Thread by @TillyBridges

Welcome to #TransTuesday! Today we’re going to dive into another movie with an incredible trans allegory that says something truly wonderful about trans folks. We’re starting THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF REAL GENIUS, part 1 - CONTEXT AND PJ TOROKVEI.

I had somehow managed to never see this movie for my entire life until just a few weeks ago. I don’t know how that happened, I wasn’t trying to avoid it or anything! But a trans friend of mine mentioned to me that she thought I should do a thread on its trans allegory.

This of course piqued my interest, especially when learning that one of the three credited writers was a trans woman. So I watched it, and there is definitely a trans allegory at play and we’re gonna talk about it. But we have to talk about a few other things first.

A trans woman screenwriter! I mean talk about my wheelhouse, that’s ME. And here’s a movie written by one of us from the 80s! But Hollywood is complicated, and so is trying to learn about trans people who existed in the past.

We ARE going to go through by timestamps, just like in the MATRIX and NERVOUS MAN allegory threads, and I know that’s likely what you’re all anxious for. So I want to mention that won’t start until part 2 next week, because there’s vital context we have to talk about first.

If you’re not familiar with why someone would mention a piece of media and ask me to talk about the trans allegory of it, may I introduce you to my 24-thread series on THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORIES OF THE MATRIX MOVIES (soon to be a book!).

https://twitter.com/TillyBridges/status/1475194703544864769

You don’t HAVE to have read my Matrix threads to understand the trans allegory of Real Genius, but I will call back to the Matrix allegories MANY TIMES because, surprise surprise, different trans allegories are still trans allegories and thus have much in common.

I’d also like to direct you to my thread on TRANS PEOPLE IN HISTORY, and why it can be difficult to spot and know a lot about trans people from the past, despite the fact that we have always existed and always will.

https://twitter.com/TillyBridges/status/1551992991178313730

The trans woman credited as a writer on REAL GENIUS is PJ Torokvei. She worked with Second City, wrote a handful of movies, and was showrunner of WKRP in Cincinnati for a while. But all of it was under her deadname. Once she transitioned, she seemingly had no further credits.

I don’t know if that’s because she chose to retire from screenwriting, or because of discrimination she faced after coming out. I certainly hope it’s the former, but the transphobic world we live in (doubly so back then) makes me fear it was the latter.

She came out in 2001 and died in 2013 from liver failure. Some second-hand information I found suggested her death may have been from complications from her HRT, which is awful to think about. The thing that eases your pain being what kills you is just… horrific.

It’s common for movies to have multiple writers across multiple drafts. The Writer’s Guild has rules for who gets credited and how, but not every writer that works on a movie’s script always gets credited.

It’s also common for script changes to happen during shooting, for the director to adjust things, etc etc. There’s no way to know how much of what made it to the shooting script and then ended up in the movie was from PJ’s contributions.

So there are other voices mixed in with hers, and she didn’t direct it. This is not a case of a pure vision like with the Wachowskis and the MATRIX movies. This is one trans voice amid a sea of cis voices, all contributing to the final product.

I see trans metaphors and an overall allegory in REAL GENIUS, and some parts we can almost be entirely sure came from PJ based on how very trans they read, but there’s no way to know exactly what came from who without someone who worked on it to tell us.

I’ve also been trying for weeks to get context about what it was like to be a trans woman at the time this was written and released, but despite using every connection I have at my disposal I could not find a single trans woman who transitioned back then to talk to.

What we do have to go on is a secondhand account of PJ from a friend of hers, Stan Brooks, in a letter written and published in the Hollywood Reporter after her death. That’s as close as we can get to hard facts, but some of it is relevant.

I’m going to quote some important parts, but I’m not going to link to the article. You can find it easily enough if you want to read it, but be aware it ROUTINELY deadnames and misgenders her (in an article written by her close friend!). It was painful for me to read.

It happens out of ignorance and not malice, as far as I can tell, but note that even when it was written (in 2013) trans people had so little cultural footprint that in a letter from a personal friend about our death, deadnaming and misgendering was still rampant.

Stan Brooks says PJ sent a letter to friends/family coming out on her 50th birthday. Part of it read, “... [she] was choosing to go public with the secret that [she’d] always felt trapped — as a female in a man’s body — and that [she] planned to have surgery to change [her] sex.”

In the letter, PJ also confessed fears over losing friends, family, and her career. PJ was forced to “live as a woman” for a year before any kind of medical intervention would be allowed, which tracks with a lot of what we do know about transitioning back then.

Imagine being forced to live a year adhering to someone else’s idea of what a woman is or should be just for the ~right~ to access the lifesaving medical care you need. CAN YOU IMAGINE? It’s pretty horrific.

Stan asked her, “‘Why not just be gay and come out of the closet?’ [PJ’s] answer was all too obvious and drove home [her] anguish.”

PJ’s reply: “If only it was that easy. I wish I could do that. I’m not a man. I’m not attracted to gay men. No more than heterosexual women are attracted to them.”

Imagine some of your closest friends asking why you don’t just be a more “acceptable” form of queer, and the complete lack of understanding of what it means to be trans, being the reply you get. Again, it’s from a place of ignorance and not malice, but it’s still painful.

“Some of PJ’s friends from the Second City days and family members had turned their backs on her during this transition. Some never called again after reading the 50th birthday letter.” Jesus. Heartbreaking. And sadly all too common.

The letter says there were serious complications from her gender confirmation surgery which kept her going back to the hospital, and may have eventually also contributed to her death.

Real Genius was released in 1985, meaning it was likely written in the years prior given the generally slow-moving pipeline of Hollywood movies. We don’t know exactly when it was written, or when PJ worked on it, but it was likely somewhere in the early 80s.

Regardless of how she presented or her friends, family, and the entire world thinking she was a cisgender man, we know that SHE knew she was trans, and she was very aware of why she had to stay in the closet for so long.

But as a reminder, if you’re trans you’ve always been trans. And via the letter/article mentioned above, she KNEW she was a woman regardless of when she began transitioning. Transitioning isn’t what makes you trans, it’s what alleviates and addresses the problem.

So given what we do know, and what you’re going to see through the rest of these threads, I feel comfortable saying the pieces of trans allegory that made it into the final version of the movie were intentional on her part.

Note that doesn’t always mean CONSCIOUSLY intentional. I’ve said many times how in my own past writing I can now CLEARLY see I was working through my own complicated thoughts and feelings about gender without even consciously knowing that’s what I was doing at the time.

It’s all hidden under metaphor, but that’s the only way she COULD talk about being trans in a movie in the 1980s. Especially when it’s not about the harmful tropes of us being jokes to be mocked, victims of violence, or deceptive sexual predators.

REAL GENIUS IS A CELEBRATION OF TRANSNESS. And now that you’ve got context, next week we’re going to dive into the movie itself and you’re going to see what being trans meant to PJ, and means to a lot of us. And the ways it can change the world.

Tilly Bridges, end transmission.