MONICA, Transgender Visibility Week, and Trace Lysette

It’s Transgender Visibility Week, and we must bring awareness to the exceptional film MONICA and the incredible performance by its star, Trace Lysette. This film is a much-needed breath of trans multidimensional fresh air within a suffocating cultural climate of transphobia as the election year cycle ramps up and politicians abuse trans culture as collateral to gain votes.

A Breath of Trans Multidimensional Fresh Air

Transgender Visibility Week is an opportunity for cisgender and heterosexual folks to expand their consciousness around transgender rights, equity, and visibility. This film provides a cohesive depiction of transness outside of the pejorative tropes accessible to normative culture today, i.e., one-sided trans characters objectified in comedy, murdered in crime series, desexualized, or overly sexualized.

The film cultivates humane understandings and dialogues about trans equity on a macro level that we can also apply to our personal lives, as depicted in the relationship between Monica and her family as the plot develops.

Our Humanity that Lives in the Ordinary

I was lucky enough to connect with Trace this week and asked her how she thought the film supports trans allyship. Trace states, “I believe, and I hope, that MONICA will start conversions. I also hope that it lets people see our humanity that lives in the ordinary. Everyday life … Like bathing your mother when she’s in her last days, reconnecting with siblings, finding caretaking instincts for children, playing freeze tag. These are all things we rarely, if ever, get to see trans people doing in a movie. There’s a shot of me towards the end holding an infant on a dock by a lake. I think that image is so powerful, in part because we never see trans people doing that in TV or Film.”

As an LGBTQ+ therapist, the film resonates with my experience working clinically with trans adults to unpack their trauma and its impact on their sense of self and view of safety. MONICA depicts the journey of a woman returning home to help take care of her dying mother after two decades to the family who rejected and kicked her out after coming out as trans. Though the narrative is set in Monica’s established adulthood, the wounding of her younger self, abandonment, transphobia, and being left homeless, is ever-present in the quiet trauma embedded in Monica’s character.

“Subtle Restraint Packing a Mighty Punch”

 Peter Sobczynski states, “’MONICA’ offers viewers a narrative that, upon hearing it described, will lead most viewers to assume that it is a decidedly melodramatic piece of work. However, Andrea Pallaoro, who directed and co-wrote the film, avoids that by approaching the story more subtly and with more restraint than one might expect but still packing a mighty emotional punch. The result is a quiet, heartfelt, and beautifully nuanced drama that feels unique and universal, featuring what will surely go down as one of the best performances of 2023.”

The subtle restraint packing a mighty punch that is both unique and universal speaks beautifully to the impact that systemic cis-centric trauma has had and continues to have on transgender culture and individuals.

The Politics of Trauma 

Author of The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice. Staci K. Haines, states, “The pain and betrayal of trauma and oppression alter our sense and reality of safety. Our strategies to navigate these experiences and conditions leave us in states of hyper-tracking or numbing, automatic distrust or over-trusting without grounding, of being ‘awake’ to danger irrespective of the people or environment that surrounds us, ready to defend, avoid, or attack. Often these embodied survival strategies become part of our identities ‘this is just how I am,’ or become most obvious in the repeated struggles we have with those close to us.” (217)

The film is loaded with subtle visual metaphors set within a quiet, somber tone. The reserved quality of the film allows the viewer to absorb the film’s emotional resonance in the tension between Monica, her family, and the world.

For cisgender viewers, watching Trace play Monica elicits the desire to speak up, verbalize the unspoken, and mitigate the tension in each scene. That’s the thing: the film points to our privilege as cis folks. We can take up that space, and we feel entitled to it. Monica helps us feel into the experience of not having that privilege. We watch Monica reenter her family of origin as a stranger in her own home. This is both a realistic snapshot of what trans people experience within their biological or family of origin and is a narrative for the greater LGBTQ+ experience of existing in oppressive heteronormative cultures.

Safety in Solitude

For many trans individuals, along with other LGBTQ+ people, there is safety in solitude. In the film, we slowly see Monica open up and experience embodied healing, openly engaging with her emotions of joy and anger, mostly only when she is alone.

The emotions of the family are not blocked because of Monica’s gender identity. They are blocked and stagnated due to how the rigidity of ciscentric heteronormativity moves through the family. It’s symbolic of the emotional detachment and ethical constipation of the United States today.

We are living in an age where transgender, nonbinary, and nonconforming culture is objectified, void of humanity, and being used for personal and political gain. From Dave Chappelle’s piggybacking on JK Rowling’s TERF propaganda as part of his stand-up comedy, to Elon Musk using transphobia to build traffic to his social media app, to local embarrassment Lauren Bobert using transphobic rhetoric to pledge her allegiance to the MAGA crowd.

In the same vein, state politicians in Texas, Tennessee, and Florida are using anti-trans legislation to maintain a death grip of supposed “traditional family values” to appeal to their base and cling to their power while sacrificing trans lives in the process.

It Goes Back to Humanity

I asked Trace how she saw the role of the film on a cultural scale. She responds, “Again, it goes back to humanity. With over 500 pieces of legislation being introduced this year alone, to make trans peoples lives harder or “eradicate” us altogether, it is so important to see our humanity. Because when you can relate to something or someone, you can see, and they can see, that we are all connected and that we are not a threat. We just want to live, and thrive, and to have family, and love, and be productive members of society. I just hope people watch it even if it’s not their normal cup of tea. No pun intended.”

The Call Against Transphobia is Coming from Inside the House

Watching the unfolding and softening of Monica’s family through the film is powerful and is a needed resource for parents and family members of trans people. I have been recommending this film to clients all year, for it highlights that the source of trans trauma is people, families, and communities. The call against transphobia is coming from inside the house, metaphorically in Monica’s family home, but also in all our homes.

Cisgender and heterosexual folks need to be the ones to initiate the healing of our internalized transphobia. It is not the responsibility of our trans loved ones we’ve hurt. We’ve made it unsafe for trans folks to speak out openly. Monica’s family narrative is our country’s narrative, and we can use this film to examine how we wish to grow or not.

As a culture, we get addicted to the swirling chaos of harm targeted at or using trans culture and fail to witness the impact it has on our transgender loved ones, family members, and community members. This transgender awareness week, I call on all of us to take a cue from quiet and subtle attributes of MONICA and slow down and focus on seeing trans, nonbinary, and nonconforming people as human and witness our own transphobia personally and culturally as just that, our shit. We need to deal with it.

The Film’s Success

With these understandings, the role MONICA plays on a larger national scale is vital. It offers a healthy multi-dimensional depiction of trans identity in opposition to this degradation. We need these powerful human trans stories embedded in our cultural zeitgeist as an impactful tool to fight against national transphobia. We need to get this film seen, shared, and fucking nominated for awards.

Images courtesy of MONICA