Body Horror and The Trans Experience

By Leighton Parkes, 3rd Year English and Classical Studies

Content warning: This article contains discussions of transphobia and suicide.

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Body Horror Art, artist Leighton Parkes

Dissonance between one’s inner life and physical form has long been utilised by horror writers. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the protagonist remains young and conventionally attractive while his personality rots. In Frankenstein, the creature observes regular humans and laments that his body cannot be accepted by them. This narrative has particular resonance for trans people experiencing gender dysphoria, for whom this horrific dissonance is our everyday.

The Fly, Kurt Neumann (1958)

Your body starts growing, warping, changing. Neither you nor the people in your life connect your new appearance with who you are inside. This may seem to cisgender people like something from a horror movie, but this is the real-life experience of many trans people, especially during puberty.

Many of us find comfort in allegory, even if that allegory is monstrous. A book published last year, Bound in Flesh: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror, is a collection of short stories written by trans and non-binary writers. The stories explore the overlap between the horror genre and the isolation, longing, shame, and other terrifying aspects common to the trans experience.

Meanwhile on screen, this year the film I Saw the TV Glow was made. The writer and director, Jane Schoenbrun, has confirmed that it is intended as an allegory for the trans experience. In the film, the protagonists, Owen and Maddy, become obsessed with a TV show called The Pink Opaque, and the film loses grip on what happens in the show and what happens in reality. Maddy tells Owen that they can become the characters in the show if they bury themselves alive, but Owen settles for his current, unsatisfying life. The film ends with him euphorically opening his chest up to reveal TV static, but then closing it, apologising, and submitting to a slow, suffocating death.

I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun (2024)

When a person transitions, they don’t necessarily “kill” their old self, as we see Maddy do literally in I Saw the TV Glow. They will, of course, be the person they always were, and were always meant to be. But after this glorious transformation, the person may look back on their old self and wonder if they were alive at all before now. The ill-fitting identity is shaken off like a snakeskin and their birth name becomes their dead name. Their old self isn’t dead, but the person society wanted them to be is. A transition is a kind of death and a kind of birth.

While trans people write our own horror-genre allegories, cisgender people write horror about us. In Distancing Representations in Transgender Film: Identification, Affect, and the Audience, Lucy J. Miller writes about ‘The Transphobic Gaze’. This is the phenomenon where we are written about as objects of fear. She provides examples in the films Psycho, Sleepaway Camp, and Dressed to Kill. In all these films, trans women are maligned as unstable and murderous. Much of the modern rhetoric surrounding trans women in the news echoes these sentiments, and we circle back to the monstrous. There are few trans people who haven’t been called, or heard someone like them be called, a monster, an androgen, unnatural, or similar.

A 2018 study found that there was no link between non-discrimination laws and safety or privacy violations in public restrooms, locker rooms, or changing rooms. Despite the media circus around us, we are not the villains of your slasher films.

To be transgender is to be your own creator. We take the job from our caregivers and our gods; we shape our bodies and give ourselves names. There is something awe-inspiring, terrifying, and monstrous in such power. Our freedom is so enviable that many try to smother us from existence. There is horror in our everyday lives, but also unimaginable joy. Lives can’t be confined to a single genre — body horror is only one such genre we live in.

Edited by Scarlett Bantin