The premise of the sweet and smart teen comedy, “She’s the He,” has two presumed-to-be-gay high schoolers, Alex (Nico Carney) and Ethan (Misha Osherovich), pretending they are trans so Alex can woo Sasha (Malia Pyles) the girl of his dreams. It’s a dumb plan that is bound to backfire — but it does impress the school jock, Jacob (Emmett Preciado). As Sasha helps Ethan become more feminine, Alex bonds with Forest (Tatiana Ringsby), a lesbian. But when Ethan comes out as trans, it strains her friendship with Alex and her relationship with her mother (Suzanne Cryer).
Trans writer/director Siobhan McCarthy has created a teen film that is as raunchy as it is sensitive. (One amusing sequence involves a bloody tampon fight.) “She’s the He” is very much about promoting trans visibility and acceptance and the film ably showcases a large LGBTQ cast.
The filmmaker spoke with Gay City News about making “She’s the He.”
I got serious “Some Like It Hot” and “Bosom Buddies” vibes from your film. But I also see it as the trans teen comedy we need. What inspired this film? It was really inspired!
The film came from me developing a more established film and getting a note from executives that the film I was developing needed more trans sorrow. I made a joke over dinner about the extreme version of trans sorrow and what if we made a movie where the central thesis was trans joy. I thought, what if we made a movie that took all of these crazy ideas at face value and put a ton of transpeople in that? My friend said, “You should go and make that,” and I wrote it in a week and six months later, we were shooting it. It came from living as a transperson in a world that is inherently absurd and feeling like this bathroom discourse is never ending. Being able to poke fun at that and defang that story felt important at the time and has only become increasingly more important since we made the movie.
Ethan becomes empowered by pretending to be trans. I love the message that how other people see you may not be who you are; that you decide who you are. As a trans filmmaker, what was your goal here — other than making a joyous trans film?
That is the funny catch-22 of making art when you are an oppressed person. The inherent act of speaking your voice is political. It doesn’t matter if I detach myself or this film from politics. It is inherently political because we live in a world that makes transness political. I was consciously aware while making the film.
I love that you bring up “Some Like It Hot,” which is one of my favorite movies. I think it is a fantastic trans story despite being made in aftermath of McCarthy era in Hollywood. There is so much stuff deeply queer coded, that as a gay person watching that movie, it is all you can see. But at the time it was made, cis people looked at it as a joke that was friendly to them. That was, at a core level, the inspiration — making something that was accessible to everyone and had a veneer that would be comprehensible and digestible for cis audiences that had a secondary layer that a queer and trans audience would see and read and find funny and relatable that may not be comprehensible to cis audiences. This film was trying to toe that line and apply trans narratives and aesthetics to feed cis people awareness of transness while hiding something that has more depth and nuance for transpeople.
The film only touches on the gender dysphoria Ethan experiences as a trans teen. Can you talk about that decision?
I wanted to get to the story beat where we move Ethan out of “boy mode” as quickly as possible. While dysphoria is part of the trans experience, the film’s primary goal was to represent the experience of, in the colloquialism of transness, “cracking your egg,” and realizing the euphoria of your true identity. That experience is far more complicated than this film posits it as. I wanted to take that complicated and difficult experience and condense it and make it easily comprehensible.
Very little of the film dwells on Ethan’s life when she is feeling that expressed intense dysphoria. The other element, which is complicated to talk about and didn’t fit in the film, is that most transpeople experience dysphoria for many years without knowing what it is. I was not interested in putting that on screen because I don’t think transpeople need to be reminded of our own experience. Sometimes, the centering of tragedy for an oppressed group ends up being for the sake of people not in that group. This film was made for transpeople at the end of the day, and I hope cis people come along for ride.
“She’s the He” has a large queer, trans, non-binary, and gay cast. What can you say about the importance and validation of working with a queer crew?
I hope people go into the film not knowing who the cast are, so they engage with the film upfront and learning after fact that so many of the people involved in this are queer and trans.
We are putting trans men in dresses. Would Emmett [Preciado, who plays Jacob, a jock] and Nico [Carney] be comfortable in those shoes? Both said, “I think so, but I have no way of knowing until we are there.” Dysphoria is always a monster that is going to rear its head. Working with queer and trans people made it easy when a cast member was feeling dysphoria. Misha was pretending to be a boy for the first act. We could reflect not only the trans joy of being in community on screen, but also have it present behind the camera, which bleeds though to the end project.
The language and humor in “She’s the He” are very raunchy, and I appreciated the focus on upending gender roles and stereotypes. What can you say about the way your characters speak and think about, and perform gender?
One of the things about being trans that I enjoy the most is that it made the entire concept of gender feels like farce every day. My movement through the world feels humorous and funny. The performance of gender that I do and I see every single person do is incredibly funny and feels inherently raunchy. The idea of gender is culturally associated with sex, and genitalia, and indecency that we level upon gender in a patriarchal, misogynistic, transphobic and homophobic society. There is this inherent sex, sexuality, and raunchiness to talking about gender because of all this cultural baggage we bring to it.
There is a severity we approach the concept of gender with that I don’t feel in my personal experience. It is hilarious to acknowledge that the clothes we wear and telegraph who we are is life or death. It is play acting and putting on a costume and a performance for world. There is a heightened absurdity and sincere experience, and that dichotomy was what tried to get at in the comedy — this constant push and pull between the vulgar and absurd of being young and trans and existing in the world and performing gender and this deep sincerity and necessity of performance of gender within clothing, aesthetics, and transness.
Alex and Ethan are grappling with teenage hormones but are also inexperienced. They each learn about love but also learn to love themselves before they can be with someone else. What are your thoughts about how the characters process their desires?
It feels so core to the teen experience — learning how you engage with love and desire and attraction. So often desire is wrapped up in your understanding and perception of another person. This film could get at the self-identification that comes from the perception someone else has and how that changes when someone changes. The way most teens are messing with their performance of self to make themselves desirable for people they desire is so much fun to get at. I hope people see how they are trying to be someone who is desired and also an honest reflection of themselves and finding that middle ground where they can be themselves and be the person other will desire and see truly.
What observations do you have about “She’s the He” being your debut film?
It is interesting to have this be my first film. I think about what it reflects back on me. It is not what I thought I would do. I have different stories I want to tell outside my queerness. But being trans in cis world, I am always playing to a cis archetype. This film feels like the first step in a career where I am able to step into an identifiable “normal” movie and apply a transgressive queer aesthetic to it. Because that is so much of my experience of transness is mimicking and subverting the already well-established world. That is interesting to me — to step into an existing thing and change it.
“She’s the He” | Directed by Siobhan McCarthy | Opening June 5 at the IFC Center | Distributed by Obscured Releasing
