Inside TGirl­sOn­Film: An archive for the future of Trans cinema

In no small part due to the rise and fall of the Nazis, McCarthy­ism and Mar­garet Thatcher’s Sec­tion 28, there is a scarci­ty of films explor­ing Trans Femme nar­ra­tives. The ones we do have tend to favour Transness deemed palat­able for cis audi­ences, fail­ing to rep­re­sent the lived truth found with­in our com­mu­ni­ties. Typ­i­cal­ly there are com­mon and harm­ful tropes used to define Trans Fem­i­nin­i­ty in cin­e­ma which dimin­ish us to a cheap joke. Cin­e­ma will include trans femme char­ac­ters sole­ly for the appar­ent thrill of a gen­i­tal reveal, or the pop­u­lar Freudi­an plot-twist where the clos­et­ed Trans or cross­dress­er turns out to be a per­vert­ed, sadis­tic ser­i­al killer obsessed with wear­ing her moth­ers clothes. In the words of the late, great Cil­la Black: ​“Sur­prise, surprise!”

Since Time magazine’s ​‘The Trans­gen­der Tip­ping Point’ arti­cle in 2014, there has been an increase in Trans femme rep­re­sen­ta­tion yet many were and still are direct­ed by Cis-men, how­ev­er the past decade has seen a pro­lif­er­a­tion of Trans Femme direc­tors and screen­writ­ers, many (but not all) of which Hud­son has brought into the pro­gram­ming for BFI Flare 2025: Nyala Moon, Zackary Druck­er, Louise Weard, Jane Schoen­burn, Vic­to­ria Verseau, Novem­ber Nolan, Thein­gi Win and Augus­tine Caille to name a few. How­ev­er this increase in vis­i­bil­i­ty has sad­ly come at a price, ril­ing up trans­pho­bes and becom­ing a ​“polit­i­cal foot­ball” in the house of com­mons and UK leg­is­la­tion. The ​‘Trans Issue’ has become a divi­sive polit­i­cal sound bite used by the right wing in the cul­ture wars to stoke hatred, dehu­man­ise our com­mu­ni­ty and nor­malise cis peo­ple debat­ing whether or not we deserve health­care, access to pub­lic spaces, and basic human rights. This relent­less per­se­cu­tion of Trans women is one of the rea­sons Jaye Hudson’s pro­found work as the cura­tor behind TGirl­sOn­Film is sig­nif­i­cant to our com­mu­ni­ty now more than ever.

From Med­way in Kent, Hud­son stud­ied Eng­lish and Film at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leices­ter, or in her own words was ​“trapped in the mid­lands with lots of girls who went to pri­vate school in West Lon­don who secret­ly want­ed to be doing drugs in Leeds”. After Uni­ver­si­ty Hud­son moved in with the head of Fringe Queer Film Fes­ti­val. Their ​“friend­ship bloomed shar­ing lots of Queer film ref­er­ences with one another…from Pete Burns to Pedro Almod­ovar.” Even­tu­al­ly Hud­son was employed as Mar­ket­ing and Pro­gram­ming for Fringe Queer Film fes­ti­val for three years between 2021 to 2023 before tak­ing a step away to focus sole­ly on TGirl­sOn­Film in 2023.

Ini­tial­ly set­up as an Insta­gram account cel­e­brat­ing archival clips of icon­ic Trans Femmes in film – Romy Haag, Ang­ie Star­dust, Can­dy Dar­ling, Aman­da Lear, Hol­ly Wood­lawn – Hud­son describes the ear­ly days of the account being ​“archival in theme but with­out a phys­i­cal archive…I’m not Bish­ops­gate Institute.”

As the account con­sumed Hudson’s time, a friend and employ­ee of Prince Charles Cin­e­ma (Sarah Cleary) con­tact­ed Hud­son about col­lab­o­rat­ing on an event. Hud­son explains ​“we didn’t have a moniker but knew we want­ed to be pro­gram­ming events. So we teamed up and mapped out this Transploita­tion series of films for the Prince Charles.” With Cleary now pro­gram­ming her own screen­ings under the moniker Funer­al Parade Presents, Hud­son is adamant that with­out being employed at Dalston’s Rio Cin­e­ma and work­ing with Cleary at PCC, her pro­gram­ming career may nev­er have come to fruition due to start­up costs and finan­cial con­straints. ​“There’s all these pic­tures of me in my nap­py just star­ing at a tele­vi­sion when I was a small child,” Hud­son recalls. ​“My sis­ter told me she had a night­mare where we’d promised to watch a film togeth­er but we didn’t, and then I died, and she was like ​‘you always want to watch a film’ so that’s what I’m doing with my com­mu­ni­ty now: just mak­ing every­one come and watch a film with me so I’m not on my own.”

I ask Hud­son if there was a cat­a­lyst for her to ven­ture into film pro­gram­ming. She replies ​“Many times I had gone to see a film, a Trans doc­u­men­tary or some­thing at the ICA and the audi­ence would tit­ter when one of them was in a dress or what­ev­er and it made me feel uncom­fort­able.” A self-con­fessed ​“frus­trat­ed per­former at heart”, Hudson’s ami­able sense of humour, expe­ri­ence on stage as an actor and wit­ty intel­li­gence has led to reg­u­lar TGirl­sOn­Film intro­duc­tions, resem­bling the depth and details of a mini-lec­ture but with added the­atri­cal flour­ish­es. Humour became a key tool Hud­son deft­ly uses to teach Trans femme audi­ences about their own his­to­ry in an acces­si­ble man­ner, break­ing down bour­geois aca­d­e­m­ic lan­guage and cre­at­ing an inter­gen­er­a­tional dia­logue in the process. Hudson’s intent is to broad­en the con­text of each film in the hope that ​“any cis audi­ence mem­bers that would have tit­tered at the wrong moment feel like they can’t, so it’s turned on them.”

Hudson’s mini-lec­tures also offer to coa­lesce these terms into a sin­gle thread and weave them through decades of vari­able socio-polit­i­cal shifts, final­ly pre­sent­ing them in a palat­able con­text for her inter­gen­er­a­tional audi­ences. She tells me ​“It was a way for me to hold their hand, explain that the lan­guage or images might seem like it’s bad but actu­al­ly it’s real­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary, or the oppo­site and talk about why it’s bad and what it meant for peo­ple at the time.” These inter­gen­er­a­tional dia­logues have fos­tered cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tions with Trans femme elders, such as Roz Kaveney (with the Tran­ny Cen­tral zine) and a poten­tial Sex Change! Shock! Hor­ror! Probe! sequel in the works with Kristiene Clarke.

Ear­li­er this year Hud­son joined the pro­gram­ming pan­el for BFI Flare 2025 which involved her watch­ing 200 film sub­mis­sions. Through this expe­ri­ence she noticed some­thing miss­ing from the cur­rent film land­scape: ​“Trans fic­tions are still a rar­i­ty, full-stop…pushed into the doc­u­men­tary space and often times if the writer or main actor is Trans, these projects still feel inau­then­tic or cliched because the trans cre­ative lacks any pow­er and any influ­ence is oppressed.”

It seems the focus around Trans Femmes being pushed into the doc­u­men­tary space cor­re­lates with our val­ue being intrin­si­cal­ly linked to the voyeuris­tic sell of the tran­si­tion. Hud­son expands upon this, reply­ing ​“there are lots of doc­u­men­taries being made that do feel in con­ver­sa­tion with our worth being about being prod­ded and under the nee­dle, I mean that not just in a sur­gi­cal sense but the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the tran­si­tion. What it means to be trans is still the same clich­es like ​‘how did the fam­i­ly react, what did you look like before’.”

But is there any­thing to be done to pre­vent cer­tain trends becom­ing com­mon­place? She thinks for a moment before say­ing ​“a way out of that is to give mon­ey to Kick­starters for Trans led projects.” It’s a valid point con­sid­er­ing the num­ber of projects being over­looked by insti­tu­tion­al fund­ing bod­ies due to them not tick­ing the cor­rect boxes.

Hud­son brings up the sani­ti­sa­tion of Transness, for exam­ple when char­ac­ters ​“are inex­plic­a­bly real­ly strong in every sit­u­a­tion and have the per­fect come­back for any argu­ment or they have every­thing done and look gor­geous.” I ask Hud­son why she thinks this is the case, and she humor­ous­ly replies ​“Oh God, it’s so hard, every­day I wake up and ask myself ​‘Why am I not serv­ing Cunt?!” But adds it might be ​“a holdover from 2010s well-mean­ing attempts of rec­ti­fy­ing 100 years of trans­pho­bic imagery, but with Emil­ia Perez fore­bod­ing a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal atmos­phere in terms of how the Cis gaze use our cul­tur­al relevance.”

TGirlsOnFilm’s pro­gram­ming has includ­ed Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, Louise Weard’s Cas­tra­tion Movie, Mervyn Nelson’s Some of my Best Friends Are…, The­da Hammel’s Stress Posi­tions, Doris Wishman’s Let Me Die a Woman and many more. But is there any­thing in par­tic­u­lar she looks for when pro­gram­ming? ​“A lot of my stuff comes from want­i­ng more com­pli­cat­ed sto­ries and under­stand­ing that progress is not lin­ear”, Hud­son explains ​“But I do think you can see in the wave of Trans Femme direct­ed films we’ve got in the past cou­ple years…has seen the rise of anti-sani­tised Transness and it’s very much in con­ver­sa­tion with [writ­ers] Tor­rey Peters or Casey Plett’s work.”

The suc­cess of a pro­gram­ming organ­i­sa­tion like TGirl­sOn­Film is depen­dent on inde­pen­dent cin­e­mas and spaces. Hudson’s skillset has been honed work­ing at inde­pen­dent Queer-led fes­ti­vals like Fringe Queer Film Fes­ti­val and Scot­tish Queer Film Fes­ti­val, and she will con­tin­ue to screen events at small­er Queer-led spaces too such as Fort Lon­don and Trans­mis­sions at Super­store, because ​“It’s wher­ev­er is com­mu­ni­ty-ori­en­tat­ed and cosier and that lacks the threat of the gen­dered world. I have to be ver­sa­tile, I have to think broad­ly and be open.”

Look­ing towards the future, Hud­son is intern­ing at the Lon­don Com­mu­ni­ty Video Archive, pro­gram­ming a series of free screen­ings at the Muse­um of the Home in Hox­ton; she has just returned from a screen­ing of Kristiene Clark’s Sex Change: Shock! Hor­ror! Probe! at TITE Fes­ti­val in Dublin and promis­es ​“there’ll be more Tran­ny­li­cious con­tent as I want to con­tin­ue to research and look into often unscreened mov­ing image work such as tele­vi­sion, pornog­ra­phy and archive home movies.” Con­sid­er­ing how much she has achieved in a short peri­od of time, I ask her what keeps her dri­ven to con­tin­ue, she suc­cinct­ly replies ​“I think it’s impor­tant for trans film­mak­ers to have a plat­form and a space for tran­scen­tric audi­ences to relax, learn and get to know one another.”

Hudson’s deter­mi­na­tion to pro­vide a space for Trans femmes has become an inte­gral mis­sion to TGirl­sOn­Film, even more so since the recent trans­pho­bic Supreme Court rul­ings. As her audi­ences’ basic human rights are erased and vio­lent­ly debat­ed, Hud­son explains how she’d like to ​“encour­age more cin­e­ma spaces and art insti­tu­tions to stand up for the Trans com­mu­ni­ty, specif­i­cal­ly for Trans femme peo­ple, by offer­ing employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties and spaces in which they feel safe. It’s not about just putting on Too Wong Foo once a year.”

Fol­low TGirl­sOn­Film on Insta­gram for infor­ma­tion about all their upcom­ing events.