Rebecca is finally granted asylum in the United States. As she steps into the ocean at early dawn, she shares via voiceover that she no longer lives in fear, no longer has to look over her shoulder. The shot cuts between her glowing skin and her confident silhouette framed by the rising sun. I say, “Yes!” to an empty room, and mean it sincerely. Each of the four episodes in Trans in Trumpland features such a scene, its central subject walking proudly in the sun.
Unfortunately, it’s these very scenes that also exemplify the biggest letdown of this docuseries, streaming on Topic channels February 25. By portraying its subjects as polished, resilient heroes, the series bypasses an opportunity to meaningfully address the time and place implied by its title: the United States in the present day, whether or not Donald Trump is actually the president. It makes a clear argument for how the safety of trans people is deeply linked to racism, the carceral system, and U.S. imperialism, but stops short of showing how trans perspectives could help the necessary fights against those systems.
Even so, Trans in Trumpland’s coverage of these topics makes it a vital contribution to the trans media canon. Director Tony Zosherafatain appears on camera throughout the series, reflecting on his own experiences as a trans man and interviewing each subject. There’s Ash, a white trans boy in North Carolina who faces bullying, deadnaming, and the HB2 bathroom bill in school. The aforementioned Rebecca, a trans woman from Mexico living in Texas, recalls being detained in a men’s ICE detention center after getting pulled over for a traffic violation. Evonne, a Black trans woman in Mississippi, reflects on the young people she’s taken in as a gay mother, and the nonprofit she founded to further support at-risk trans youth. Finally, Shane, a Cherokee and Tuscarora two-spirit person and military veteran in Idaho, reckons with the legacy of U.S. settler colonialism.
As the Netflix documentary Disclosure explained at great length in 2020, the history of how trans people have been depicted in American TV and film is a too-long archive of erasure and caricature. Perhaps Trumpland wants to make up for this history. But by trying to capture such a wide range of trans experiences, it merely skims the surface of how Trump administration policies exacerbated already fervent transphobia.
Instead, the docuseries spends much of its time aestheticizing its subjects’ stories. In a discomforting dramatization of Rebecca’s arrest, her silhouette is lit by flashing blue and red light. Afterward, we see another slo-mo shot of her at a vanity, applying makeup. The hyperreal cinematography lends beauty and gravitas—but it also suggests that these trans lives are worth caring about because they follow a legible hero’s journey narrative. Through Zosherafatain’s lens, they’re self-possessed, their glossiness filmed from every angle. Rugged individualism, but make it trans.
Maybe Trumpland could have told more complex stories, covering an even wider breadth of experience or addressing the violence of Trump-era policies in more depth. But as the 2017 anthology Trap Door suggests, representation can be a double-edged sword. Heightened visibility in recent years has correlated with heightened violence against trans people, especially Black trans femmes. When trans visibility means attracting the cis gaze and its Trumpland-ian respectability politics, it becomes not only a project of permission, but an appendage of the surveillance state.
Perhaps it’s because my face mask makes me look less masc; perhaps it’s the very transness and gender nonconformity of my beauty. Either way, I’ve been harassed more in public in the last year than ever before. And it’s not just the lack of social protections that makes me unsafe—it’s that cis people continue to write laws that purposefully make life so challenging for trans people. It’s that “Trumpland” is a metonym for both the obvious and subtle iterations of fascism and white supremacy in supporters who will not be convinced by any amount of mainstream media storytelling, no matter how exquisitely filmed, that trans people are people. And of course, it’s that even many of Trump’s loudest opponents are also proud TERFs.
Rather than suggesting destined-to-fail conversations with fascists, each Trumpland episode concludes with its subjects surrounded by supportive families and communities. It’s a choice that could seem trite but, to me, reads as a necessary place to return to and depart from. I often think about my trans identity as resisting the legible, the desire to be understood, least of all by cis people. While waiting for New York to finally repeal the “Walking While Trans” act, it has been my trans communities who have helped imagine ways to live our lives outside of cis people’s permission. For those without access to community, this docuseries evokes what this refuge could feel like. It also reminds me that the state will never care for us the way we can and must care for us.
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