In the indie comedy “She’s the He,” which premiered at SXSW on Sunday, high school seniors Alex and Ethan decide during the last week of school to pretend they’re trans so they can sneak into the women’s locker room. If that sounds like a premise lifted right out of MAGA-era attacks on trans rights, it’s because it is — that’s the point.
First-time writer-director Siobhan McCarthy dreamed up the idea just over a year ago, in February 2024, after discovering online that the one high school comedy that spoke to them as a teenager — the 2006 Amanda Bynes comedy “She’s the Man” — was just as formative for many other trans kids. That led to a conversation with their friend, Will Geare (who co-edited “She’s the He” with McCarthy), about the kinds of trans stories they both wished they’d been able to see when they were younger.
“I made a joke about, what if we took that conservative fear of [trans people] going into the bathrooms and we really played that out?” McCarthy tells Variety. “What would that look like?”
McCarthy finished the first draft of “She’s the He” just a few days later, and by July, they were shooting the film with a cast and crew that was almost entirely made up of trans, nonbinary and queer people — including all of the background actors. To achieve that cast, McCarthy leaned heavily on the tiny network of trans professionals within the industry.
“It was incredibly difficult to not only find trans people to be in a film — and this many trans people, which is fairly unprecedented — but to then find the right people for the roles we were trying to cast, which is the goal of any film,” McCarthy says.
Trans actor Emmett Preciado (“Good Trouble”), for example, landed the role of the school’s jacked, bullying quarterback, Jacob, through a recommendation from McCarthy’s friend, trans actor and activist Ian Alexander. After McCarthy cast queer actor Malia Pyles (“Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin”) as the hottest and most popular girl in school, Pyles’ boyfriend, trans actor Jordan Gonzalez, suggested casting Misha Osherovich (“Freaky”) for the film’s critical central role, Ethan — who, after pretending to be trans, realizes that she actually is trans. And McCarthy didn’t find comedian Nico Carney, who ended up playing Ethan’s horn-dog BFF Alex, until a week before filming started.
“I had no idea if he could act,” McCarthy says. “I’d just seen his stand up. When we got into that rehearsal room the first day and he did the first scene, I finally, finally breathed a sigh of relief, because I knew we had a movie.”
After “She’s the He” opened to a standing ovation in Austin, McCarthy spoke with Variety about their inspirations for the movie, the “painful” experience of making it during the 2024 presidential election, and why they hope the film — which does not yet have distribution — will make it into movie theaters.
What was the first impetus to make you want to tell this story?
It was complicated. It ended up being a trip back to my hometown, where I happened to walk by my high school. It got me thinking about what it felt like to be young and to be dissociated from your experience. Because when you don’t necessarily know that you’re trans yet, the basics of life become very difficult to comprehend. Even if someone’s saying “I love you,” if they’re saying it to you from the perspective of the wrong gender, it doesn’t sound like “I love you” the way that it does to other people. In thinking about that, it was hard to not think about the movies that I grew up with and what broke through that haze of being disassociated.
Like what?
“She’s the Man,” Amanda Bynes, that movie! I rewatched it, and realized that there were a lot of trans people who had rewatched that movie recently as well and had started to talk on Twitter and on Tiktok about how they wish they had stories like that, those Shakespearean gender swap stories that were genuine to the trans experience.
All of that happened in the span of 24 hours, and at the end of that 24 hours, I was having conversation with my coeditor [Will Geare] about what we wish we had seen, because they’re trans as well. I made a joke about, what if we took that conservative fear of [trans people] going into the bathrooms and we really played that out? What would that look like? It started out entirely as a joke between the two of us. I wrote a draft in 24 hours of the entire movie. Gave it to Will. Will read it, gave me some notes. I took it back, rewrote it. We did that for about three days, and the first draft was done, and that was 13 months before today.
Did you know right away that everyone in the cast would be queer, trans or nonbinary?
That was a line that I was willing to die on, because I knew that the movie would not work if I was casting heterosexual, cis people — and specifically cis men, in the roles of those two leading boys, Alex and Jacob, who are such a representation of a lot of the men that I grew up with. A lot of trans men, through lived experience, have a nuanced understanding of what it means to engage with some of the toxicity that can be thrust upon cis boys, and that allows them to play in that field with a little more lucidity. That’s not to say that cis men don’t have that lucidity, but I knew that in order for me to be able to talk to my cast and communicate clearly, I was going to have to be talking to trans men, because they would speak the same language as me.
You were shooting and editing in the thick of the 2024 presidential campaign, which became so centered on anti-trans messaging. What was it like to have that in the background as you were putting your movie together, especially since the Republican talking point about trans kids in locker rooms was one of the main inspirations for the film?
It was incredibly painful. It’s hard to overstate the psychological weight of that messaging on everyone involved in this film when we are trying to make something that is centering trans joy. I had to turn around the movie in six weeks to get it to South By. And all six of those weeks, every week, it felt like the stakes were ratcheting up. Every week, something new was being said. Some new bill was being posited that was potentially going to strip my rights, going to strip the rights of children who I care about, going to strip rights of my friends.
The only thing that really kept me going during that, and I think kept a lot of us going during that, was realizing how strong our community has been in the face of this oppression. There are so many generations who come before us who have done incredible work and incredible things against unbelievable odds. But it also was scary, because it made the future of this film uncertain. When you’re watching the figurehead of the country come out every day and say, “You, specifically, who are making this movie. You people. We don’t want to hear from you. We don’t want to see you. We don’t want to think about you. We don’t even want you to have the basic rights to live.” Making a movie that was not only showcasing this many trans people and putting this many trans people right in their line of sight, but also talking about the thing that they were saying back at us, was absolutely terrifying. I’m so happy to be here now, but it was a lot.
What is your hope for this movie? Where would you love this movie to live to get to the audience you want to see it?
We very much see this movie in the vein of “Bottoms” or these queer movies that are beginning to break through to the mainstream. So much of the goal of creating this was making a movie that really did represent the trans community, and really is for the trans community, but that was accessible for cis audiences and heterosexual audiences. We basically wanted to take the bubble that was all those movies we grew up on and just expand the part of it that hadn’t included trans people. So we are really hoping to get this into theaters. There’s something powerful, I think, about seeing this many trans people in an AMC or a Regal next to “Mission: Impossible” or these other blockbusters, because that inherently makes a statement as well that we are here and we’re just like you.
This film came together so fast. I can imagine a lot of your decisions were made on instinct, but it reminded me so much of the independent queer movies from the 1990s. Was that something you were going for?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, those movies live deep in my psyche. “But I’m a Cheerleader” was quintessential to my identity as a human being. But so many of these decisions, I think, were made on instinct. I animated everything in the film. I wrote the score with my brother. I edited the film with Will. All of this movie ended up having to be my brain child in a lot of ways, because this turnaround was so tight that I just didn’t have access to reach out to other people. But as it started to come together, it became clear that, because Will and I both grew up on those ’90s queer movies, we were referencing those instinctually.
The animated notebook scribbles throughout the film also evoked “Heartstopper” for me. Was that consciously on your mind?
Oh, “Heartstopper” is very much in my mind. “Heartstopper” was a huge show for me on a comfort level. I’m the older end of Gen Z, and I do find that my references skew from TikTok to those old ’90s queer movies. I want the movie to be a representation of a lot of queer history. Also, I’m trying to make a movie for my generation, for young people. There’s not a lot of people right now who are getting to speak to the experience of growing up as part of Gen Z or Gen Alpha. There is a collage aesthetic to the film, because that’s just inherent to my experience growing up, getting so much information in so many different forms of media shot into my eyes.