[Editorial] Transploitation: Glen or Glenda

What is transploitation? Some introduction to the term is necessary, certainly, but I don’t want to take too much away from Glen or Glenda. Suffice to say that, to me, transploitation is part of the exploitation sub-genre that focuses on gender queerness or unconformity.

These films must feature a trans character and explore trans-ness thematically. They also vary from completely misguided and voyeuristic in the worst way, to holding deep truths about being trans, but almost all fall in the in between of reprehensible and illuminating. I want to look at these films from a historical context and how we respond to them through modern eyes.

Glen or Glenda was a deeply personal film for director/writer Edward Wood Jr. The filmmaker had trans feminine leanings from an early age, beginning when his mother had him wear a dress as a small child. Wood discovered he liked wearing women’s clothes and continued to do so all his life, including his stint in the military where he wore a bra and panties under his uniform. After his service, Wood took many jobs to break into Hollywood, including working as a “female impersonator”. He broke into the directing scene making no-budget Westerns before getting a chance in 1953 to work on a project closer to his experiences. 

Wood’s girlfriend at the time, Dolores Fuller, said “our relationship was pretty much like the movie"¹. Wood and Fuller would play the central couple of Glen or Glenda, making this point all the more obvious. The film follows a trans feminine person who is conflicted about telling her significant other about her queer identity. It’s tricky to know which pronoun to use for Glenda; it feels wrong to use “he” as the film does so easily, and yet Wood himself never used feminine pronouns or sought to transition medically. Still, there is some distance between Glenda and Wood, as the film originally began as a documentary project about Christine Jorgensen.

Christine Jorgensen was the first trans woman to receive attention for medically transitioning in the United States. This intrigued early grindhouse producer George Weiss, who began putting together a standard b-movie documentary project about Christine’s procedures and life. She however was uninterested in appearing in the film, and Wood, who Weiss brought on to direct, was responsible for moving the film away from pure documentary into a genre that was known at the time as “problem pictures”. These were movies about societal issues like teen pregnancy or race, mostly full not of characters but talking points for issues. Glen or Glenda falls into these trappings: the film’s superstructure is a cop talking to a psychiatrist after being called in on a trans woman’s suicide. He wants to learn about these people in the hope of helping them, and so the psychiatrist tells him two stories, each about a different trans feminine figure.

The first story, about Glenda, offers the more wonderful moments of trans femininity expressed in the film. It opens with a preface that includes the text “You Are Society — Judge Ye Not” and one gets the sense that Wood places himself not with the judges but with the judged. The film is at its strongest when it nods to its documentary origins but breaks free of the confining elements of that genre. A sequence which cuts from newspaper headlines about sex reassignment surgeries to people reacting to them is one bravura moment. When one woman makes the old transphobic remark “if God wanted us to fly, he’d have given us wings”, the narrator chimes in with “we’ve corrected that which nature hasn’t given us… We’ve just had to learn how to put nature’s elements together for use. Yet, the world is shocked by a sex change”. 

It’s the second story, about a woman named Ann, that showcases the biggest issues with the film’s treatment of trans femininity. This one is much shorter, almost a postscript to the Glenda story, but also offers parallels to Wood’s life. Ann, like Wood, was enlisted in World War II and wore bras and panties under her military uniform. Unlike Wood, after leaving the service, she sought to medically transition, and perhaps it is Wood’s ignorance in this realm of trans femininity that leaves this section feeling  gawky and leering. 

The film is hurt overall by an overreliance on the scientific discourse of trans people. Gatekeeping doctors are presented as a positive, telling which trans feminine patients they think should transition medically and which shouldn’t. There’s a strange idea about Glenda being “cured” of her trans femininity that is particularly offensive, as if gender queerness is something like depression to be worked against. But most of the medical transphobia is heaped onto Ann, the clear stand-in for Jorgensen. Weiss said he asked other medically transitioned women to be in the movie but all refused. At least one woman cited Bela Lugosi’s involvement as the reason she didn’t want to work on the project, as his presence suggested this would frame transitioning in a horror context. While this is not purely true of the Glenda segments, which features triumphant music when she is presenting as herself, the Ann segments features a standard ‘50’s horror score over scenes of her undergoing surgery, portraying it as otherworldly and creepy.

The film’s insistence on medical and scientific analysis of trans people is a sign of its bigger issue: this is not a film about trans liberation, merely acceptance. Wood doesn’t argue for society to shift in order to accept trans women, more that trans women should shift to be better members of society. There’s a section where the film deli antes all the different ways Ann needs to act now that she’s transitioned medically, studying things like her walk through a grossly clinical lens. Trans women need to be feminine to be accepted, the film says, and that way they can be better workers and citizens. This kind of argument feels dated and offensive, more for the benefit of cis society at large than the trans community it should be for.

Ed Wood’s work is an important piece of queer film history. His movies and books (he would go on to write a lot of softcore pornography, most of which involved trans femininity) are messy and can be offensive, full of dated language and casual misgenderings. But there is too much here that is important, that was done in a mainstream way for the first time, that it needs to be remembered and discussed. I could stand to lose many sequences in the film that make me uncomfortable for how they discuss trans feminine bodies and people. But we’d also lose scenes such as  where Glenda reveals her secret to her fiancé. At first Barbara is shocked, but then she sees the person she loves, and reassures her they can work on this together. She stands up and takes off her sweater in a quick motion, holding it out to Glenda as a peace offering. This moment, where one woman accepts another for who she is and offers her assistance in becoming that woman fully, is something only transploitation could give us.

¹Grey, Rudolph. Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr.. Faber and Faber, 1995.

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