Nothing makes randos pop out of the woodwork to dismiss any given piece of criticism I publish than when I consider a film or TV show through an explicitly trans lens.

But I'm already always doing this because I'm a trans critic? I don't have a different lens to apply?

Like, yes, Midsommar is not an explicitly trans film. That doesn't mean it doesn't reflect my experience on a deep, almost gutting level.

But this dismissal extends to movies explicitly made by trans filmmakers, like The Matrix.

(Sidebar: This dismissal is also leveled at people who criticize films via explicitly feminist, queer, Marxist, or racial justice-focused lenses, because the assumption of "greatness" in US society remains skewed toward the white, the cis, the straight, and the male.)

Like on its surface a trans critic saying "The Matrix is a movie that reflects the trans experience" should be largely uncontroversial, since it was, after all, made by two trans women.

But gosh, every time I say this, people act like I'm tearing down a pillar of culture.

If there is an explicitly trans lens one can apply to art, to criticism, to culture, then trans identities de facto exist. If you want to deny the existence of trans identities as a recently invented flight of fancy, you're throwing out so many babies with that bath water.

I do not think Midsommar is "about" a trans woman, because it's clearly not. That doesn't mean its subtext can't be full of interesting and complicated ideas about gender roles and who gets to fit in where.

But to allow a trans subtext is to allow that trans people exist.

And once you start to think about that, then you bump into all of the "great artists" throughout history who have played in an extremely gender non-conforming grey area AT THE LEAST, people like George Eliot and Kurt Cobain and Ernest Hemingway.

That's not to say any of those three people were trans. I would never say that. It is to say that trans readings of their work will help us understand the places where they clearly wrestled with the strictures of the gender binary they struggled so mightily to occupy.

Anyway, if you're going to take one thing away from this, it should be that trans people exist and that Midsommar is a movie about a trans woman who can't quite fit in with men and finds herself among women.