Why this trans woman thinks Emilia Pérez is great trans representation

"It treats Manitas' early transition with shock and disgust."

Little White Lies' Juan Barquin writes that "in their very first scene together, Rita literally gasps with disgust at Emilia (in boy-mode drag as Manitas) opening her shirt to 'prove' she's serious about transitioning. Though the audience, blessedly, isn’t shown the small breasts she’s presumably grown with two years of hormones, the reaction shot alone being played like a body horror reveal is enough."

The scene in question takes less than six seconds to unfold, as Rita is telling Manitas that she can't just transform into a woman overnight, it takes years. "I started treatment two years ago," Manitas says as she unzips her jacket and then quickly zips it back up.

To me, Rita's gasp seemed to be a shock that this situation was real. Once she saw the physical changes Manitas was already going through, she knew that there was no turning back.

If she was disgusted, her disgust vanishes instantly, as in the moment after, she begins her work in helping her new boss transition.

"It has too many trans tropes."

In my original review, I compared the film to Brokeback Mountain, another movie that is filled with problematic gay tropes.

Drew Burnett Gregory at Autostraddle writes, "The film hits just about every trans trope you can imagine: 1. Trans woman killer 2. Tragic trans woman 3. Trans woman abandons her wife and children to transition 4. Transition treated as a death 5. Deadnaming and misgendering at pivotal moments 6. Trans woman described as half male/half female."

Brokeback Mountain did the same with gay tropes: self-hating gays, tragic ending, secret relationship, gay men cheating on their wives, gay men using sex workers, antigay violence, and homophobic reactions from family. It's still one of the best queer movies ever.

In the end, those tropes don't hold the film back at all and actually are part of what makes it so powerful. I argue that Emilia Pérez uses its tropes the same way: to tell an all-new story and reveal some of the truths behind the tropes — tropes that we can examine more closely in the rest of this piece.

"It paints trans women as liars."

"The entire time I was watching it I had a really weird feeling in my stomach because to me it seemed like the filmmaker was painting trans women as liars. Liars and people that can’t tell the truth and they don’t know who they are," journalist Reanna Cruz said to NPR.

I want to see complex and villainous trans women characters. Love Lies Bleeding is one of my other favorite films this year, and it paints lesbians as violent, depraved, abusive criminals.

To me, it was clear that the film wasn't leaning into harmful trans tropes about trans women being deceptive or liars, but examining them. Emilia isn't a liar because she's trans, she's a liar because she's a bad person and she's in many ways, afraid.

The movie shows that if you live a lie, whether you're trans or not, your lies will catch up with you.

"It compares transition to death."

In my opinion, it actually does the exact opposite. Emilia Pérez presents the trope that transition equals death and shows just how flawed it is.

The movie is very clear that no matter how hard Emilia pretends that her old self is dead, she's not. She's the same person she always was, and transitioning doesn't change that.

One of my favorite themes in the movie is that when a trans person transitions, they don't die. Folks like Elon Musk love to say things like "the woke mind virus killed my" child and they argue that once a person comes out, their past self is dead.

This movie challenges that idea and emphasizes that a person is still the same person they were before transition.

Just because Emilia transitions, her violent and controlling tendencies don't go away. To have them disappear would be sending the message that The Silence of the Lambs did 20 years ago when Clarice told Hannibal "transsexuals are very passive."

Emilia is not a nice person and she's not a forgiving person. Of course that won't change when she transitions. As the Israeli surgeon points out, "If he's a wolf, she'll be a wolf." Surgery and hormones won't change that.

"Emilia is constantly misgendered and deadnamed."

Several critics have argued that the film features "deadnaming and misgendering at pivotal moments," and "Emilia Pérez is endlessly subjected to misgendering and deadnaming at every turn," but to me, misgendering and deadnaming were used sparingly in the film, and only at times where it made sense for the narrative.

Emilia is mostly referred to as Manitas and with "he/him" pronouns before she transitions, and Jessi says her deadname when she realizes who Emilia really is, but that makes sense. Jessi then refers to Emilia as "my husband," saying, "he's in the trunk," but this is shown to be the reaction of an obviously traumatized woman in the middle of a gunfight who thought her husband had been dead for the last five years and just now found out she's actually living as a woman.

Throughout the film, every person who Emilia meets as Emilia treats her as nothing other than Emilia, a woman they've met. None of them have an issue with welcoming a trans woman into their lives. Her new girlfriend never once has an issue with her being trans, and neither does her ex-wife, her kids, and Rita.

When Jessi wants to insult her, she calls her the d slur and threatens to expose her relationship with a woman, she doesn't call her the t slur or misgender her. It's only when she's surprised with the news that she misgenders Emilia.

"It's uninterested in a realistic transition."

Some folks have criticized the film for not having a realistic transition, instead having Emilia go to a one-stop shop and then magically recover offscreen.

As a trans woman who enjoys watching movies, and as a trans film critic, I am tired of watching trans movies centered around the character's actual physical transition. I want trans movies to be past the point of having to linger on the medical facts of transition. That's not an interesting story.

I'd rather have a hilarious and fun song where the characters sing "Mammoplasty! Vaginoplasty! Rhinoplasty!" and a scene where Emilia wakes up from her surgeries and then moves on rather than focusing on the physical process of transition for 60 minutes of the film.

"Trans women don't question their gender."

This is one of the biggest flaws I've seen with many negative reviews for the movie.

"One song sees her characterize herself as 'half him, half her/half papa, half tía.' I am a straight, cisgender man, and I cannot claim to understand the trans experience fully. (Although, to be sure, trans critics such as my New Times colleague Juan Barquin have also criticized the film.) But none of the transgender people in my life would ever question whether or not they are the gender they claim to be. Yet Emilia constantly backtracks on her chosen identity," writes Douglas Markowitz.

In my experience as a trans woman who has been out for over a decade, literally every trans person I have ever met questions their gender, especially early in transition.

Every trans woman grapples with not feeling like a "real woman." All women do. In a world where we're told that men and women are polar opposites, it's impossible to not question your gender if you think about it as much as a trans person does.

I'm over a decade into my transition, but even I still have my doubts sometimes. That's a part of the trans experience.

David Opie at Yahoo! Movies wrote that "even Emilia herself bizarrely refers to her body as 'half he, half she' during a romantic number with another woman."

As a trans lesbian, I can tell you honestly I never felt more insecure about my womanhood than in my early relationships with women after I transitioned. By having Emilia express that she feels between genders when she begins her first relationship with another woman after transitioning, she's expressing a feeling many, many trans lesbians have, and one that I've never seen explored in a film like this.

I love that the movie shows Emilia grappling with what it's like to be a trans woman in a lesbian relationship. The experience of trans lesbians is so often erased from media representation, and here, we finally have a trans lesbian expressing how it feels to be a trans lesbian.

"Emilia reverts to her 'male' self when she becomes angry."

Something I've seen in several reviews that really bothers me is when critics argue that Emilia fell back into using her "male voice" in the tense scene where she fights with Jessi about her moving in with her new boyfriend.

She's not reverting to her "male" self any more than I am when I enjoy something masculine like sports. I'm just being the version of me I always have been.

"The worst moment however, worse even than the fate that eventually befalls Emilia, is the moment when our protagonist angrily throws his unsuspecting wife onto a bed and threatens her using the same low, masculine voice she used pre-surgery," David Opie writes, misgendering Emilia.

"After learning of Jessi’s affair, Emilia switches back to Manitas’ masculine vocal register to chastise and threaten her, as if the man is still inside her," Douglas Markowitz adds.

Emilia most definitely does not go back to using her "male voice." She simply is a woman with a lower register, and when she gets angry, it shows. If you listen to the scenes where Gascón is playing the character as Manitas, you can clearly hear a difference in the voice she uses in the fight scene with Gomez.

To me, this criticism of the film only makes me, a real-life trans woman with a low register, feel like I will be seen as a man when I talk.

Is 'Emilia Pérez' transphobic?

In the end, if you are trans, I can't tell you whether or not you're going to find this movie to be transphobic. All I can say is that as a Mexican-American trans lesbian, I find Emilia is one of the most realistic and relatable trans characters I've ever seen in a movie.

Emilia Pérez is now streaming on Netflix.

Mey Rude is a staff writer for Out.

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