Schrödinger’s Transsexual

Or something about a paradox of representation

In Evil Dead Rise, the eldest son, Danny, is not a transsexual. But Danny is a transsexual. It’s complicated, and it depends on who you ask. Is Danny trans? Or is Danny just played by a trans person? Is there a material difference?

Fresh off of seeing the film at SXSW, I wrote about the experience of recognizing Morgan Davies as a trans person while also having to contend with the fact that the character was not likely written to be trans. And, listen. I love all of you. But having to listen to everybody’s opinions on trans* representation in horror and in the Evil Dead franchise is killing me. Most of you are not experts and in fact many of you are haters!

Nevertheless, the always-declining state of Twitter has meant that I’m seeing plenty of hot takes from folks that I would not ordinarily see. Plenty of folks have posed the same question that I failed to answer in my own initial review: how do we understand Danny’s trans identity? Or lack thereof? One of the tweets I saw recently was actually incredibly assertive on what the right answer is:

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that characters played by trans actors [are] trans themselves unless explicitly stated otherwise. we always assume characters played by cis actors are cis, i…