She’s The He is one of those coming-of-age films that people will wish they had when they were a kid upon viewing. Its discussions and dissection of gender and sexuality are incredibly relatable regardless of one’s personal identity. Such is the success of the framework crafted by writer/director Siobhan McCarthy in taking the familiar coming-of-age structure and the natural exploration that happens in high school, and creating something rooted in the here and now, whilst evoking a timelessness that seems missing from the current generation of films in the genre.
This fusion of modernity and timelessness was born initially from a joke among Siobhan McCarthy and their friends about the toxic levels of discourse around trans people using bathrooms. From that specificity easily came the opportunity to expand things into a broader gender discussion, and then something universal emerged.
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The question of who we want to become? For Siobhan McCarthy, their personal experiences allowed them to pull together and shape a story that wasn’t just a lifeline for the LGBTQIA+ community but also captured the universality of human experience.
“The reality of transness, at least for me and my experience, is that there is a lot of similarity with transness to, honestly, most human experience. There’s always this back and forth, and this push and pull between who you want to be, or at least who I want to be, and who the world desires me to be, and that feels like the definition of teenagerhood.
She’s The He was created as an homage to teen films past, with the trans experience centered.
It is trying to reckon with the difference between who I feel like I am as a human being inside my brain and who other people, my classmates, my teachers, the world, my parents, who they all want me to be, the expectations that are piled upon me, and I think just purely by engaging with the fact that realistically there is this universality to transness, despite all of our discourse and all of our craziness around it,” they explained.
Setting She’s The He in high school, where most, if not all, characters are undergoing puberty, and when these questions surrounding identity are coming to a head, further punctuates that human experience. For those of us who have survived high school, how many of us remember the feeling of finality in deciding which school we were going to attend, what major we’d pursue, and the mixed messages from society we sat through and absorbed, which only added to the soup of internal confusion that was our identity crisis? It’s beyond relatable.
These universal questions and struggles, Siobhan McCarthy shared, at a particularly turbulent time in life, paved the way for them to broaden the film’s reach: “I really wanted to make a movie that could feel like it engaged with that question on this broader level.” The film Easy A became a model in this sense for how it engaged with these conversations in specific ways, according to McCarthy, while still maintaining a universal appeal.
From Easy A to Hannah Montana, She’s The He is a love letter to the teen media genre of the 2000s and 2010s.
Key teen-movie genre films were a major source of inspiration for Siobhan McCarthy in tackling the project in more ways than one. “That movie [Easy A] is a huge inspiration for me. She’s The Man was [also] huge for me when I was a kid, only for me to realize later on why. And obviously, She’s The Man is like the central joke of the movie,” they shared. The films also influenced the punchy, doodle-like animation throughout, giving the film an extra pop while also feeling like a throwback to the teen-movie genre films of the 2000s and 2010s.
“The aesthetic of The Sweet Life of Zack and Cody, That’s So Raven, Hannah Montana; all that stuff was so full of that poppy colorfulness that it just wormed its way into my brain, and then met my own personal experience in a way that it came out in this movie,” they shared. That personal experience manifested in the doodles’ designs, inspired by how Siobhan McCarthy would doodle on themselves and their desk in school. That infusion of the personal with pop culture references from TV and film helped craft the distinct look and feel of She’s The He.
At the heart of She’s The He, though, is the queer experience, and to say that the film was a love letter created by and brought together by the community would be an understatement. As they explained, the trans community is really tight, where everyone either knows each other or knows someone who knows someone:
“It was really just a process of asking everyone within the lesbian phone tree who [people] thought were funny and interesting and cool, and then calling them up. ” This factor allowed Siobhan McCarthy and their producer, Vic Brandt, to build up the cast, resulting in a cast mostly comprised of trans and queer actors, including background.
She’s The He is a passion project raised up by the community, resulting in an almost entirely queer cast.
“It almost felt like a pipe dream,” McCarthy explained regarding the casting process. “I knew from the second I wrote the script that I wanted Alex, the cis boy, to be played by a trans man. My fantasy world was that Jacob would also be a trans man, and that obviously, we would have as many trans people in frame as possible. The cast, from my perspective, is so perfect that it almost feels like I’m living in an alternate reality.”
And yet, it was possible through networking outreach and gumption. A real lesson that seems like a cliché, but is built on reason. It really is who you know that can make your passion projects come true.
Through that passion, She The He presents a major step forward for queer representation in media. Not just in its casting, but also in the exploration of ideas and themes that weren’t explored or heavily discussed in the 2000s and 2010s. The broadness of storytelling in the teen movie genre easily lent itself to creating a simple yet memorable step forward.
“It’s one of the beautiful things about how ridiculous, streamlined, and simple these stories are,” McCarthy shared. “They take the complexity and that mess of being a teenager and really drill it down to something that at least can offer a certain look or a path or a clarity that has no real-world counterpart.”
Films like She’s The He are world-defining, and this film will speak to many.
With the rise of censorship, anti-trans messaging, and anti-trans legislation, accompanied by the loss of third spaces where teenagers can explore themselves outside of home or school environments, stories like She’s The He are more essential than ever before in opening the door to these conversations.
While the teen film genre is generally dismissed and looked down upon, its importance in the cultural lexicon and individualized impact on viewers can’t be overstated. As Siobhan McCarthy themselves put it, these films shape us.
“When I was young, they were world-defining, and now it’s really interesting to look back at them and realize that they were for me, and I think for people writ large, just a piece of this much bigger puzzle that has led me to where I am,” they explained.
“I hope this movie can speak to grown people who wish they had it when they were young, and I hope it can speak to young people. Its only purpose for me is just to heal the teenager inside of people, or give those real teenagers a chance to try to heal themselves.”
To end on a personal note, as someone who has spent over 20 years figuring out my gender and sexuality, She’s The He is one of those films that I wish I had when I was a teenager trying to make sense of what was going on with me internally. The film provokes necessary discussions without shying away from the ugliness this journey of self-discovery entails (because it’s not always smooth sailing). In many ways, the film made me feel seen. I imagine I will not be alone in that feeling once others watch She’s The He.
She’s The He is now playing in theaters.
