A film that centers on a transgender person or storyline enters the culture like any other movie. The difference lies in the discourse around it. A pervasive disregard for the realities of trans experience beyond the screen is evident in how criticism of such films is written, in how moviegoers view them, and even in how they’re made. Trans bodies have long been depicted in cinema in the most salacious and deviant contexts, and this has been met without much protest from the mainstream society that absorbs those images. Trans people in movies are written and talked about as if they were abstract concepts, anomalies. For years, it’s been clear that very little attention is being paid (by filmmakers, critics, or marketers) to the ways in which a trans audience might see and react to these attempts at putting their lives in front of the camera, and the cisgender majority continues to control the conversation. But a robust dialogue about these films has existed for decades within the