Last night I finally watched The Substance.
Spoilers ahead.
There are a lot of lenses the film can be perceived through. Off the top, there is the more textually explicit issue of body image and the beauty expectations placed upon women: especially in the public sphere of entertainment. I can see arguments of varying merits being made about the film as representation of self-care, of parenthood and legacy, generational trauma, of capitalism… the film says a lot with few words, granting lots of space to find meaning in addition to (or counter to) any intended messages the filmmakers brought to it.
The Substance is most certainly about women, but watching it as a transgender woman in her thirties, I found myself having a very personal reaction to it. Coming to terms with my gender and transitioning was easy in some places and very difficult in others and as with all change, it never ends but continues evolving. I will always be in a state of transition. Between you and me, everyone is. Some of the core aspects of my personal experience with gender transition, however, is going from an existence where I cared little for my appearance in a world where that was fine (as with most AMAB folks) to suddenly having to reckon with an existence tethered to beauty standards so persistent and all-encompassing that it is impossible to avoid.
It's not just the persistent daily drug regimen that stands out, though dear god do I wish getting a prescription was as easy as picking up the phone. Watching Demi Moore’s Elisabeth applying her makeup in preparation for a date, only to constantly rework it and fiddle with it obsessively as the spectre of a younger, ‘perfect’ face haunts her, was upsettingly familiar. Seeing her bin off the entire evening when she ‘fails’ to achieve some nebulous goal in her makeup was upsetting to say the least, and it’s a moment I have directly experienced myself.
When I stand in front of the mirror, I want to see an attractive face looking back at me. That’s fine to admit, that I want to be attractive. I think a lot of people do. Society places a lot of focus on ‘attractive’ and the broader issue of centuries of beauty standards is not something I’ll unpack in massive detail here. In short, beauty standards are socially upheld and used under a capitalistic society to drive consumption while maintaining a patriarchal ideal of what women should be. It goes without saying that there should be no value in what a person looks like on a socially ordained system of values and no one should experience any form of suffering because of the way they look.
I don’t want to talk about what society says is pretty or says is feminine because as much as I can rail against the impact it has on the mental health of people across the world, it’s a bad system I still engage in. I want to be attractive, despite how much I abhor the concept.
No, instead I want to talk about a specific flavour of this nightmare that us blue-pink-n-whites have to deal with. In short: how ‘attractive’ gets entangled with ‘passing’. For the blissfully unaware, ‘passing’ is when a transgender person is automatically perceived as their actual gender by the people and systems around them. A trans woman who ‘looks like a woman’. Note that there are two big problems with this concept: the gendering is based on social conceptions of gender and is predicated on a lack of intention, or to put it more clearly, on the people around the ‘passing’ person assuming gender and not actively deciding to gender a person based on how they are choosing to present (another big nebulous conversation to get into).
Whether or not we pass can be a constant source of stress.* For one, it sucks to be misgendered, especially if we go out wearing makeup, a skirt and heeled boots. There’s nothing inherently female about these clothes – masc people can where them too, for sure – but I feel like the bloke who looks me up and down and then calls me ‘sir’ isn’t doing it to be progressive. It’s another hammer with which we can beat ourselves, examining brow bones and hairlines. Frankly, it makes us sound like incels sometimes. For a lot of transgender women – myself included – it’s easy to get stuck in the mire of ‘looking like a man’. Every transfemme ends up getting a bit phrenology-ish at the beginning. The effects of testosterone can feel like a poison, wreaking changes across the body that feel at home in a movie just like this. Online communities of transfemmes are full of desperate people asking if thirty, twenty-three, eighteen, is too late to start HRT. Beautiful trans women attract questions about their drug regimen, their lifestyle, their genetics. Even the hope these public figures can attract is poisonous: I’ve looked to beautiful trans women as a sign that there is hope for me. This isn’t healthy. This is not how the people of a healthy society thinks about themselves.
And that’s kind of the point. I feel that any cis women reading this would find the texture of these issues, if not the exact flavour, as very familiar.
We have to learn in a very compressed timeline something that cis women have been railing against their entire lives. This isn’t about who suffers more: the point is the similarity, not the difference. The lesson to be learned in The Substance is that Sue exists for cisgendered women in much the same way as she does for us. We can push back against the Harveys of the world as much as we want – and we should – but I know that I personally can do more for myself when standing in front of that mirror than I currently do. It’s a grotesquely messy system that is entangled with so many layers of social and economic politics, but at the end of the day I need to be the best advocate for myself that I can be, and I took a very real sense of that away from this film. This is not a defense of beauty standards or the Harveys, it's not putting the blame onto women, it's not a dismissal of the very real need to strive for a better society. It is just a case of, as the philosopher Son Goku once said; "If I don't, who will?"
The film tells us its point at the very beginning: an egg yolk is injected with the substance and it splits, two parts of one whole. Both parts are the same. Elisabeth and Sue are the egg yolks: the differences that drive the two to destroy each other are socially layered artifice. This isn’t to say this artifice can or should be entirely discarded – throw away your eyeliner and go live in the woods – but it’s perhaps possible to reckon with this reality that a lot of the pain we put ourselves through when looking in the mirror doesn’t come from something inherent or something natural. Comparison is the thief of joy.
Also, that shot of Dennis Quaid striding right up to the camera to pee was masterful and counts as found footage COME AT ME.
*This is all in discussion of passing as a sense of self-satisfaction, seeing the person in the mirror you feel should be there. There is an additional and very real aspect of passing: not passing – ‘looking trans’ – can be dangerous depending on the place and culture in which you live. Sometimes, blending in is not just about feeling good, but its about survival and that element of passing is not being argued against here at all. Stay safe out there.
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