SXSW 2025 Interview: SHE'S THE HE, Siobhan McCarthy Talks Their Trans Indie For America's Here and Now

Alex (Nico Carney) is worried that everyone at school thinks he and his best friend Ethan (Misha Osherovich) are gay. The reality is that their peers couldn't care less, it's 2025.

Regardless, Alex is determined to prove once and for all that he is a Heterosexual Man. How, you might ask? Why, by one of them pretending to come out as trans, of course. Unhinged, but there's logic here. But wait --what's better than one of them coming out as trans? That's right, both of them coming out as trans!

Alex has lost Ethan at this point, but he's dead-set on the idea. After all, drools Alex, if they identify as women, they can gain access to female-only spaces...

On paper, this sounds disastrous -- a checklist of tropes from the right-wing reactionary fantasy of self-ID-- but trans-nonbinary debut director Siobhan McCarthy knows what they're doing.

At a girls-only party, Ethan starts, for the first time, to feel truly herself, and the most ill-advised premise on the planet blossoms into the film it was born to become.

It's refreshing how McCarthy's film imagines a world where the truth of one's identity is accepted as what is spoken, yet equally finds biting humour within the absurdities of our self-formations. It's knowing, winking -- laughing with, not at -- but fully cognizant of the conflicting opinions that pervade our reality.

What can this scrappy, sincere indie do for the trans+ community, and can it fix the hearts of its wider viewership? Thanking McCarthy for the film's excellent joke about the gender-neutrality of my own name, we get to questioning.

ScreenAnarchy: What sparked you to spin your coming-out experiences into a film?

Siobhan McCarthySo much of this film is based on the movies that I grew up with: She's the Man, White Chicks, Mean Girls, Clueless. With Y2K nostalgia coming back, it was impossible for me not to start thinking about these movies.

Gender-bending narratives have always been told by cis people, and they've always used trans people as the butt of the joke. I began to think about what it would mean for one of those stories to get told by a trans person and to really foreground trans joy in the telling of that story.

There's a huge question mark about what the future of trans entertainment looks like and what the future of transness in film looks like. I wrote this movie thirteen months ago. We've made this thing on such a quick turnaround because, while all of those influences were dovetailing, there was a political shift in the United States towards transphobia. Making something that foregrounded trans joy and undermined those narratives became crucial, not only to protect trans kids, but to provide them a sense of joy.

Men en-masse pretending to be women to gain access to women's spaces is, of course, a right-wing fantasy. And yet you engage it in this film. It's a curious tightrope to be walking, and arguably a dangerous one in this current political moment. It must be an interesting thing to pitch.

Oh, it was an incredibly odd thing to pitch. We made this movie begging, borrowing and stealing.

This movie was mostly written for my own entertainment. I thought it would be funny to engage this insane idea genuinely and play it out as if it were to 'really happen'. I think there's less power in brushing these fringe theories aside than taking them on, acknowledging them, and conversing with them.

The only way to reveal that absurdity is to take it at face value and truly acknowledge what it would mean if that idea was taken genuinely. Making this film was unbelievably difficult because of that core concept.

I really like the way that you present your cast. It's refreshing, because you don't attempt to make your trans+ cast members look less visibly queer in service of a corny transformation later on. There's a faith in the audience. It's very much 'by queer people for queer people', right?

Absolutely. The film was made for a queer audience. While we would like the audience of this movie to be anyone who enjoys coming-of-age films, we wanted to expand that bubble, which has previously mostly been for cis straight people. We wanted make sure that the taste and the aesthetics of this movie were designed to be consumable and readable by queer people, because we see ourselves so much as being in the lineage of filmmakers like John Waters and movies like But I'm a Cheerleader, that have been made by queer people to highlight the queer experience, and that have faith that audiences queer and cishet are going to understand what you're doing.

I see so much of this film as a fantasy also. By casting trans people to follow the arc of the journey of self-discovery and transformation that are themselves already on that journey, we can represent that experience in a heightened reality where we don't feel like we need to push the aesthetics too far or that we need to telegram to the audience any of the specificities of gender or the aesthetics of gender.

Because, in my opinion, it's also quite problematic to foreground those elements. I fear that a cis filmmaker would try to push those aesthetics, because that's all that they see of transness -- the aesthetic of someone's body.

And by keeping it so fluid in that way, you create this 'possibility space' of identity, that anyone could be anything. You foreground that with the Ingrid Michaelson needledrop as well. It creates a really lovely, positive vibe.

I'm so glad. We're trying to open up the industry as much as we can. We cast trans people as cis characters because we also see that as the future of the industry, as the future of representation.

It's not enough just to cast trans people as trans people. Part of our future and the evolution of this industry will be to acknowledge the existence of queer people writ large, to allow us to have the diversity in our performances and the kind of art that we get to make, just as most other people have had.

As a trans-nonbinary filmmaker specifically, do you feel that you have more licence to get away with toying with archetypes and stereotypes? You've got the heightened toxic masculinity of Alex, you've got jokes made lovingly at each and everyone's expense. You're throwing gender to the wind. Is that instinctual for you?

It is instinctual. A lot of the jokes in this film are almost inherent to my existence -- in that, being a genderqueer person, especially being a nonbinary person, so much of my lived experience runs the gamut of gendered identity. The world has gendered me just about every way you could imagine. I get every single pronoun, I get every single identity from the outside world. I've become a Rorschach test, and it's different in every space that I enter.

Through that, I end up with a lived experience that has overlapped so many different identities that bled into this work. I've had access to many of these toxic male traits by being in spaces where cis boys think that I'm one of the guys and they want to tell me all of the horrible, crazy things that they think. I've been in spaces where cis girls think I'm one of the girlypops and they tell me all of their crazy things. A lot of these jokes are just me repeating things that have been said to me, either in private or in public, throughout the arc of my life as a nonbinary person.

We've spoken about film influences, but have there been any explicitly genderqueer or nonbinary artistic influences that you've drawn from? Have you found any?

Acknowledgement in film of genderqueer identity -- especially of fluidity -- doesn't really exist right now. So much of my crew is trans, and I've known many of them for a while now. Some came from the American South, and had never heard of the concept of a 'nonbinary' person until they realised that that was them. I don't think culture has caught up to those identities.

What we're doing in this movie is just styling the characters the way that our friends dress and having the characters act the way our friends act. So many of the clothes in the film are my clothes, my producer's clothes. Both of us are nonbinary, and we're putting so much of our own aesthetics into this movie, because we can't be drawing from elsewhere.

Tell me about your cast. You've drawn together a collective of cool people who will be familiar to many online queer folks.

Casting this movie was a complicated feat. We specifically wanted to cast trans people as the cis male leads, and our cast needed to be a majority of trans people. Out of the six main voices and faces in this film, four of them are trans and all of them are queer.

We're lucky that the queer community is so tight, because the way a lot of these people ended up in this film is that they're my friends or they're friends of my friends. There are so few of us, especially in the entertainment industry, that many of these people were one phone call away.

Researching them, I realised that they have internet followings that are bigger than I thought they were, which speaks to the relevance of queer people being themselves on the internet. There aren't a lot of outlets in film and TV for queer, and especially nonbinary people, to be themselves.

A lot of these people have gained massive footholds in more niche and non-traditional outlets because that's the only way that they can. By putting them in this movie, I'm really hoping that we can not only expand their traction to a broader audience, we can also allow all of those people who've been watching them on the internet to come into a cinema and find a movie where they can watch the people that they deeply relate to.

We've spoken a lot about how queer audiences will engage with this film -- it's queer for queer through and through -- but what are your expectations or hopes of the cisgender heterosexual people who will somehow find their eyes glued to this film?

I really did want to make a film that cishet people can engage with and find enjoyable -- that was quintessential. Alex is the inroad for a cishet audience, especially a male audience, and he's based on so many boys that I grew up with -- who genuinely want to do the right thing, but because of how they were raised and the context that we all grew up in, they don't know how.

I wanted to create a film that allowed cishet people to laugh at things that they have laughed at before, but to recontextualise those images in a way that is trans-inclusive. I think the core to that is the image of all of these cis boys wearing dresses walking down the hallway in the third act of the movie. The image of boys in dresses has been used as a punchline for so long, and every time it's been used to put trans people at the butt of the joke.

There's a way to tell that joke that isn't laughing at trans people. It's laughing at cishet boys doing dumb things that cishet boys do. I was looking to things like Jackass for inspiration as much as any queer film, especially for the way that a lot of these boys act. The stupidity that is inherent to masculinity can be a funny joke to acknowledge. I think it's especially powerful to allow that stupidity to come through trans men doing stupid things on screen as cis boys.

By using trans men especially, we can allow a cishet audience into the film without excluding a trans audience. We wanted to make the film as intersectional as we could. The way forward to gain a larger audience is not to exclude one group or the other, it's to put everyone in the movie.

What do you want this film to gift your audiences, and what has it gifted you?

I wanted to gift my audiences joy. So much of the driving force of this film is to provide joy to trans Americans in a moment where everything is doing all it can to make our lives more difficult. This is designed to bring laughter, and to bring happiness into the hearts of trans kids who are facing down a dire situation.

It is incredibly important to me that this film brings that into the world, and making it has brought me a lot of that same joy. A lot of the cast are my friends, but there were so many people who came onto this film -- my costume designer, my cinematographer -- so many people who have come into my life through making this film who have expanded the number of queer and trans people who I get to know, and the joy that is brought to my life by expanding my own community and who is close and important to me.

It's also been such a reclamation of my own life -- my relationship to my mother, to my friends growing up, to where I grew up. It's so nice to be able to finally acknowledge what it meant to grow up in America as a trans kid and to reclaim that experience for myself, and for as many trans kids as I possibly can.

To show that, despite all of these oppressive forces, despite these horrible conservative narratives, we can still find joy in the American trans experience. Because for a lot of us, we have to live through this, and there's no way out. So we have to find some through road.

She's The He enjoys its World Premiere at SXSW 2025. It screens again tonight at Alamo Lamar.