Logan’s Trans March: A Look at 31 Trans-masc Films and Media

Note: this is a transfer over from a WordPress blog of mine, so apologies for any errors that come with. Originally written in March of 2019.

“I was a rather awkward child, I never felt like I belonged, and then one day I tried on my brother’s school uniform, and that was it. I knew I was home for the first time.”

- Colette, 2018

March 31st is the recognized day of Transgender Visibility, and this one is the first I’m able to celebrate as an out trans man. To commemorate this, I decided to look into myself in my favorite medium second to writing — film. I’ve heard up and down, left and right about movies and their depictions of trans women- I got thirty minutes into a hate-watch of “The Danish Girl” before rage quitting, so we’ll categorize my general knowledge there as “not great, mostly negative outlook”- but going into March, I realized I could count on one hand the number of movies I knew of that depicted men like me, regardless of quality. Thus, I compiled a list (that can be found for reference here) of 31 movies that in some way depicted trans men, from the early 20th century to now.

Qualifications for a movie to be on this list were that I had to a) be able to find it in some medium, be it DVD, online rental, or a book that the movie itself was originally based on, and b) the movie obviously had to include some depiction of transness, fictional or biographical. Many of these earlier movies are noted for having “trans depictions” while being movies about “women in suits”, so please keep that in mind for the first ten or so entries. I’ll tag any possible triggering content a movie might contain, but if you intend to watch any of these movies, I encourage looking them up on your own as well. A broad warning for spoilers for all of these movies as I intend to discuss them relatively in-depth.

Edit: if you don’t have the time for a full article but would like to get a general idea of these films, consider watching this video I compiled (link). Note that this is not endorsement of any of these films.

1. The Amazons (1917) dir. Joseph Kaufman

Warnings: mention of light transphobia within the article
Rating: N/A