the julian sauce

I watched it with my mom a decade before coming out, so I'm probably not the best person to speak to it; I didn't get a great vibe from it though. I don't remember anything super egregious, it just very much feels like it's coming from a cis lens—it spends a lot of screentime on the trans woman lead getting ready in the morning / putting on lots of makeup, it makes a big deal about her getting "the surgery," it dwells on her relationship with transphobic parents (lots of misgendering in those scenes)

honestly it probably delayed me coming out, because I didn't see myself in the protagonist. she's not the kind of woman I really wanted to be 🤷‍♀️

I'm a cis person who watched it after being recommended to watch it by cis friends right after high school. It was instrumental in demystifying and humanizing the trans experience to me as I was not connected to trans folks irl or online like I am now. Looking back I agree that it was probably a movie "for" cis people, and I think it played a role in opening up the eyes of a lot of cis folks at a time when gay and trans rights were being forefronted.

I suspect that the movie has aged poorly and I haven't ever gone back to it. I bet that if viewed as a historical artifact it would feel better than watching it purely for entertainment or emotional satisfaction.

I’ve seen it like ten years ago so take my thoughts with a grain of salt because I don’t remember it well but my thoughts at the time were “I guess it was fine but I didn’t love it” and I’m sure I would think of it worse now. Also a cis actress plays trans which is enough reason to not watch right there.
There’s a brief scene where the (trans-played-cis) character goes to a party full of trans people played by trans people and is deeply uncomfortable which I think really demonstrates what the cis team making it thinks, that they’re aware trans people have a community but are very uninterested in it because it involves joy and acceptance and love and not martyr-like self-hatred played for laughs.

(I think it’s noteworthy that they originally cast the amazing trans actress Alexandra Billings in the lead, started shooting, and then were like “nah, let’s go a different direction” and cast a cis woman instead and put prosthetics on her face to make her look masculine.)

I think of it as kind of like a worse Transparent, kind of both fascinated with and disinterested in its protagonist at the same time.

I don’t know if they mention it in Disclosure (the trans-directed Netflix documentary about trans portrayals in film where all the talking heads are trans) but I would recommend just watching that if you haven’t seen it and whatever contribution Transamerica made to the history of trans film will be appropriately extremely briefly mentioned (or not mentioned, lol.)