UC San Diego

As trans healthcare access becomes increasingly precarious, leftist discourses around trans care trend towards oversimplification. In reaction to right-wing ideologies that paint gender affirming care for minors as child abuse and for adults as criminal-pathological, liberal commentators describe trans healthcare through a positive dialectic of sickness, treatment, and recovery. This linear narrative erases trans people who are also disabled and/or who have had to medicalize themselves, literally make themselves sick, in order to receive care. Due to austerity social welfare systems, many trans women will remain debilitated long after their neovaginal nerves reconnect. How do we visibilize these women’s stories cinematically in ways that do not further demonize us as navel gazing snowflakes or posit representation as a solution to crises of neoliberal political economy?

To navigate this question, I turn to cinematic narratives of disability and (un)recovery to think through futures of care. In addition to theorizing with own short film Sydney & Kim [2023], this paper looks closely at Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe, which describes a binary of capitalist care and New Age care. Haynes’ implicit critique demonstrates the urgency of a third path of care, one that resists atomization. Sydney & Kim is motivated in part by queer cinematic works that index queerness obliquely, exploring what queerness is by showing what it is not. Narrative projects like Haynes’ Safe and Gregg Araki’s TV sitcom pilot This is How the World Ends [2000], employ an apophatic cinema of queerness, exaggerating cisness and straightness to the point of explosion. In a moment when Trans Cinema is still congealing into a genre, I hope Sydney & Kim can offer a cinematic language of refusal, in which the historical failures in achieving trans liberation through recognition inform the filmic structure itself.