States of Being
On the Films of Maz Murray with Charlie Markbreiter
Two trans actors are trying out for a UK regional theater show; one wears a zebra durag, the other, a giant name tag that says “Visibility: they/them.” The image, a still from writer and artist Maz Murray’s Principal Boy (2024), is part genre, part life. Trans roles, let alone good ones, are hard to find. So the actors tear each other down while being berated by the play’s toxic director before coming together, temporarily or forever, for the musical finale.
As anti-trans legislation threatens healthcare access across the US and trans cultural production is algorithmically censored, we began watching and discussing the films of artist and writer Maz Murray. Based in the UK, where NHS austerity and tabloid transmisogyny threaten healthcare access, Murray has also spent years coordinating DIY hormone distribution and organizing against forced migrant removals. Because his movies are short, we recommend viewing them as we did: all at once, back-to-back.
-Grace Byron and Charlie Markbreiter
GB: We've both often discussed culture as a way to think through politics: Gossip Girl, Chris Marker, and Ethel Cain and Ariana Grande on your end and I've written about our beloved Almodovar as well as explicitly trans films like I Saw the TV Glow, Stress Positions, and Mutt. You and Maz are close friends and collaborators—what drew you to one another?
CM: The first Maz Murray movie I watched was Very Important Trans Artwork (2021). “It’s hard not to narrativize your life when you’re a transsexual,” says an animatronic voiceover as Maz, somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and Sad Ant with Bindle, strolls, depressed and merry, across a green-screened stock image.
“I dramatically moved back to my hometown of Basildon in Essex for the first time since starting medical transition in what turned out to be the start of the pandemic,” the narrator (also Maz) says. “I now have main character and long Covid symptoms.” A front door opens (Maz in a wig). On cue, Maz’s bindle unravels; it’s filled with testosterone bottles, literally nothing else, and they clatter, cartoonish, onto the cement.
I love these ten seconds because they’re a microcosm of Maz’s oeuvre: the way cultural production and space are driven by rent and real estate; the city slicker versus the Essex wanker; the generic versus the niche. Because of how trans culture is produced and circulated (“that is, politically,” as you said the other night), there’s sometimes an artificial divide between “trans video art” and “trans cinema." Which is Maz doing? Very Important is a Hito Steyerl riff, but Murray’s movies are also intricately narrative, especially Thigh Rise (2023) and Principal Boy (2024). Which you said were two of your favorites. What did you like about them and why?
GB: Maz's movies speak to a heterosexual T4T experience that we don't get a lot of in trans cultural production. I'm excited by that possibility. Obviously there's precedent—Southern Comfort, Zackary Drucker—but Maz introduces such a sense of play and pageantry.
Thigh Rise literally uses the trope of tall trans women/short trans men in this way that also speaks to rent, capital, and public space. There's a recurring theme of trans lives moving with and against gentrification. In Thigh Rise, the main character is a beautiful sex worker who's boot is an apartment building that a scrappy trans guy lives in. There's a fascinating solidarity between the two and also a rewiring of T4T sexual erotics when the main guy crawls inside of the woman in order to pleasure her. Of course, this also is a play on the trope of giant women in porn. But the film works because everyone involved has agency—he says, "I'm not a toy," and the woman very clearly doesn't view him as a toy, but as a possible boyfriend she can carry around.
Principal Boy, on the other hand, is a fascinating take on the subculture of trans men who are afraid of manhood. Maz always has a cheeky way of pointing out the ways trans people can get in their own way and often his work offers a way forward that doesn't end in tears. In Principal Boy, this manifests in a play on the pantomime, a form of theater in the UK and elsewhere that often involves women playing male part––which stands in for a variety of gender anxieties.
CM: Dysphoric self-sabotage (I don’t deserve X because I’m ugly/bad → therefore I destroy my own odds of getting the thing I still also want) is, typically, understandably, doubled-up in shame. How could it not be? Self-sabotage is stasis caked in flurries of novelty. No matter which way you go, you’re in your own way.
But there is also a slapstick element to this: tripping over yourself only to land on a trampoline. In her essay on The Pursuit of Happiness by Stanley Cavell, Jane Hu describes the book’s central concept, ”comedies of remarriage,” as “instances of couples breaking up only to reunite with greater self-knowledge and commitment.” Cavell looks at Hollywood screwball comedies from the 1930s and 40s: All About Eve, Philadelphia Story. Thigh Rise is a comedy of remarriage to me.
GB: Let’s talk about Hormonal. You sat me down to watch it just a few weeks before the election; it feels even more prescient now. You recently wrote about the tide of anti-trans politics for the Nation. How does this film speak to the current political moment?
CM: In Hormonal, a trans guy from Essex named Gary stumbles into a testosterone heist. Made in the UK—where many trans people rely on DIY—getting HRT is depicted (correctly) as an action movie. In her essay on the twentieth-century history of US DIY, Jules Gill-Peterson recounts trans women in the seventies going to Mexico, buying out a pharmacy’s estrogen, and smuggling it back to the US. She compares it to a “heist film.” While this quest for HRT might feel both glamorous and spectacular from a 21st century US POV, it was, as Gill-Peterson also notes, just the normal way that many trans people got HRT, especially those who were denied access to legal transition via the clinic. As trans care gets restricted across the US, it’s helpful to look at how this has been navigated historically.
Maz, like Charli XCX, is famously from Essex, which he once described to me as “the New Jersey of England.” So many of his movies—Very Important Trans Artwork, Hormonal, Poppets, Laindon—take place in Essex. Trans life and culture is typically associated with “the big city,” but most trans people don’t actually live there. Maz’s movies respond by insisting on their own Essex-ness. (I say as someone who has never been there lol).
In the US, as we both know, anti-trans bans have been steadily passing since 2021. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Skrmetti, which it likely will, state-level anti-trans laws will become even easier to pass. That is: pre-existing regional discrepancies are about to get even worse.
At the same time, as writer Katherine Packert Burke said recently, “I know that it's complicated, but I feel fairly strongly that marking states like Texas and Florida as ‘DO NOT TRAVEL’ for trans people is largely bound up in ideas of the South as disposable and ignores, like, the actual experience of living in any of these places.”
I wonder what you think about all this as someone who has written about and is from the Midwest, and as someone whose work often touches on the ambivalence of geography and “home.”
GB: There’s a form of mirroring in how the US and UK think of transness as something gatekept, or blocked over there. You have people arguing that things are worse on one island or another, more TERFs or more transphobia as phenomena tied to place. There’s a desire to escape, to believe that the other is further along in the slow march towards fascism. But we’re all in it together.
Geography is so seductive to narratives of progress. Certain states or places can be seen as better, or more liberal, or more backward. But the land doesn’t have these innate qualities. That’s a colonial mapping. It’s a political mapping. It’s a racist mapping. It obscures and mythologizes instead of getting granular about the ecology of living where one has roots.
There are and will be trans people all over the US. Including the South and Midwest. I went to Montana earlier this year and the main thing I heard from trans kids was like, we’re here. We’re okay. It’s not always easy, but we make do. There are also, I think people forget, “liberal oases” scattered across more conservative states. College towns often have more resources, though that comes with plenty of new complications.
I get a lot of blank looks when I talk about coming from Indiana and going to conversion therapy. People in New York don’t want to be reminded that those things still exist. But I’m sure there’s conversion therapy programs here. There are certainly Evangelicals, Trump supporters, and Christians. No utopia is complete, no dystopia is forever.
CM: I love the way Hormonal uses genre, and how Maz uses it across his work. Virtuousically, each movie is a different genre. Seven Penises is sci fi; Principal Boy is panto but also, as you explained, “an allegory about allegory.” Hormonal is a heist film. What do you think of this?
GB: There’s something freeing about genre. In the preface of her next book, Stag Dance, Torrey Peters states that she’s writing genre stories. Thigh Rise is almost a romance, a DIY rom-com. Each film functions on the level of genre and as some sort of greater metaphor; not always a lesson but an extended idea punctuated by a punchline. So many of Murray’s films are so sci-fi, which also makes sense; there’s an impulse in trans cultural production to think beyond the realist drama or novel. Many trans artists are turning to horror: Jane Schoenbrun, Alice Maio Mackey, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Allison Rumfitt (who is also British). My own first novel is a horror novel about demons and cults. Genre offers something to work through doublethink.
Speaking of, there’s something to be said about what kinds of trans men are allowed to be rendered in popular media. I’m thinking of By Hook or By Crook (2001) in contrast to Mutt (2023) or Elliot Page, who just starred in his own film. Hormonal, in contrast to these last two, is interesting in its utopian aspirations and subtle takedowns of the differences between cis and trans men. The ending makes me think about how Pippa Garner argued for a utopia of estrogenated androngony. A trans man I knew asked her, “What about trans men?” Well, Murray answers that question. Testosterone for everyone. What do you make of Maz’s representation of trans-masculine figures? Not to make you speak for the male point of view.
CM: Mutt and Elliot Page’s Closer to You are both slice of life dramedies, the “relatable” indie movies that cis men get all the time. What’s more interesting than either condemnation or praise is description: if this kind of trans masc movie is now part of a genre, then what are its tropes?
One hallmark is how intensely these movies cleave to the domestic and romantic realms. Closer to You and Mutt both gesture to the public sphere, as e.g. Mutt’s protagonist deals with cultural differences between him and his Chilean dad. Ultimately, however, these are movies about family, sex and love, as if transition’s impacts stopped there. But as Paisley Currah argues in Sex Is as Sex Does, sex classifications are made by state bureaucracy. It’s impersonal.
Maz’s work reflects this impersonality without sacrificing the particularity of his characters; and he does this, not by pretending he’s telling a singular story, or by reifying the dominant genre tropes of trans masc cinema, but by pushing on genre so hard that the fourth wall often cracks. In Seven Penises, for instance, the protagonist, Felda, is rejected for having the “wrong” genitals. What could become a classic “am I a real man” moment is instead flipped on its head. The problem isn’t that Felda doesn’t have a dick, but that he has too many, endowed with eight penises on a planet where everyone else has seven.
GB: I love that you brought up Seven Penises. It’s such a delightful skewering of trans masculine and feminine tropes. Everyone in that film is doing something with gender. Especially Maz as the director. I think that’s part of what I find so interesting about Maz’s work. I’m not always attracted to art that marks itself specifically as trans. So what? It doesn’t break the genre. Like you said, so many films are just repackaging of familiar tropes. But transness can break genre too. As Maz does. It’s much more interesting to watch someone do something with gender than to only do gender. In this way, the films operate on multiple valences and to multiple audiences. They’re sometimes films that would take knowing certain trans cultural production cues to decode. You have to know both the lived experience and genre tropes Murray is poking fun at.
CM: We’ve been talking about trans cinema in relation to Maz’s work, but since we’re reaching the end of our conversation, perhaps we can zoom out for a sec. We’re writing this a few days after Representative Nancy Mace––what an amazing name, fitting name, like being named Janet Taser Gun––introduced legislation that would ban Delaware Congresswoman Sarah McBride from using the bathroom that corresponds to her legal sex. Bathroom bills targeting trans adults are not restricted to Capitol Hill. As journalist Erin in the Morn reported, “McBride’s acquiescing to the ban shows no sign of stopping the attacks; bathroom bans continue to spread. Rep. Nancy Mace has expanded her efforts, introducing a bill to ban transgender people from using bathrooms in all federally owned spaces.”
McBride has repeatedly called anti-trans bathroom bills, even the ones she herself is facing, a culture war distraction. But in “The Cis State,” historian Jules Gill-Peterson argues that “if trans youth and adults lose access to public education, healthcare, restrooms, and legal recognition of their gender, there is essentially no way for them to participate in public life. They are not so much legally disenfranchised as in losing the right to vote or hold citizenship as they are expelled from the public sphere, exempt from care and support, as well as vulnerable to policing and violence.” Considering the clear material stakes at play here, how do anti-trans bathroom bills keep getting labeled “distractions”––and to what effect?
Our Monica, Ourselves: the Clinton Affair and the National Interest (2001), edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan, is maybe helpful. The Lewinsky scandal, as the intro points out, “was a historic public event, yet central to it was a debate about whether it was worthy of attention. Had politics and prurience become identical, and whose fault was it?” On the one hand, a relation to sex (both having sex, and sex as in gender, haha) makes it easy to dismiss the McBride and Lewinsky scandals as “merely” cultural. But Sarah McBride’s bathroom usage, just like Lewinsky’s sex life, is now also being produced and consumed as national media.
We’ve been talking about trans cinema in relation to Maz’s work, but I wondered if we could talk about trans cinema in relation to the sadistic, manufactured, dysphoric visual spectacle McBride has been tossed into. As Erin also notes, McBride is now forced to walk into the wrong bathroom in front of her colleagues and the media multiple times a day. What’s going on, libidinally and aesthetically? Who is this even for?
GB: Who isn’t it for? Before answering this question, let’s look, first, at the question of image-making, and how spectacle reinforces certain ideas about transness. The specter of “the man in the dress,” and its relation to the image of womanhood. We can look at Monica Lewinsky as one of many mutated precedents, analyzing how her image also became a signifier—which is what’s happening to McBride’s image now as well. Her face has become a symbol rather than a face. Her smile eclipsed by the words of others, emptied out of pathos and turned into a political lightning rod.
Now, images of McBride are not just being circulated, but, as with Lewinsky, being circulated by two different camps for radically different reasons. Trans people are rightfully outraged she capitulated to the right, and cis people are outraged that she exists, let alone that she won office. That said, McBride is also a Zionist. Which doesn’t excuse how she’s treated, but perhaps it means some of us were pessimistic about what she would fight for in office anyway.
CM: In April, McBride tweeted that “President Biden is right to reinforce our collective commitment to support Israel’s self-defense.” During the Delaware debate for Congress, she stated that if America stopped funding and arming Israel, it would be an “open invitation” for Iran to attack the US. She said this as Israel imposed mass famine conditions in North Gaza, escalated attacks on Lebanon, martyred Palestinian journalists like Ismail Al-Ghoul, and bombed hospitals, water filtration facilities, and schools.
“I’m not here to fight about bathrooms,” said McBride in her official statement. “I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families.” But it’s an imperial fantasy to think that “costs” can be divorced from Palestine. In February, Maersk, which has been transporting weapons parts to the Zionist entity throughout the ongoing genocide, announced that it will reroute its shipping through South Africa to avoid the Red Sea, where pro-Palestine Yemeni forces have targeted ships going to and from Israel. This part of South Africa, in another instance of almost allegorical violence, is infamous for Great White Sharks. So on a supply chain level, “costs” are only going up.
We can, following McBride, who is just following the Democratic Party, continue pretending it’s possible to have trans liberation without a free Palestine; or, following trans Palestinians, we can ask how a free Palestine will truly free us all. In February, for instance, when author Randa Jarrar refused to stop protesting a Zionist PEN America event, security dragged them from the room by their chair. As Dan Sheehan reported, “Over jeers from the audience, Jarrar can be heard condemning the October 14th killing of Yousef Dawas by ‘a targeted Israeli air strike.’” On 10/31, PEN America Director Suzanne Nossel—an ardent Zionist who infamous for suppressing PEN America’s union and “forgetting” to pay incarcerated writers—was finally forced to resign.
Thank you so much, Grace, for having this conversation with me.