“I never thought I’d live in a world where trans people would be celebrated on or off the screen,” Laverne Cox says in the new documentary Disclosure, as images from television series featuring trans actors like Euphoria and footage of the film A Fantastic Woman, which starred trans actress Daniela Vega, being feted at the Oscars flash by onscreen.
“I never thought the media would stop asking horrible questions...” she continues as the film, which premieres Friday on Netflix, cuts to Oprah Winfrey’s intrusive and offensive interview with trans model Lea T in 2011: “How do you hide your penis?” Cox then finishes the sentence, “...and start treating us with respect,” as footage of Winfrey’s much-heralded interview with multi-hyphenate creator Janet Mock plays, revealing how things have evolved.
“Now, look how far we’ve come,” she says, as the cast of Pose, the first show featuring an ensemble of trans women of color as leads, is shown. “For a very long time, the ways in which we have been represented on screen have suggested that we’re not real, have suggested we’re mentally ill, that we don’t exist. Yet here I am. Yet here we are. And we’ve always been here.”
A time of unprecedented visibility, Disclosure, which Cox executive produced, chronicles the full history of trans representation on screen—dating back to some of the first moving images in 1901, with the silent short film Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken—and dissects the ways in which disparaging and dangerous portrayals have impacted how society sees trans people, and how they see themselves.
It also brings into sharp focus the urgency of our current moment, revealing the paradox of representation.
At a time when trans people are finally in control of their own storytelling and shows like Pose, Billions, and Euphoria signal a watershed moment, trans people are still being murdered at disproportionate rates.
There is a Supreme Court case pending that could make it legal for employers to discriminate against and fire LGBT+ people because of their identity. (Update: The Court ruled Monday in favor of the LGBT+ community.)
Secretary of Education Betsy Devos is using federal funding to hold to ransom states that don’t ban transgender student athletes. Countless pieces of legislation have been introduced criminalizing transgender bathroom use and legalizing the denial of health care.
The world’s most successful author is publicly espousing dangerous transphobic rhetoric.
Two days after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officer George Chauvin, a transgender man named Tony McDade was shot and killed by police in Tallahassee—yet his name has been largely omitted from the global Black Lives Matter outrage.
In the days after Cox spoke to The Daily Beast, the Trump administration finalized regulations making it legal to deny trans people healthcare and health insurance, and two more Black trans women—Riah Milton and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells—were violently murdered.
“This is the environment that trans people are existing in right now,” Cox tells The Daily Beast.
The environment is such that any examination of the ways in which our culture has denied the community dignity—and the ways in which that has evolved—would be timely. But Disclosure’s debut during Pride month on Juneteenth—and amidst an unignorable reckoning as the United States confronts its systemic racism—is striking.
“Disclosure was certainly made with the hope for a new world in mind,” director Sam Feder says. “One which deeply connects to this moment.”
Asked how she’s been handling the last weeks, Cox lets out a labored sigh, stammering a bit as she lists off everything: anxiety over the pandemic, the loneliness of quarantine, George Floyd’s murder, Tony McDade’s murder, the video of Iyanna Dior, a Black trans woman attacked by a mob.
“It’s trauma on top of trauma,” she says. “I’m really trying to meet the moment. It is an opportunity for us to look at the injustice and say, we need to make a change and we have to do it right fucking now.”
Disclosure is nothing if not comprehensive. It charts examples of trans representation dating back 120 years, chronicling not just the entire history of trans representation in media, but the many different kinds.
It’s not just the famous cases of The Jeffersons, Silence of the Lambs, and Orange Is the New Black. It’s D.W. Griffith at the dawn of cinema itself. It’s exploitative episodes of The Jerry Springer Show or Maury. It’s how trans celebrities were interviewed by Arsenio Hall, Phil Donohue, or Katie Couric on talk shows. It’s what it means to see trans people as dead bodies in episodes of Law & Order, as the butt of the joke in Soapdish, or even central to a famous episode of Looney Tunes.
Disclosure explores not only how these images shaped society, but how trans people working in the industry saw themselves. The documentary features interviews from trans Hollywood pioneers like Chaz Bono, Candis Cayne, and Jazzmun, as well as actor-activists who are part of today’s major moment of trans visibility on screen, including Cox, Sense 8’s Jamie Clayton, and Mrs. Fletcher’s Jen Richards.
It’s Richards who contextualizes the effect of that warped visibility, wondering how she would feel today if she had never seen any of that trans representation in media.
“On the one hand, I might not ever have internalized that sense of being monstrous, of having fears around disclosure, of seeing myself as something abhorrent and as a punchline and as a joke,” she says in the film. “I may be able to go on a date with a man without having the image of men vomiting. On the flip side, would I even know I’m trans if I had never seen any depiction of gender variance on screen?”
Cox remembers when she was younger and watched The Flip Wilson Show, which would sometimes feature Wilson in drag as Geraldine, and the episode of The Jeffersons in which George learns his friend is trans. She leaned in and listened discreetly to how her family was reacting. But the characters she saw were the subject of mockery. That didn’t meld with how she saw herself: a young, religious, smart, talented kid who was groomed to be successful.
As she got older, Cox paid close attention when trans celebrities would appear on talk shows. She was fascinated when she saw transgender model Caroline Cossey, who was the subject of a famous interview with Arsenio Hall, but she still didn’t see herself in her.
“Me coming to accept myself wasn’t about the media,” she says. “It was about meeting real-life trans people. That’s what changed my life.”
“But then I have seen so many messages and met so many people who’ve seen me on television and that has changed their lives,” she continues. “And I’m the reason why so many people apparently have transitioned or come out to their friends and family as trans. People who lived stealth for years say they are no longer living stealth because I’ve had a presence in the media. That is powerful to me. The media is powerful. I can certainly attest to that.”
If there is general knowledge that depictions of the trans community on screen have been historically disparaging and offensive, Disclosure curates that problematic track record to startling effect.
There’s Dressed to Kill, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Terror Train, Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, and any number of Alfred Hitchcock films—just to name select examples—that portrayed trans people as psychopaths, murderers, and deviants, teaching people that they were to be feared. The Crying Game’s portrayal of a trans person was reduced to its big central “secret,” the reveal of which caused the trans character’s lover to become physically ill, initiating the trend of trans disclosure in cinema inciting a puke train.
Any number of TV series portrayed trans women exclusively as prostitutes, but without the context of the societal reasons why trans women are pushed into sex work. Police procedurals perpetuated the trans victim narrative, consistently showing trans people as murdered corpses, while seemingly every medical drama on TV aired a storyline in which a trans person died of an illness related to their hormone therapy or biological reproductive system.
When there are clumsy representations, like the ghastly comedic twist at the climax of Soapdish or the shockingly offensive subplot of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, we may now dismiss them as of-the-time missteps, but they have profound and emotional effects on trans people. Even when a storyline is as delicately handled and based on a true story as it is in a film like Boys Don’t Cry, its scarcity in Hollywood is harmful in its own way. “After I saw that film, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m gonna die,’” Cox says.
Having these examples presented at once is an uncomfortable, necessary experience for the viewer. Imagine, then, how unpleasant—if, again, necessary—it was to revisit them for the trans people involved in the film. There are representations Cox is so disgusted by that she is nearly at a loss for words when discussing them. For example, how the TV series Nip/Tuck depicted Famke Janssen’s trans character.
“It was difficult to talk about and difficult to grapple with, wanting to be in a space of telling the truth and coming from a place of love,” Cox says, letting out a quiet laugh. “And I’m in the business. So I’m like, ‘I hope this person isn't mad at me because I’m saying this.’”
But the discomfort is the point. “We have to reckon with that,” she says. “We can’t just be in denial about it and then just move forward. So yes, it’s painful, but through the pain, we can come out on the other side.”
As the director of Disclosure, Feder was largely responsible for diving deep into research of negative representations and had tried to distance himself from emotion, but found it impossible.
“I kept just being reminded and angered and hurt by how everything, all this representation, points back to disavowing who trans people say they are,” he says. “Just taking away trans people’s agency and power. That was just endlessly painful and frustrating. Simultaneously, when you see all these things together in this context, you realize how ridiculous and basic and stupid these strokes are. And it just highlights the laziness and the lack of imagination on the part of the creators that is inexcusable.”
Disclosure’s timeline runs up to modern day. That means a celebration of, as Pose actress Angelica Ross says, “the fierceness” of the trans performers and activists dominating the industry today.
It means taking pride in Pose, in non-binary actor Asia Kate Dillon on Billions, in Hunter Schafer on Euphoria, in transmasculine representation finally starting to appear on screen, in Cox’s elevation to major Hollywood power player. It means acknowledging that evolution. Ryan Murphy, who was responsible for those Nip/Tuck missteps, is now the man behind Pose.
But it also means taking stock of what that success and that visibility means when the off-screen reality is still so harrowing. “The more confidence the community gains, then puts us in more danger,” Sense 8 star Jamie Clayton says. On the one side, there’s finally hope. On the other, there’s still fear.
The dichotomy is echoed by historian Susan Stryker: “Why is it that trans issues have become front and center in the culture wars?” Take for example, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s recent transphobic statements.
As the Daily Beast reported last week, Cox responded to a question about Rowling’s views by choosing to instead make a larger point about dividing marginalized people: “The ‘divide and conquer’ method of pitting women’s rights against the rights of trans people has been a very effective tool for dividing marginalized people,” she said. “So then what we’re seeing in that moment [with Rowling]… is that we’re pitting marginalized communities against each other.”
Cox and her trans siblings warn against seeing any kind of progress as a finish line, when the fight is as crucial as it ever has been. She talks about “the beautiful trans folks” who are succeeding right now, but as juxtaposition to a story about a vigil she attended last year when two Black trans women were murdered in the same week.
“God, I’m getting so emotional,” she says, fighting back tears as she speaks. “This is what our film tries to grapple with, this paradox of visibility. That we’re potentially more targeted because we’re more visible. And so then the need for justice, the need for real justice and understanding and hearts and minds to be changed so that the existence of a trans person doesn’t cost someone to react in a way that that trans person might lose their life.”
