In ’05, a trans mother & her bisexual son hit the road: Is Transamerica still a trip worth taking?

Welcome back to Y2GAY, where we take another look at some of the defining queer cinema of the early 2000s. Today, let’s revisit a road trip classic years ahead of its time.

I don’t think I need to tell anyone here that in 2005, they were not making mainstream movies about trans people. Especially not lead trans characters, and especially not played by trans women or cis women actors. But when out-gay filmmaker Duncan Tucker pitched studios a road trip comedy with a heavy side of gender dysphoria, somehow, the money materialized.

How about we take this to the next level?

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Transamerica, Tucker’s first and only feature film, tells the story of Sabrina “Bree” Osbourne (Desperate Housewives‘ Felicity Huffman), a middle-aged trans woman working toward her longed-for bottom surgery date. When we’re introduced to Bree, we see she’s cut off from her family, her community, and the broader world around her.

She tells her therapist she’s a virgin, except for a college encounter so “tragically lesbian” she barely thought it counted. But when Bree learns just a week before her surgery date that the son she never knew she had is alone, in jail, and in need of a friend, she’s forced (by an evil therapist!) to do the right thing.

Ultimately, it does turn out to be the right thing for Bree. But at the start, she’s understandably upset. All Bree wants to do is live her life stealth, and for the most part, she’s able to pass. She works two jobs: as a telemarketer and dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant. Every penny she’s been able to save has gone toward gender-affirming care.

When her therapist gate-keeps the forms Bree needs to get her surgery approved until she reunites with her son Toby (former child star Kevin Zegers), she’s left with no other choice. She travels cross country to find and help him, learning that he’s a young sex worker in active addiction. The two drive together back to California, where Bree gets her surgery and Toby tries to make it big… in the adult entertainment industry.

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Tucker based the character of Bree on his roommate, an intersex woman who found it easier to identify as a trans woman throughout the ’90s. Hearing her story, Tucker wanted to magnify the feeling of being alone and unloved in the world through the handy trope of the queer cross-country road trip.

Just 10 years before, we’d seen two high-profile comic attempts with Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert and To Wong Foo. But Transamerica‘s mission was different. With Bree, Tucker was able to honestly capture the period of transition that most trans folks would like to forget: That in-between moment when you’re out to yourself and the world, but still soaked in the shame that threatens to pull you right back into the closet.

Bree doesn’t out herself as Toby’s parent when they first meet. She doesn’t disclose her trans status, either, for obvious reasons. After Toby realizes that Bree is trans and not a church worker as she’s claimed, his bitter immature reaction is laced with transphobia. But Bree fights back. “My body may be a work in progress but there is nothing wrong with my soul,” she says. “Jesus made me this way for a reason, so I could suffer and be reborn the way he was.”

Throughout the journey, as Bree encounters violent transphobia from her son, her parents, and passing strangers, she’s forced to find the part of herself that can, and will, stand up for herself. At a party scene where Bree finally gets to coexist with some other trans women, she sits alone, stuck inside herself, still too ashamed to embrace her community.

But as the trip comes to a close, she becomes exactly who she’s always known she was. Not a work in progress, but a woman who refuses to let the ignorant cis world define her. “You never had a son,” she tells her mother after she pleads with Bree to not to do the “awful thing” of getting bottom surgery. Later, in a private moment with Toby, Bree admits that the love of her parents is something she wishes she had, even if she knows she has to learn to live without it.

“I wish just once they’d look at me and see me,” she says. “That’s all. Just really see me.”

That’s the thing so many of us want more than anything in those first hard months—sometimes years—after coming out. We’re met with everything from violence to disbelief to religious diatribes about why what we’re doing with our bodies and lives is against nature. And we have to find the strength to do it anyway. But that hurt never goes away.

Tucker fought for a cis woman—as opposed to a cis man—to play Bree, and it paid off (though trans icon Alexandra Billings almost got the part, and that would have been even better.) He didn’t want Bree to look, in the hateful convention of the time, like a “man in a dress.” He wanted her to look like the woman she is.

What Felicity Huffman brings to the role is a deeply felt empathy that’s never trite or self-pitying. On the outside, Bree is wrapped in diaphanous, powder-pink outfits. But when we get those flashes of insight about where she’s come from and how hard she’s fought to realize herself, we see flashes of red in the strong, secure woman rise up.

For trans people still battling internalized transphobia, every cruel word finds its target deep inside the most frightened, wounded part of us. That’s how we learn to stand up for ourselves and each other, long before we feel we’re ready for the fight. But the fight finds us.

Transamerica is far from a perfect portrait of trans life, but it gets one thing right: the way your heart can end up opening in the least-expected ways during the hardest part of your transition. It gets its point across so well that Dolly Parton even wrote a thematically-perfect original song to close out the film. When Toby and Bree finally find each other again at the end of a long journey, it’s a heart-melting moment that takes you by surprise even though you know it’s coming. They’ve both changed just enough to become the family neither of them had before.

“It hurts,” Bree tells her therapist after finally getting that coveted surgery. Everything hurts after surgery, but she’s talking about something else.

“I know,” her therapist says, hugging her. “That’s what hearts do.”

Transamerica is streaming on Tubi.

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