Estradiol and Epiphany: Analyzing the Representation of Transgender Women in American Films

The purpose of this research was to determine if the representation of transgender women in American films has improved in the past decade. The overall representation of transgender women in the media has noticeably improved over the past thirty years alongside other minority groups. However, many people in the transgender community feel as though this improvement has slowed down recently or has become stagnant. This research judges the films’ qualities of representation by using the films to answer set questions which test how positive the depiction of a transgender woman was. As previously mentioned, this examination focused on finding how many harmful stereotypes or tropes each film incorporated. This information was gathered from seven films which were used as critical texts: Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives (Luna, 2010), Gun Hill Road (Green, 2011), Dallas Buyers Club (Vallée, 2013), Boy Meets Girl (Schaeffer, 2014), Tangerine (Baker, 2015), Assassination Nation (Levinson, 2018), and Rocko’s Modern Life: Static Cling (Murray, 2019). The results of this research showed that the representation of transgender women in film in the United States has been improving throughout this decade, with the three most recent films, that were apart of this study, all showed improvement in three key areas. The increase in the quality of transgender representation seemed to have happened alongside Caitlyn Jenner publicly coming out. While the process of improving representation is slow, it seems to be slowly improving with the help of transgender people in the film industry and allies who care about transgender people.