‘She’s the He’ Review: A Delightful Coming-Out and Coming-of-Age Sendup of Transgender Bathroom Panic

by

On the verge of graduating high school, two cisgender boys pretend to be transgender to get into the girl’s locker room. It sounds like a ferocious right wing fever dream (not all that different from the plot of “Lady Ballers,” the hatemongering Daily Wire sports comedy). However, in the silly but lovable “She’s the He,” debuting feature director Siobhan McCarthy — and their heavily trans and nonbinary cast and crew — find the farce through a twist: one of the “boys” discovers she really is transgender. The result is a meaningful comedy-drama about identity, and the confusion of burgeoning youth.

Half the fun of “She’s the He” lies in its Russian-nesting-doll logistics: It’s a film in which trans and non-binary actors play ostensibly cisgender characters pretending to be trans. Not only does this subvert the Hollywood norm of having cisgender men play trans women (and sometimes receiving Oscar attention for it!), it also adds a playful fluidity to the film’s purview of queerness, as though it were a sandbox for trans storytellers to experiment with traditional tales from which they’re often boxed out (in this case, teen sex comedies, and high school coming-of-age stories).

The horny, high-energy mastermind Alex, and his reserved best friend Ethan — played by Nico Carney (he/him) and Misha Osherovich (they/them) respectively — are, as far as they both know, cisgender, heterosexual boys at a school largely accepting of queerness. However, the meat-head football players, led by muscular douchebag Jacob (Emmett Preciado), are still behind the times, and turn the co-leads’ closeness into jokes about the two of them being gay. In order to escape this hazing, Alex concocts the ill-conceived, two-pronged scheme of pretending to be trans girls in order to avoid the “gay” label — the school’s jocks are run-of-the-mill homophobic, but not so hateful as to trans-bash! — and in order to get closer to his crush, the popular it-girl Sasha (Malia Pyles).

Where transphobic fearmongering warns of “pretenders” taking advantage of bathroom rules, “She’s the He” presents a more realistic scenario, where total naivete is replaced by well-meaning (if at times, overcompensating) acceptance. Not everyone buys Alex’s plot, but they also offer him enough space to question his gender if need be. This also helps Ethan in the process, when she discovers that she may not be so averse to the feminine rituals foisted upon her as “one of the girls” (or the romantic attention she’s given by Tatiana Ringsby’s charismatic, nonbinary tech wiz, Forest).

Assisted by cartoonishly indie flourishes, like words and other onomatopoeia scribed across the frame, the film’s slight, low-budget stylings allow for a greater concentration on character moments, usually by way of rapid-fire punchlines. The vast majority of these are sweet and hilarious, which more than makes up for the movie’s plain presentation (its palette may be warm, but its aesthetics rarely enhance its mostly dialogue-based humor). However, the movie’s character focus affords Osherovich’s performance enough downtime to silently explore Ethan’s evolving sense of self, as she wrestles with how best to come out to her mother. One could try to align the actor’s own experiences with femininity to Ethan’s form of self-discovery — it’s certainly a curiosity in a film as smartly cast as “She’s the He” — but these linear, binary methods of framing performance are seldom applied to cisgender actors in trans roles. What’s important is that Osherovich, McCarthy and co. offer an authentic representation of teenage dysphoria and transgender fears in an act of community storytelling.

These notions certainly matter. However, one needn’t get bogged down by wistful reflections on the state of the world when discussing “She’s the He,” if only because Carney channels a young Steve Buscemi and delivers such an enormously funny performance that he swallows the movie whole. His conception of Alex is a blast. It’s both a satirical portrait of toxic, over-eager teenage masculinity (with interjections like “bro!” and references to “getting pussy” galore), but at the same time, makes for a surprisingly empathetic look at young men who fall short of masculine expectations, and the ways in which they overcompensate. To have a trans man in this role is both a meaningful reflection on what elements (and struggles) of manhood are learned and adopted, as well as a downright gut-busting parody of the type of bro-y teenager that usually appears in Hollywood’s teenage comedies.

Eventually, the film does build to a more straightforward depiction of aggressive cis boys trying to con their way into women’s spaces, but this too unfolds with a satirical streak (set to a song from queer landmark “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” no less). Treating it with anything approaching somberness would mean ceding ground to oppressive cultural forces. Instead, “She’s the He” makes a huge lark out of the idea that trans women in public spaces are a threat, or would open the door to bizarre impersonations, and instead presents political solutions in highly unusual, tongue-in-cheek ways. All the while, it keeps its character drama centered, by remaining focused on the fraught, gentle and ultimately lively dynamic between a harebrained cis-het boy, and the newly out transgender best friend he learns to affirm as she learns to accept herself.

Read More

2025-03-17 02:27