With this video essay, Nicole Morse contributes to a growing body of trans media studies scholarship that returns to trans classics and offers exigent re-readings. Like Cáel Keegan, Dan Vena, and Quinlan Miller before them, Morse shows how there is something there, that embedded in even some of the most seemingly cisnormative and transphobic texts are political lessons. Significantly, Morse does this work right at the very time when popular trans discourse is doubling down on certainty. If we are to fight for trans rights, we must know who the transgender are, and they must know who they are. But sometimes transness is a state of not knowing, it is the uncertainty in cis reality, a part of the queer feeling beyond the parameters of the here and now. Transfeminism can mean linking arms with trans children in pride, but it can also look like edging closer, reaching out, seeking a safer world together. 

Morse’s video essay exemplifies and explores this transfeminism and does as much beautifully through close attention to the frame. Morse centers the scene most outside the scope of the film’s narrative, the scene that could have been cut—the first in an extended post-denouement sequence wherein Liz and Peter supplant Kate and the doctor as protagonists (and Kate and her husband as domestic pair). By crafting a zip through the middle of the frame as Liz teaches Peter about hormones and surgery over drinks, using the very suggestive formulation ‘if you’, Morse calls attention to the intimacy of the two-shot, to the two’s hands always almost meeting at the table’s center. The intimacy of this two-shot, more apparent in Morse’s edit than the original, recalls the opening of Hitchock’s Rope, where Brandon and Phillip, having killed together, are always almost touching. But now this intimacy is reserved for those seeking safety from violence, normative and nonnormative alike. 

Dressed to Kill is a very Hitchcockian film, and this restaurant scene is its version of Psycho’s psychiatrist in the police station scene. But whereas Simon Oakland’s explanation of Norman Bates’ condition withers the charge of transsexuality, Liz Blake’s explanation sustains possibility. Morse says the film uses Liz to teach Peter that transfemininity is impossible but also that this final sequence points to a different sort of future for Peter and Liz. And what Morse’s editing, including their looping of this scene and use of midscreen zip does for me is allow me to hear multiplicity in Liz’ voice. It may merely be a matter of waiting, and Liz could very well know as much. Sitting with this scene, it strikes me that it would in fact be totally bizarre if Peter, learning of vaginoplasty, said immediately with certainty and pride, 'That’s for me'. Instead, the idea, already long planted, has been given the water necessary to grow. And just as the film concludes with Liz and Peter embracing lovingly in the bed where Peter’s mother and stepfather first had dispassionate sex, here too and in the film’s imagined after might Liz and Peter return to transsexuality with a difference. And that difference is transfeminism.