Revolutionaries
Isabel Sandoval has been slowly changing the game with her transgressive art over the years. And she’s not the only one: many trans* creators are retooling audience expectations of sex on screen – at a time when it’s impossible to talk about anything else. Lillian Crawford talks to the key creators helping the trans* sexual revolution.
In the first episode of the Wachowskis’ Netflix series Sense8, we are introduced to computer wiz Nomi Marks in a bathroom. The camera closes on a syringe as she injects herself with oestrogen before panning back to show her girlfriend, Amanita, taking a bath.
The next time we see her, Nomi is lying on a bed with Amanita on top of her. We move behind the couple, the strap-on visible as Amanita continues to fuck Nomi. At the point of climax, Amanita undoes the straps and throws the device to the ground. Cut briefly to a rainbow dildo dripping on the floor.
In Isabel Sandoval’s 2018 film Lingua Franca, the director herself plays Olivia, an undocumented Filipina careworker living in Brooklyn. In the first intimate scene with her, she goes to her bedroom drawer and takes out a purple dilator. She squeezes lube onto the tip, before lying back on the bed and pushing it inside her vagina.
Later, we see Olivia imagining herself having sex with Alex, the grandson of the elderly lady she cares for played by Eamon Farren; a fantasy that soon becomes a reality. The camera stays close to her face, revealing subtle expressions of the pleasure she feels with Alex’s erect penis inside her. With Sandoval in front of and behind the camera, she is in complete control.
There’s a myriad of ways in which these scenes are revolutionary for trans* audiences. A cisgender person could watch these sequences and not realise that either woman has been through a process of transition. By showing without telling, Sandoval and the Wachowskis don’t owe anyone an explanation.
For some women, taking oestrogen and dilating are the only persistent medical aspects of transition for after Gender Confirmation Surgery (GCS). Neither ritual is exclusive to trans women – many cis women require Hormone Replacement Therapy, and/or dilate to counteract vaginismus.
However, by showing them on screen, they are visual signals to trans* viewers that Nomi and Olivia have transitioned. It’s like an understanding hand outstretched for the first time, to see that these women aren’t different because of the sex they were assigned at birth, right down to how they fuck.
In Sense8 and Lingua Franca, Nomi and Olivia are forcibly reminded of their medical history through misgendering, administrative nightmares, and a lack of acceptance. By showing the naked normalness of these women early on, every issue they face is shown to be due to the ignorance and prejudices of a cis-normative society, which fails to acknowledge the diversity of cis experience.
Both scenes challenge stigmas and misconceptions about trans women that are especially pervasive today. Nomi is seen experiencing a similar hormonal cycle to a cis woman, including regular period symptoms and sexual pleasure derived from having a functioning vulva, clitoris, and g-spot in her vagina.
This attention to detail comes directly from actor Jaime Clayton and director Lana Wachowski, stressing the importance of allowing trans* people to speak their own truth. Isabel Sandoval, too, tells me that this was the most essential part of feeling able to make Lingua Franca.
“When I made Señorita in 2011 and my second feature, Apparition, in 2012, even though sex was part of the plot, I approached it from a position of guilt and shame, which had a lot to do with my Catholic upbringing,” she says.
“After my transition I wanted to start afresh and question the assumptions I had not only about filmic language and sensibility, but my own personal truths. Part of that was my attitude towards sexuality and sex. For Lingua Franca, I approached shooting the sensual scenes just in terms of how I felt – I wrote it while I was transitioning and started shooting three or four years after my confirmation surgery.”
In contrast to how she had felt making her first two features, there is a sense of celebration and pride in Lingua Franca. “This time I felt there was nothing I should apologise for or hold back showing a trans woman indulging herself,” Sandoval says. “To have a sex scene that’s very personal and sensual, and for Olivia to allow herself to experience that pleasure onscreen.”
“A lot of minority filmmakers want to try to make their work more palatable or accessible so they make it for the other people, like white or cis people. That’s not a priority for me. It’s not autobiographical – I don’t think of myself as a victim. It’s a declaration of selfhood and agency.”
Sense8 and Lingua Franca offer a turning point: sex is not adding to representations of trans* people, but making that sex positive. As critic Drew Gregory tells me, trans* people “are often sexualized and objectified. But very rarely, at least in mainstream media, have we had autonomy over our sex lives and their messy complexity.”
A trope popularised by Alfred Hitchcock, and revived in the 1990s by erotic thrillers like Dressed to Kill and The Last Seduction, was to depict trans* sexuality as something to be feared. The alternative, as Clarice Starling says in The Silence of the Lambs, is to see trans* people as “passive”. Gregory summarises: “We can get fucked but rarely are we allowed to fuck. I mean that in a metaphorical sense – nothing against bottoms.”
For Gregory, this is what made Lingua Franca so refreshing. “Isabel has personal experience, political awareness, and a deep understanding of cinematic craft,” she says. “It’s the combination of those three things that lets her capture a truth and sensuality I’ve rarely seen when it comes to representing sexuality on screen in general and never seen with trans* sexuality.”
In addition to showing Olivia having sex in Lingua Franca, it was also important to Sandoval that the audience sees her dilating. “The big debate around the dilation scene was how much we wanted to tell the audience, because a lot of people think she’s masturbating,” the director explains. “And I decided that I want them to learn about this on their own, instead of me educating these people about it. If I had put those extra details in, I would have felt like I was capitulating as a storyteller and as a trans woman. I don’t need you to understand me.”
One of the most unrealistic aspects of mainstream sex scenes is that they largely don’t feature props – the body, for cis people, is shown to be enough. Of course this isn’t always the case, as everything from condoms and lube to strap-ons and vibrators can enhance performance and pleasure.
This is slowly changing on screen. For instance, cis teenager Lily who is shown to use dilators for vaginismus in Netflix’s Sex Education. Yet as soon as these rituals are shown, it is then seen to make it more taboo, resulting in censorship and higher age restrictions from certification boards. Think of the 18+ ratings that appear at the start of Sex Education (a show targeted at high school teenagers) and Sense8, which moralises what sort of audience should be allowed to witness non-cishet PIV sex acts.
That’s why the rainbow dildo in Sense8 is such a radical object. As Gregory says, it “deserves to have its own exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image”. Films such as Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, in which a male character infamously vomits at the sight of a trans woman’s genitals, and Lukas Dhont’s Girl, where the lead female character castrates herself with kitchen scissors, are obsessed with the image of a pre-op woman-with-a-penis and the threat they pose to male heterosexuality.
Sense8 flips that image on its head by featuring a trans woman getting fucked in her pussy by her girlfriend within the first half hour. This form of sex, and how to shoot it on film, is beyond the realm of imagination for a lot of cis male directors.
Thanks to the enduring success of The Matrix franchise, Lana and Lilly Wachowski have been allowed to use their position of power in a mainstream sphere and personal experience to film what would previously have been unfilmable – or at least inconceivable to any male director or studio executive. It’s no wonder Sense8 was cancelled by Netflix after two seasons given how radical its trans-positive representation is. Maybe they feel mainstream audiences aren’t quite ready for that yet.
Asked to reflect on the sexual symbols seen in Sense8 and Lingua Franca, writer, curator, and organiser So Mayer says they want “all cinema to be more honest, more thoughtful, more playful, less euphemistic, less sentimental, less moralising, more narrative, more dynamic in how sex and sexuality are seen on screen: the whole frame needs to change.” In other words, it’s not only the types of sex that need to change on screen – but the cinematographic language itself has to be reconsidered to accommodate it.
Asked what forms of trans* representation they avoid, Mayer tells me, “I try to avoid media about trans* people that have no trans* creatives involved. Trans* sex is particularly presented fetishistically and/or moralistically in the media, while cishet sex is presented as ‘natural’.”
There has been a great deal of discourse around the narrative importance of sex in cinema in the last few years, but the fact is that it can teach us so much about characters and ourselves. For trans* people, it can be about subverting expectations and misconceptions, and showing the diversity of sexuality. As Grgeory puts it, “I want to know how a character fucks, if they fuck, as much as I want to know their fashion, their relationship to their family, where they work, and everything else that makes us human.”
Filmmakers like Sandoval and the Wachowskis are already changing the frame, and this is quickly having an impact on the way sex is shown and watched on screen. Sex acts can develop fictional characters by depicting them at their most open and vulnerable, where they show explicitly that they have nothing to hide or be ashamed of.
Given the culture of misunderstanding and fear surrounding trans* women today, it’s powerful to see women using their vulvas for sexual pleasure and experiencing orgasm through clitoral stimulation – as Nomi post-coitally says to Amanita, “You literally just fucked my brains out.” When we watch Nomi, or Olivia in Lingua Franca, fucking, there’s a tangible atmosphere of euphoria that comes with being comfortable with their own bodies. After all, sex is great, but have you ever felt yourself in the bedroom?
Isabel Sandoval has directed several episodes of the forthcoming FX series Under the Banner of Heaven, premiering on April 28.