?). I remember being terrified of having to shave when I got older; I remember being upset all through puberty. What I saw in this film does not reflect my story, but in some ways, it shows a story I wish I had lived. This both is and isn't my story. Watching or reading anything about transgender children is a sort of shock to the system for me, a what-if that comes with intense, bitter regrets. Even as she suffers abuse, verbal and physical, for being who she is, for trying to make sense in a world that doesn't have room for her, I still yearned for what she had, which was a sense of self decades prior to my own awakening. She doesn't yet have the vocabulary to find that there are others like her, but she has a better start than I did. It's a horrible feeling, then, to watch her abused, to watch her struggle, because there's a tragic certainty there that the story I tell myself (that I should have known sooner) is one that would not necessarily have gone better. I am no fatalist, but hearing a mother tell her trans daughter that she has ruined their family is something that suggests to me that it was better to wait. (My mother never would have said that, of this I am certain, but the world is full of terrible people.)The film's visual conceits of color vs. blue-palette are... fine. It's not overbearing, but it feels too simple, tied as it is to mood and situation and not entirely coherently tied specifically to the character's responses. It feels too rigid, without the subtle variations that come with dysphoria and frustration and self-identity. A similar problem arises with the character arc of the parents, whose cruelties are not resolved, not addressed, not forgiven, simply handwaved in the end. This is not a happy ending, though it seems to want to be one. it's a moment of horror, a sealing of a trap as they insist upon the most superficial version of acceptance, thrown in seemingly out of nowhere as the mother inexplicably connects to her daughter's fantasies. This is not the narrative we deserve.Pride month: 25/20Transgender project: 8
