Through films about films and characters in the act of watching, a new wave of trans filmmakers is transforming a medium that has long distorted their image into one that can reflect their own.
There is something distinctly meta about the films of the Trans New Wave, but not in the way we usually mean when referring to a film as metacinematic. Where most examples of metacinema let us in on the fact that we are watching a film, the Trans New Wave goes beyond this self-awareness and often makes us aware of the complex history of trans representation in cinema. This need to break our sense of disbelief in this way comes from the particular position that contemporary trans practitioners find themselves in: one of hyper-visibility and the self-surveillance that comes with it, attempts to correct media narratives, and the very online world of trans media discourse which has seemingly become part of contemporary trans life. The films of the Trans New Wave understand this reality as a part of their form.
Examples of metacinema can be as subtle a gesture as with Arno Frisch’s wink in Haneke’s Funny Games; sometimes, it becomes the entire premise, as in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. But with recent meta entries to the canon, Vera Drew’s 2022 The People’s Joker, Alice Maio Mackay’s 2023 T Blockers, and Jane Schoenbrun’s latest feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the Trans New Wave is turning the camera back on the machinery of representation itself as a consequence of living and creating in a culture of being watched, watching yourself being watched, interpreted and misinterpreted; a culture where an image can quickly become an argument about what transness is supposed to be.
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As the increased visibility of trans people in the west has coincided with increased hostility, representation feels less like a neutral act than a constant renegotiation of how we are seen. For trans women in particular, this produces a certain amount of self-surveillance. What feels comfortable when presenting in public also becomes embroiled with what will make others comfortable with our transness. Through these constant acts of self-checking, you begin to view yourself from the outside, not as an individual but as the concept of a trans woman in public space. It is often from this position that the Trans New Wave’s particular form of metacinema emerges.
In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, director Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has been tasked with revitalising the problematic Camp Miasma franchise, as they spend the weekend at an abandoned summer camp. This summer camp was the original location of the film series, and is inhabited by the first ‘final girl’ of those films: Gillian Anderson’s Billy Preston. The film’s metacinema is hardly incidental: its plot revolves around the making of a queer film, while its own construction is constantly in view.
Since the film industry has learnt that its past representations of marginalised people has been harmful, there has been a panicked response from those in development to amend this. Branded as a queer filmmaker, Kris is tasked with correcting a hundred years of misrepresentation and its real world consequences. This is the bind that contemporary trans cinema cannot escape: representation is the very condition under which it is produced. In this sense, Kris’ experience mirrors Schoenbrun’s. The filmmaker on screen is caught in the same loop of anticipation that shapes the film itself: making a queer film while imagining how a queer audience will watch and react to it. The result is a self-conscious mode of filmmaking that recalls the experience of trans people, who are made to watch themselves being watched from the outside as representations before they can simply be lived. Likewise, the queer filmmaker is made to watch themself make a queer film.
This process is made clear in a scene where Kris frantically explains their idea of revitalising the Camp Miasma franchise to a video call of industry execs. For a queer viewer, the central irony is that Kris could have been swapped for Schoenbrun themselves. The scene derives its humour from the filmmaker knowing exactly how queer audiences engage with the media that represents them.
For many young queer people, especially millennials and older Gen Z, media was where queerness was first encountered; inferred, rather than as something openly lived, whether through overt yet problematic queer texts, or through more subtle examples that required elaborate speculation to confirm that queerness (my teenage years were spent unpicking the intimacies of Sherlock and Watson’s relationship in the 2010 BBC adaptation). The Trans New Wave changes this relationship altogether: queerness does not require this act of excavation, but the habits formed under the older modes of representation remain. Kris is literally “queering” the franchise in real time, trying to remake a piece of media whose queerness was previously something that had to be invented.
Before the Trans New Wave, we had no choice but to enact the same speculation and grace for villains, but this process has become so much a part of how queer audiences engage with media that even after queer people begin making their own films, we haven’t necessarily stopped watching them in the same way. That speculation, scrutiny and corrective impulse have become part of our relationship to queer media itself. This is where the film’s metacinema becomes more than a reference to its own construction. It is also a nod to the conditions under which it was made, and to the particular audience it expects will be watching.
A similar impulse appears in Mackay’s T Blockers, where two trans girls discover that parasites are making hosts of local men and radicalising them towards violence, and take it upon themselves to stop the infection. A fictional “lost” film within the film, Terror from Below, is quoted in the film’s opening narration where the viewer is explicitly reminded that they are watching a work of fiction. Similarly, the fictional series The Pink Opaque in Schoenburn’s 2024 film, I Saw The TV Glow, “feels more real than real life” for the two main characters who obsess over it as it becomes their key vessel for queer recognition. The People’s Joker takes this one step further: instead of merely referencing the media through which trans people come to recognise themselves, the film takes the world of Batman and places a trans woman in the role of its original villain, The Joker, taking ownership of the text itself. That Kris’ realisation around the villain of Camp Miasma – that we don’t make the movies about them for ourselves, that instead the movies are made for the villain – is the kind of circular logic that lies at the heart of the Trans New Wave: we make films about ourselves, watch ourselves in them, and then make films about the act of watching ourselves. The meta-text is this cycle made visible.
If the Trans New Wave continuously reminds us that we are watching a film, it’s because contemporary trans life rarely allows us the privilege of forgetting, even for a moment, that we are being watched. These meta techniques aren’t a simple stylistic flourish, but instead work as attempts to interrupt and break the gaze that trans people live under every day, and turn it back on itself.
