What Jane Schoenbrun Gets Right & I've Been Getting Wrong About the Trans Experience
A trans psychologist reflects on I Saw the TV Glow and the psychological discourse around gender affirmation/transition
So much has been lost as the way we talk about transness becomes increasingly shaped by the “culture wars” and related discourses. As a psychologist who is a trans man, a researcher on trans mental health, and a therapist to (among others) many trans people, my participation in public discourse in the past couple years has been largely reduced to arguing that access to gender affirmation, including gender-affirming medical care, improves psychosocial wellbeing. Sometimes I pause and feel dizzy, wondering how I got stuck in this never-ending debate about whether mental health symptoms do or don’t improve after gender-affirming medical steps. Judging by much of my Twitter feed (my own tweets and the tweets of others), you’d think the trans experience was limited to 1) hormones and surgeries, and 2) movement along the spectrum of severity of depression and anxiety symptoms. I am guilty of contributing to a debate that sends the message that those of us who affirm our gender undergo a gender transition expressly to improve our mental health, that the only psychological and social experiences relevant to said gender transition can be captured in symptom measures, and that psychiatric symptom reduction is the most valuable metric for judging whether gender affirmation is worthwhile.
Thankfully there are trans thinkers and artists who haven’t gotten stuck here - people who are exploring and publicly expressing the richness and complexity of trans experiences, and helping people like me remember to do the same. In this moment, I’m thinking primarily about Jane Schoenbrun and I Saw the TV Glow, which they wrote and directed. [There are spoilers ahead. Go watch the movie and come back!] My takeaway from this film was a deeply emotionally resonant reminder that we don’t transition because we are seeking to reduce our PHQ-9 depression scores; we do it because it’s how we address the persistent sense that we are living lives that are not our own. There’s a reason the trans community of yesteryear largely accepted the (now perhaps appropriately maligned as transnormative) narrative that we were “born in the wrong body”: pre-transition, we often feel like we were born into someone else’s life, someone else’s social role - and yes a disconnection from the gendered aspects of our bodies can be a major part of that or can be what clues us into it. Before transition, we are Isabels trapped in Owens’ lives and bodies.1
I went to watch I Saw the TV Glow after a trans friend told me I must, but he warned me it was intense for him at times. Even with this warning, I was surprised by how emotional it was to watch the film. My eyes welled with tears almost immediately while watching young Owen move through life dissociated, detached, seemingly drawn to certain content and people without understanding why. In an interview in Vanity Fair, Schoenbrun reflected on the importance of not wrapping up I Saw the TV Glow in a simple feel good ending, saying “Transition leaves you traumatized for the rest of your life. Trans people will be unpacking pretransition for as long as they live, as well as many other things out of their control.” And in that movie theater, 36 year old me - approaching 15 years since the dysphoria and dissonance of Owen’s experience resembled my own - felt punched in the gut, the ghosts of the trauma of pretransition life stirring in me.
In the days since I was so viscerally and beautifully reminded of the pain and confusion of my own dysphoric pretransition “midnight realm,” I keep returning to how reductive the narratives of why we support gender-affirming care have become. I want to talk more about waking up to myself, about helping people live lives that feel more real. I’m sick of pointing to graphs of lower depression scores and suicidality. I want to communicate how my life, my body, and the world around me made more sense when I acknowledged that I was a man and moved to live accordingly. I want to share stories of the young people who seem so disinterested in life around them and then blossom into youth with passions and zest when we stop trying to force them into boxes they don’t fit into.
Another friend who also loved the movie sent me a seemingly-now-deleted post from the Tumblr novelconcepts that describes I Saw the TV Glow as a “uniquely, devastatingly queer story” and reflects on how Maddy is easily seen as “crazy” - indeed is called crazy - for breaking out of her false self and describing it as such. My hunch is that this is why I’ve tried to tell my story - our stories - through this simplified psychological, measurable-benefit lens. I’m afraid that my experience will be weaponized against the community if I share it fully. If you don’t know what it is like to feel trapped on a life path (and for me - in a body) whose wrongness you can’t shake, nor what it’s like to change that - to emerge onto a path and into a body that despite requiring disruption and intervention feel so much more natural… how can you hear me describe this as the trans experience and not think I’ve had some break from reality? That’s my fear anyway. So instead I try to show people data. I give them deliverables and visuals that are superficial and easy to digest. And suddenly we’re testifying that people should be “allowed” to transition because it’s good for their mental health to do it and it’s bad for their mental health to not.
I Saw the TV Glow reminded me that the argument is really: trans people deserve to realize and actualize and embody the parts of themselves that they’ve repressed. We deserve to live fully.2
If you have not seen the movie (which I hope you will and think you should before you let me spoil it) and against my advice you want to read this article and understand my references without seeing it, I will explain but am certain to not do it justice: The film follows Owen as a middle schooler and then adolescent and young adult in 90s suburbia who becomes enthralled with a TV show “The Pink Opaque” about two teenage girls (Tara and Isabel) with a psychic connection who fight monsters sent from the supreme evil force, Mr. Melancholy, who is trying to trap the girls in the “midnight realm.” Owen simultaneously becomes very connected to Maddy who is obsessed with the show. During high school, Maddy disappears “without a trace” and returns to find Owen a decade later to tell him that reality as he knows it is in fact the midnight realm, and real reality is the Pink Opaque - she is really Tara and he is really Isabel. They had been buried alive and given a potion that kept them asleep and made them believe they were Maddy and Owen. She had found a way to wake up and came back to convince Owen/Isabel to save herself, and Owen struggles with whether to believe that the emptiness and out-of-placeness he’s felt is because he’s Isabel trapped in the midnight realm or if it’s “just the suburbs” and something he must accept.
and people should be able to transition because no government or society should restrict autonomy over people’s own lives and bodies.