[News/Film/Commentary] [Australia] Ticked off Trannies with Knives: Homage or damage?
Stephanie Stevens
Ticked off Trannies with Knives: Homage or damage?
Israel Luna’s ‘transploitation’ movie ignited a firestorm of outrage
from the trans community in the US last year. As the film gets its
debut screening in Australia this month, Katrina Fox reviews the
controversy and examines why it failed to impress.
13 February 2011
Trans people are ‘en vogue’, it seems. The New York Times declared
2010 the ‘year of the transsexual’
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/fashion/09TRANS.html> and Brazilian
trans model Lea T is currently the darling of the fashion world
<http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/transsexual-model-steals-the-show-20110201-1abfr.html>
, making appearances in several high-profile runway shows and
featuring on a magazine cover in which she and British supermodel Kate
Moss locked lips
<http://www.styleite.com/media/kate-moss-lea-t-love-cover/> .
Gay male film-maker Israel Luna cashed in on the zeitgeist last year
with his ‘transploitation’ movie Ticked off Trannies with Knives
<http://www.tickedofftrannies.com/> (TOTWK), which he declared an
homage to the exploitation
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_film> films of the 1970s.
Billed as a ‘trans revenge fantasy’, the film features a group of
trans women (who may be transsexual, transgender or drag queens – it’s
not explicitly stated) who fight back after being viciously beaten,
raped and left for dead by three redneck thugs.
When the trailer was released last year, the shit hit the fan. Luna
was derided for appropriating the real-life murders of Angie Zapata
and Jorge Mercado, who were victims of trans hate crimes, to promote
his film. He subsequently re-edited the trailer and removed their
names.
His use of the term ‘trannie’ also raised the ire of many American
trans women, who consider it to be derogatory. This is a whole
discussion in itself which is taking place online – see articles by
Roz Kaveney <http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/30/trans-language-transgender>
, Joelle Ruby Ryan
<http://transmeditations.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/why-it%E2%80%99s-time-to-get-rid-of-%E2%80%9Ctranny%E2%80%9D/>
and Kate Bornstein <http://out.com/exclusives.asp?id=27988> for an
overview of some of the arguments for and against.
As if that wasn’t enough, TOTWK has also been lambasted for its
portrayal of trans women. In an article published on the Huffington
Post <http://out.com/exclusives.asp?id=27988> , Ashley Love from
anti-defamation group Media Advocates Giving National Equality to
Transsexual & Transgender People
<http://themagnetsource.blogspot.com/> (MAGNET) wrote:
The film portrays all trans women as hyper-sexualized, jokes,
murderous and/or unstable. This is not only inaccurate; it's offensive
and incites further misunderstanding and violence. Some of the drag
queen characters have a ‘trans face’ act that is comparable to ‘black
face’ of decades past, when white men painted their faces and depicted
black people as minstrels and subhuman.
Likewise, ‘trans face’ is just as dehumanizing to actual trans women.
Their ‘trans face’ act is hyper-sexualized, vile-talking, flamboyant,
gay man with women's clothes on.
MAGNET protested the screening of the movie at New York’s Tribeca Film
Festival and held an educational rally outside the premiere last year.
Love told The Scavenger why:
We protested this film because society is uninformed that women born
with a transsexual and/or intersex birth challenge have had their
medical legitimacy usurped, misrepresented and appropriated into a
gender deconstructionist reservation against their will, starting with
misogynistic transvestite males such as Virginia Prince, then backed
by Gay Inc, via Janice Raymond, and now by the newer transgender
ideology mandate, which problematically cages these women with gay
male drag queens, genderqueers and cross-dressing males with little to
no education to educate of the differences.
Other organisations weighed into the debate
<http://www.glaad.org/calltoaction/032510> , including the Gay &
Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
<http://www.glaad.org/calltoaction/032510> (GLAAD), which stated:
Because of its positioning as a transgender film, viewers unfamiliar
with the lives of transgender women will likely leave this film with
the impression that transgender women are ridiculous caricatures of
'real women.' It demeans actual transgender women who struggle for
acceptance and respect in their day-to-day lives and to be valued for
their contributions to our society.
TOTWK has now arrived in Australia and will be screened this month as
part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Film Festival
<http://www.queerscreen.com.au/page/mardi-gras-film-festival> .
I watched a preview screener of the film with my partner, Tracie
O’Keefe, a transsexed woman who said:
There are some things in life that I choose not to engage with because
I have only so many years left to enjoy. One of them is trash movies.
By this I mean a film with a poorly devised plot, bad directing, and
more violence than entertainment. TOTWK is such a project.
The actors are overly aware of the camera in a bad way, its mainstream
fake tackiness is unconvincing, rendering trans people as either
stupid or vengeful. Most of the street sisters I hung around with when
I was younger would have killed their attackers long before the tea
break and not dragged it out until the credits.
Unlike O’Keefe, I don’t mind the occasional trash movie. A bit of
low-budget, high-camp, horror schlock featuring super-vixens with
sensational cleavage in the vein of Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat,
Kill, Kill <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster,_Pussycat%21_Kill%21_Kill%21>
go down a treat with vegan pizza and a gaggle of pals with an
appreciation of the warped.
I occasionally warm to a revenge fantasy film too, like I Spit on Your
Grave <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Spit_on_Your_Grave> . Originally
released in 1978 (the version I’ve seen), and remade in 2010, it tells
the story of a female writer who is repeatedly gang-raped, humiliated
and left for dead. She then hunts each of her attackers down and
exacts her revenge by various methods including stabbing and
disembowelling.
The gang-rape scenes are hard to watch – one of the reasons why
radical feminists vehemently protested against the film in the ’70s –
but there is at least some kind of ‘pay off’ at the end when the
rapists get their come uppance. Even Guardian columnist Julie Bindel,
who took part in the picket of the film’s screenings 30 years ago,
recently admitted she was wrong about I Spit on Your Grave
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/19/wrong-about-spit-on-your-grave>
, arguing that it is “less exploitative than sentimental fantasies of
justice” portrayed in films such as The Accused, in which rapists get
a lengthy prison sentence.
As a cis woman, I found the scenes in TOTWK in which trans women were
brutally bashed, kicked, punched and raped disturbing. What made my
skin crawl the most, however, was the threat of violence.
In one scene, a trans woman is restrained in a chair and asked to pick
a card. Her attacker then describes in chilling detail how he plans to
kill her. Depending on which card she chooses, he will either batter
her to death with a hammer, or cut out her heart with a knife,
promising to relish in her screams and agony as she’s slowly tortured.
The trans women – who have acquired superpowers after taking a martial
arts course – fight back, inserting knives and pistols into their
attackers’ anuses before stabbing, shooting and battering them. But
for me there was no satisfaction in the revenge.
Kate Bornstein nails the reason why. Writing in Out magazine
<http://out.com/detail.asp?id=26757> she says:
Luna inexplicably switches styles: The attack scenes are now all about
camp. Luna makes it clear that none of the men are afraid of their
attackers. Ha, ha, ha. It’s all nudge-nudge-wink-wink. In the film’s
earlier scenes, if a girl went down under a baseball bat or a knife,
she stayed down. Two of the five trans women die in the first attack.
But the revenge scenarios are all French farce. Every time a trans
woman hits one of her attackers, he somehow survives a death blow and
comes back at her.
In other words, the violence against the trans women is graphically
realistic, while the revenge of the ‘ticked off trannies’ is all just
a giggle and framed as ‘not likely to ever happen, so don’t worry
guys, you can bash a tranny without fear of reprisals’.
But, like most things, it’s a matter of personal taste. What will
outrage and offend one person will delight another. Cindi Edwards, a
Sydney-based trans and intersex woman enjoyed TOTWK. She told The
Scavenger:
First and foremost I am a fan of exploitation cinema. In a world where
everything is very seriously real it’s just nice sometimes to just
indulge in pure fictional black humour. I’m not going to label this
film transphobic because I’m trans. I love revenge in films – always
have. This is special because it’s tranny revenge. Watching it was
like therapy. I’ve seen so many movies and TV shows where the trans
folk are miserable, pathetic and always die in some horrible way or
they are perverted murderers or something like that. This doesn’t
happen in this film.
Edwards also takes issue with criticisms of the films by trans
activists that appear to set ‘real’ trans women apart from and above
those who may be part of the drag scene:
The film starts off in a club with showgirl trannies. They do exist
you know. Trans woman do become showgirls. For some it’s par for the
course but still keeping in mind this film is fiction. The jokes are
cheap and crass but that’s all part of the scene.
When I first transitioned a lot of girls were sex workers and
showgirls. That’s the trans world I came into. I wouldn’t change that
for the world. I have lifelong friends and a world of experiences that
is part of who I am today. I read something somewhere where a trans
woman suggested it’s not even a real depiction of trans life.
Well sorry honey pie, but for some it is and was. I’m sorry to break
this to you tadpole but some of us came through that way. It angered
me that there seems to be a denialist movement regarding how some of
us transitioned. Not too long ago the drag and trans scene was all
mixed up. I worked with many of the Les Girls
<http://www.lesgirls.com.au/> and lots of them are trans.
On the violence depicted on screen, Edwards says she found the revenge
scenes empowering:
I remembered all those times that I’d been physically and verbally
assaulted. And yes I was viciously attacked by five men but this is
like 15 years ago. I remember I had all sorts of revenge fantasies
about getting some justice but they were just personal musings. I
loved all the revenge scenes in the film. They were fun and, in a
twisted way, empowering.
The violence towards trans women was here long before this movie came
out. It’s a revenge flick, not a ground-breaking masterpiece.
On that final point, most will agree. As Bornstein astutely points
out, the film is more than just about transphobia. Like other movies
in the exploitation genre, it offends just about everyone:
If this film was worth it – and if the transgender protesters really
wanted to put together an effective protest campaign – they could have
opened the cause from transphobia to the larger issue of misogyny.
Then they could have invited all the people who are told they’re not
man enough or woman enough. That’s misogyny.
And that includes anyone whose race, class, age, looks, ability, and
religion, sexuality, citizenship, language, and/or family and
reproductive status impacts their status as real men and real women.
In Ticked Off Trannies, Luna manages to offend everyone who’s
oppressed by any one of those hierarchical systems of oppression. But
because the lightening-rod word Trannies is in the title, the film is
mistakenly perceived as a single-issue problem, thus forcing the hand
of an old-school single-issue political activism.
They say the best publicity for a film is to be banned or protested
against and the controversy surrounding TOTWK has ensured that it will
take its place in the annals of ‘transploitation’ film-making. Let’s
hope future efforts take on board the criticisms and create movies
that appeal – rather than repel – the very community they seek to pay
homage to.
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Ticked off Trannies with Knives screens Monday 21 February, 8pm at the
Oxford Hotel, Sydney. Visit the Mardi Gras Film Festival website
<http://www.queerscreen.com.au/page/mardi-gras-film-festival> for more
information and bookings.
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Katrina Fox <http://www.queerscreen.com.au/page/mardi-gras-film-festival>
is editor-in-chief of The Scavenger.
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