Two major trans narrative movies were released in 2024. The wrong one's being talked about

When the 2025 Oscar nominations were announced bright and early Jan. 23, one of the most promising headlines bursting through the fog of the morning was that Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays the titular character in awards season heavyweight “Emilia Pérez,” was the first openly trans person to be nominated for an acting role. It was a reason to celebrate, a win for the trans community and their allies after a week that began with Donald Trump’s inauguration, where he was keen to mention that he’d be rolling back protections for trans people nationwide. But as happy people were for Gascón, there was also a good deal of head-scratching that followed.

Since its debut at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, “Emilia Pérez” has divided audiences and critics. Some view the flashy musical thriller about a cisgender cartel leader who decides to transition both to escape her enemies and become her true self as an audacious work of provocative cinema. Others have decried its depiction of transness as regressive, falling into old, incorrect tropes about trans people trying to deceive others and spectacle-izing the act of transitioning. Such rampant discourse has turned “Emilia Pérez” into the most talked about film of this year’s awards season, a sensation that translated to a whopping 13 Oscar nominations.

But unlike the old adage, not all press is good press. A few days after Gascón received her nod, journalist Sarah Hagi unearthed some of Gascón’s inflammatory posts on social media, which were still live at the time of her nomination. From there, it was a firestorm, with users searching for and amplifying Gascón’s hate-filled posts about everything from George Floyd’s murder to the Islamic population in Spain; she even managed to get in a dig at Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” while judging the film for its diverse cast. Despite Gascón issuing numerous apologies, fellow “Emilia Pérez” cast members Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, director Jacques Audiard and the film’s distributor, Netflix, have all distanced themselves from Gascón. Suddenly, the film’s trans star —whom Audiard and Netflix were all too happy to hinge their awards season campaign on — went from the token image of progressive filmmaking to a pall hanging over the film’s already murky legacy.

“Gascón being revealed to be a racist ultimately reinforces the same narratives around trans people,” says Jessie Earl, a filmmaker and content creator whose videos chronicling the “Emilia Pérez” controversies have amassed over 500,000 collective views. “Trans women are always framed as villains, as people trying to attack the status quo. Because we have given up ‘manhood,’ [we’re seen] as the antithesis to how our society is built. That gets even worse when you consider the tokenization because our culture likes to prop up people as representatives of our entire community. So when Gascón falls, it makes us all look bad.”

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But Earl points to another 2024 film that also tackles transitioning from an abstract viewpoint, Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw the TV Glow,” as an opposing force to “Emilia Pérez.” Schoenbrun’s film also ran in the festival circuit and garnered meager awards buzz. But “I Saw the TV Glow” didn’t boast the same name recognition and awards-ready sparkle to make it a contender against Audiard’s movie. Though, now that “Emilia Pérez” is in limbo, Earl believes it’s the perfect time to point to the fundamental differences between the two films, and why Oscar voters are afraid of movies that ask viewers to question institutions like the Academy, instead of catering to them.

Below, check out our full interview with Earl, who dissects the stereotypes that “Emilia Pérez” reinforces, the cautionary tale of making a trans film from a cisgender gaze and whether she thinks that “Emilia Pérez” turning into a meme factory could make the film a future cult hit.

Let’s jump back a few months in time to last year. Do you remember when you first heard about “Emilia Pérez”?

The first time I heard about it was at Cannes. I’m a film buff, so I watch those lists of, “Here are the 50 different films out of Cannes that you won’t be able to watch for seven months!” I vaguely recall saying, “Oh! There’s a movie that’s a musical about a trans person who is also a criminal.” So I was curious about it because I didn’t know too much about the backstory or the director. I was intrigued because I find a lot of trans representation today tends to be very squeaky clean.

Once you watched the movie, give me a sense of your reaction.

I tried to go into it with an open mind, because there have been many times where people have told me a movie is bad and I end up really liking it. So I tried to give it a fair shake. But it is… oof. [Laughs.] It’s a movie that is very clearly written by a cis man who took no time to try to understand a trans experience. It reinforces every single stereotype about what it means to be trans and it puts on [an edgy] veneer, without actually doing anything to interrogate any of the core underlying assumptions about trans people. Instead, the film thinks it’s deep because it’s asking the question of, “Oh, has Emilia really changed because she’s trans?” It uses transition as a metaphor, but doesn’t do anything deeper to talk about what a trans experience would mean at that level.

You mentioned the stereotypes that the film emphasizes. Give me a sense of which stereotypes you’re referring to, for anyone who may not recognize them.

For example, the idea that a trans person is deceiving you in some way. So much of the film is centered around the idea that Emilia’s character is deceptive, and deception is tied to her transness. She’s hid her transition from her family; she reveals her breasts at one point, which focuses on trans bodies as a spectacle to be looked at; later on in the film, when she’s reconnecting with her family, she lies to her family about who she is, saying she’s not her wife Jessi’s (Selena Gomez) ex. The film keeps going back to the question of whether Emilia is a good person based on how deceptive she is. And that is then tied into her transness.

The other thing, which is epitomized by that “penis to vagina” song [laughs] — the “Vaginoplasty” song — is the hyperfixation on surgeries as a main qualifier of being trans. [The scene] is quite literally spectacle-izing the experience. What’s funny about that song is that I saw it out of context first.

Me too!

I was like, “Oh! This must be making fun of how cis people talk about our surgeries.” When you watch it in context, it’s so much worse. She gets a transition like that, she gets all the surgeries at once, and is just done. The film is not interested at all in Emilia’s internal life. The movie uses [Zoe Saldaña’s character] Rita as a vehicle to ogle at Emilia, and also takes away Emilia’s agency. Narratively, she doesn’t even get to pick her own surgeries?! And that’s another trope: that every trans person needs surgery.

After she gets her surgeries, there’s a time jump, and we don’t get to see how Emilia comes to understand being a woman, how womanhood changes her perspective. Instead, we’re left with this question, “Has she changed?” It sits over the entirety of the film, but because it constantly keeps us in that question, we don’t get any [intimate] moments with her character to reveal who she is. The only revealing moment we get, which is the biggest transphobic moment in the film, is when she lashes out at Jessi, and that moment is coded as her “male self coming out.” Her voice gets deeper, the violence is tied to violence that she enacted as “a man,” as “a criminal.” It points to this idea that trans women are just men deep down. The movie thinks it’s deep by saying that, but it’s just a transphobic trope.

I’m curious, do you think that because “Emilia Pérez” is so outwardly offensive, there might be a reality where this movie becomes a cult hit among queer and trans people?

It could be a queer “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” where it’s worth watching with a crowd of people who make fun of it, like “The Room.” We all understand it’s not a good movie, but we can make fun of it and find joy in our awareness of that.

I feel like it’s already on that track with the vaginoplasty song becoming a meme.

It’s funny in the context of doing the thing that we all know is wrong. There’s that, but there’s also, equally, a chance where that song becomes a right-wing thing. There’s a chance for it to become a cult hit, but I don’t think it will ever be able to reach the heights of something like “Rocky Horror”; also a problematic movie, but a problematic movie that is ultimately trying to say something supportive.

What do you think it is about the style of the trans narrative in “Emilia Pérez” that people responded to? Because while a lot of people deride it, a lot of people love it, too.

The reason it’s getting all of these awards and nominations is because it’s reinforcing a narrative that people already want. It’s also the topic du jour of the political moment. Trans people are the scapegoats, we’re the hinge point of the question, “Are you progressive or are you conservative?” So people wanted to uplift a trans story, but this is a story that ultimately just reinforces those dominant narratives about us, and that’s what people are responding to. They’re not willing to interrogate how we treat trans people in our society … To stand up for us would require a lot of breaking down a lot of internalized thoughts about our society today. So this movie is a tokenization of a trans person, but it’s not forcing people to reckon with how they actually think and talk about trans people.

“I Saw the TV Glow,” that film is showing the internal struggle of a trans person, and trying to make you understand what it feels like to be trans. It universalizes that experience . . . by getting inside a person’s head, whereas “Emilia Pérez” is a movie that’s an external view of trans people that says, “Look at the trans person. You don’t have to identify with them, but you can pity them.” It never wrestles with what it would mean to be us. It’s not [introspective about] what makes us human, and what connects us to [everyone else].

When the Oscar nominations came out, the big headline was that Gascón’s nod made history, but now, the cast and the director are distancing themselves from her. What do you make of that?

Gascón’s racism speaks to the kind of person she is within the trans community. She’s certainly not as overtly conservative as Caitlyn Jenner, but she has a certain Caitlyn Jenner vibe in the sense that she is a woman who is [somewhat] insulated from a lot of the direct violence happening to trans people. She’s a woman of a certain privilege, and she’s aligning more with her class over her marginalized status. That being said, she does need to take accountability for [the things she’s said]. Her surface-level apologies show that she’s unwilling to engage with that.

At the same time, there’s a lot of transmisogyny in the way that people responded to this controversy. Before this stuff with Gascón even came out, people were talking about how the movie is extremely transphobic and also extremely racist toward Mexican people. Despite that, it got a bunch of awards and nominations. But when one trans person ends up being sh*tty, that’s when we start having these conversations, and everything’s focused on Gascón and her alone. There’s a sympathy starting to build for everyone else in the film, especially the director. “How horrible that one person ruined it for him!” The man made a transphobic, racist movie. Now Gascón is facing transphobic hate, people deadnaming her and using this as a way to deny her identity. No one [from the movie] is going to be willing to defend her because they don’t want to defend a racist. Yes, she should be held accountable, but she is not the problem with the film.

I want to talk about “I Saw the TV Glow,” which was a hit out of Sundance and was critically acclaimed. Tell me about why you think that movie — which was written and directed by a trans person — is more successful in its depiction of trans identity than something like “Emilia Perez.”

It’s an intuitive, emotional film that gets to what it feels like [to be trans]. The word “Lynchian” is thrown around a lot — even before David Lynch’s recent passing — to mean something that’s just surreal. But what Lynch really captured, and what I think “I Saw the TV Glow” is a continuance of, is that it’s a movie that works on an emotional level. You can sit back afterward and intellectualize everything, but when you’re watching it, even when it’s weird, it makes logical sense. The movie’s slow, methodical pace, the way the actors speak. It’s all very dreamlike, and it gets to that same idea of the nightmare that trans people feel like we’re living in when we’re forced to live a life that is not our own.

Elaborate on that.

I think people who watch it start to understand a little better about what it means to be trans. I’ve seen people say it’s a movie about the dangers of nostalgia. It’s not. It’s about how our culture tries to make you think the feelings you had when you were a kid are silly and dumb. “It’s silly that you wanted to be in your favorite TV show, it’s silly that you wanted to be that woman that you saw on TV. You should just want to go to work every day. Don’t think about it.”

The weaponization of nostalgia tries to strip away our feelings about the past [to make us think] it wasn’t really as good as it used to be. You see it in all of our franchises today, they use these Easter eggs and references to the past, but they’re just echoes. They’re not trying to build anything new, they’re trying to steal from the past to regurgitate something to sell it to you based on your goodwill feelings from that time. But that effort reduces the past of its meaning and depth. That’s ultimately what “I Saw the TV Glow” is saying: Those feelings about [the past] are the real you, you should seek them.

What do you think the bar is for trans narratives that become popular enough to break through to Oscar voters right now? It didn’t happen for “I Saw the TV Glow,” but we’ve seen films like “Emilia Pérez” and 2017’s “A Fantastic Woman” impress voters enough that they were nominated.

It’s something I wrestle with a lot. “A Fantastic Woman” is still a movie that is externalizing a trans experience, because why is she a fantastic woman? She’s just a trans person living her life. She’s fantastic if she’s trans. It’s still promoting this externalized view of minorities; it’s a problem that pervades the Oscars and how they look at minorities, generally.

When I look at trans narratives in that context, I have two feelings about it. There’s a part of me that would really love “I Saw the TV Glow” to have received a nomination. It would’ve gotten the movie so much more attention, it would’ve brought people to see the movie, to understand what it means to be trans. I think we need that right now. So that chance is robbed of us in favor of this tokenizing, racist, transphobic film that is ultimately going to do more harm to us than anything else.

But on the other hand?

Looking at the moment we’re in right now, looking at growing fascism … ultimately the problem is the narratives that those fascists are able to build upon, which are ingrained assumptions about trans people, women, minorities, because our society is built upon these norms. Ultimately, we need to be focusing our energy on breaking down these norms. As a result, something like “I Saw the TV Glow” was never going to get nominated because it is a movie asking you to question the very institutions that something like the Oscars is built on.

I look at the landscape of Hollywood right now and I’m like, “Who’s going to fund what I’m going to make?” Maybe someone will, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to do that, especially at this moment. The space that I want to go into is the indie space, a space that’s willing to push back and challenge the dominant narrative. To do that, you can’t really expect institutional accolades of support. Maybe you will! Maybe the stars will align and you’ll get that. I think A24 should be praised for funding a film like “I Saw the TV Glow.” I think we need more spaces that really push people to break their confines. If you’re doing that, the goal shouldn’t be to get Oscars, the goal should be making art that speaks to something truthful right now and what we need to be fighting for. At the end of the day, that art is never going to be propped up by the institution, so we need to prop it up ourselves. It’s more of a challenge for us — me, you, critics, people talking about [film] — to say, “These institutions don’t actually represent the art that is meaningful right now.”