‘Dressed to Kill Hetero Cis Patriarchy’ is a rich contribution to the tradition of trans remix. The video exemplifies trans media scholar Rox Samer’s call to '[remix] transfeminist futures' and, in so doing, to 'remix our transphobic, transmisogynistic, cissexist reality so as to make perceptible a future when trans people, queer people, people of color, and all women and femmes are free' (2019: 539). Like many minorities to whom popular culture is not explicitly aimed, trans artists and fans have long sifted through the bits and pieces of mass media to construct stories and affects that speak to them. These remixes range from trans Tumblr memes to Canadian transmedia artist B.G-Osborne’s A Thousand Cuts (2018), which cuts together trans scenes from 82 mainstream films and television series in an overwhelming barrage.

‘Dressed to Kill Hetero Cis Patriarchy’ opens with but then rejects the diptych more typical of trans media that emphasizes the doubleness of the trans subject. As the video’s narrator puts it: 'On one side, the sick doctor. On the other, the evil transfeminine alterego'. This shot echoes the before and after photo convention of trans documentaries that trans writer Julia Serano has long critiqued—a convention that emphasizes the visual spectacle of trans bodies (2007). This comparative trope goes all the way back to sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld who coined the term ‘transvestite’. Strategies of representing trans multiplicity have been theorized and complicated by trans media scholars like Jack Halberstam, who has described the ‘transgender gaze’ as 'a look divided within itself' and Cáel M. Keegan, who uses a scene in Under the Skin (2013) where the alien pulls off its face and looks at it to describe the feeling of gender transition (Jack Halberstam, 2005). He writes 'the face-to-face loop offers us an endless space of becoming in which singular subjectivity is forever forestalled: There is no failure to "be" because there is no "self" at which to arrive' (2016: 38). 

However, Morse’s video resists the tradition of using audiovisual form to articulate trans multiplicity, instead creating what they call a ‘trans feminist diptych’ to highlight solidarity between femmes—in this case between cis woman sex worker Liz Blake and gender-questioning youth Peter Miller. The video’s narrator reflects 'I want to know about these two and their painful struggle for solidarity in a world that would seek to destroy marginalized femmes'.

The video draws and undraws a thick black line between Liz and Peter as they sit across from each other at a table, and later when they chat in a living room. This visual barrier makes visceral the barriers to and possibilities for solidarity between them. The video particularly complicates our view of Peter. The character’s name seemingly overdetermines their association with phallic masculinity. As the maker and operator of the surveillance camera, Peter could represent a controlling ‘male gaze’. And yet. Morse attends to Peter’s androgyny, curiosity about gender transition, and connection to their mother and to Liz. Considering Peter’s gender as not fully defined reminds us that childhood and youth are indeed times when much about one’s identity is shifty and unknowable. It is this very fact—that young people are not fully knowable to their parents, or even, at times, to themselves—that Florida’s 'Don’t Say Gay' law is meant to repress.

‘Dressed to Kill Hetero Cis Patriarchy’ shows us that even in the most transphobic of representations lie bits and pieces that trans people can reshuffle to reveal and strengthen new possibilities—including worlds in which youth and femmes of all kinds can be free.

Works cited

Fink, M. and Miller, Q. 2014. 'Trans Media Moments Tumblr, 2011–2013', Television & New Media 15(7), November 1, pp. 611–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476413505002.

Haimson, O. L.  et al. 2019. 'Tumblr Was a Trans Technology: The Meaning, Importance, History, and Future of Trans Technologies', Feminist Media Studies, October 18, pp. 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1678505.

Halberstam, J. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives New York: New York University Press, p. 88. 

Keegan, C. M. 2016. 'Revisitation: A Trans Phenomenology of the Media Image', MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 32(61) (December 15), pp. 35–38, https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v32i61.22414.

Samer, R. 2019. 'Remixing Transfeminist Futures', TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, (4), November 1, p. 539-555. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7771695.

Serano, J. 2007. 'Before and After: Class and Body Transformations', in Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Berkeley: Seal Press), pp. 53–64.