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# Deadbeats and Dropouts
- URL: https://malloryelliott.ghost.io/deadbeats-and-dropouts/
- Published: 2024-12-14T22:43:44.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-23T20:26:15.000Z
- Description: Canadian filmmaker Louise Weard's slow-burning "Castration Movie" is already a masterful work of trans cinema, and it's only half done.
- Author: Mallory Elliott
- Tags: trans cinema, film, transgender, movie reviews, Newsletter, #Migrated-1787496673720, #Import 2026-08-23 14:51

One of the things that’s always struck me about the testimonies of so many trans women about their pre-transition lives was that their discomfort with masculinity and manhood was rarely just a matter of feeling poorly suited to it. Over and over, they express an emotionally and morally charged *contempt* for the whole thing, or else an intense anxiety about playing a male role, particularly in its aggressive and dominant dimensions. Here’s an example in *Detransition, Baby,* after Amy’s first (pre-transition) sexual experience (italics mine):

> Amy’s performance had created a fundamental separation between the two of them. Something that hadn’t existed before. *Something animal in her. A brute who could take a woman*. Delia talked to her differently —like she had more respect for Amy, but also, had to maintain a careful distance. This was a budding man, after all: powerful, dangerous.  
>  
> The person outlined by Delia’s new deference horrified Amy. \[…\] *The image made her sick. A beast whom women were wise to eye warily.*

In *Nevada,* there’s a description of a typical pre-transition trans girl as the kind of guy who’s so afraid of stepping on women’s toes that he’s utterly useless:

> Like they just stand back, and, say there are some books that need to be shelved, the windows are all dirty, there are boxes that need to go outside, and some kid threw up somewhere.  
>  
> You will start, say, carrying the boxes outside, and then when that’s done, you start mopping up the puke, and he is just standing there, so you’re like, What the fuck! Are you going to move these books or clean a window? And they’re like, Oh, okay, totally, in this very enlightened way that gives you space to fucking do everything, except they need you to show them how to clean a window, because they don’t want to do it wrong?

The thing is, there’s nothing unique to trans women about this sense of reluctance, guilt and/or monstrousness for playing a male role, which also is the source of a considerable amount of cishet male neurosis. Plenty of cishet men fear their power as men. They *want* to be strong and dominant, over women as well as other men, but they feel cruel or inauthentic when they actually attempt it—so they concoct strategies for getting around it, or for absolving themselves of this guilt, if only in their own minds.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/7a7d16aa-e49d-458f-843a-44109500d0a3_2048x858.png)

These men may adopt a defensive, reactionary stance, demanding the respect and the spoils of patriarchal manhood without having to do the work; they may publicly pride themselves on being “nice guys” while secretly seething about their impotence and undermining others in passive-aggressive ways; they may choose sex partners who they devalue and therefore see as “deserving” their aggression; they may just hang back in the shadows of society, hoping to vanish one day. They *want* to be “proper men,” but something’s blocking them psychologically, something they probably aren’t aware of and, precisely due to their gender insecurity, something they’d probably find extremely embarrassing if it did enter their consciousness, desperately re-framing it as anything other than the simple fear of being a man in society.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/d4d9cb70-bb2f-4657-98a6-d8e4828a007e_2048x858.png)

What makes pre-transition trans women different—at least the majority who are living as straight or at least straight-leaning guys[1](#footnote-1)—is not this anxiety about manhood, which most of them share, but the additional fact that, sooner or later, they realize *they would actually prefer to be women*. This additional desire may intensify their discomfort, and they usually aren’t as prone as cis men to blame their situation on women, but on the surface, it doesn’t always look so different.

I wonder about this a lot: what quirk, of psychology or physiology or both, makes us diverge from our beta male peers, with whom we’re often friends prior to transition, sharing geeky interests and bonding over an apparently shared trepidation toward social expectations? And why, if it’s not distinctive, is coming to terms with one’s reluctance to be a man so often portrayed as intrinsic to arriving at one’s transfeminine identity?

[Subscribe](#/portal/signup)

Louise Weard’s brilliant [*Castration Movie*](https://louiseweard.gumroad.com/l/castration-movie?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) may not exactly be trying to answer this question, but its side-by-side contrast of a budding incel and a frustrated trans woman had me thinking about it in new ways. The film’s immersiveness, psychological acuity, and provocative empathy single Weard out as a real talent. I badly want someone to give this woman a lot of money, because what she has done with only the sparsest budget, her friends, and an old video camera is pretty incredible.

The 4.5 hour first half, available to watch now, begins with the story of an apparent cishet man, Turner, who works as a production assistant in the film industry of Vancouver, BC. At first, he appears to be a charismatic dreamer with a dark sense of humor, but as the plot progresses, he’s revealed, mostly through his mistreatment of women, to be a megalomaniac. Weard excels at producing sympathy for Turner without implicitly excusing his behavior. Noah Baker, the actor who plays him, is one of the best in the film, inviting us into Turner’s grandiose inner world like a gingerbread house, only to make us feel uncomfortably trapped later on, about to be thrown into the incinerator of his own ego.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/d673c7df-c10d-45cc-bea4-7a2fefda0840_2048x858.png)

Turner appears to be profoundly uncomfortable with being a man, but he refuses to admit it. Unable to countenance his own negative thoughts about others (especially when they’re pointed out by others), he reframes every insensitive comment as an act of generosity. Unable to admit weakness, he projects his own struggles onto everyone who, in his view, has failed him—particularly his girlfriend, who, when she complains about him not wanting to have sex, he berates for not being good enough at seducing him. More concerned with whether or not *she* likes *him*, he’s too invested in being able to check off the box of having girlfriend—any girlfriend—to realize that he’s not attracted to her. After she breaks up with him, despite having treated her quite poorly, he acts as if he was a jilted lover, engaging in increasingly inappropriate behavior that culminates in him breaking into her apartment and exploding in a truly uncomfortable display of self-centered emotion.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/e713c373-5d55-4141-8356-28c462b715e4_2048x858.png)

With the breakdown of his relationship, he also lashes out at work, berating his boss for accusing him of trying to network with the more successful people on set. Already convinced of his destiny as a great filmmaker, he has no patience for working his way up the film hierarchy, or really for any kind of work. In a montage, he wanders around in an egoistic fugue, scrawling faux-Nietzschean nonsense in his journal, fully revealing the depths of his self-regard.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/bb36e177-fbd5-41e5-b826-3015c3f3ac0b_2048x858.png)

Even at this point, well into his spiral into what a Lacanian would call “hystericization,” he remains charismatic, almost cute by virtue of his being such a complete loser. As scary as his meltdown in front of his ex is, it’s also grimly hilarious in its futility. When he downs a bottle of wine meant for a botched date and harasses a living statue on the street, it’s kind of funny, even though it’s completely cruel and pointless. We still have a sense of Turner’s enjoyment of these behaviors, as much pain as he’s also in (and more importantly, causing to others). A filmmaker more concerned with loudly demonstrating her morals would never let us see this, but Weard is clearly more interested in the contradictions that constitute human beings, entrusting her audience with their own consciences.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/b80ae21d-8664-4ad9-b0be-92769ce5f9d4_2048x858.png)

To have lived as the sort of beta male Turner is, even if you’ve never gone as bananas as he does, and see all of this going down with no power to stop it, is a sort of nightmare. It all ends with him, at his lowest low, logging into 4chan to declare his redpilling. Those who understand—and this movie is really only for those who understand—know that this means he’s been totally defeated—he’s gone past the point of no return, crystalizing his frustrations with society at large, and women most of all, into an ideology that’s going to be reinforced over and over by hoard of grubby little anons. And yet, we also understand that this is a perverse kind of breakthrough for him, because he’s finally taken ownership of the misogyny he was too afraid to cop to before.

Our discomfort at all this is enhanced by Weard’s filming methods, favoring very long takes and what seems to be largely improvised dialogue, as well as her use of vintage videotape, which makes the whole thing feel like an ambitious public access TV show from two decades ago. Obviously staged scenes are seamlessly woven with obviously real events. A lot of the tediousness of life that’s left out of movies is kept in. Although everything is heightened from life, Weard accomplishes a realism that prompts self-accusations of voyeurism in the viewer: *Should I be seeing this? Should anyone be seeing this?* The film serves as an example of Weard’s contention, in [her thoughtful review of ](https://weard.substack.com/p/my-self-imposed-humiliation-ritual)[*Actors*](https://weard.substack.com/p/my-self-imposed-humiliation-ritual), that “the true transgression comes from this revelation and disintegration of identity and its relationship to public/private image.”

A certain kind of trans woman is uniquely positioned to create an incel character with so perfect a mix of sympathy and condemnation. Many cis men would be too quick to defend him; many cis women too quick to dehumanize—or, like Alex Lee Moyer in *TFW No GF*, to make the misguided empathic error of defending him even harder. But a trans woman may have once felt how he felt (or close enough) while *also* being able to turn around and face him from the point of view of the opposite sex. I’m not making the assumption that Weard, prior to transition, was ever very much like Turner—I hope not! I’m just saying that she obviously *gets* a character like this in a unique way.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/6c303dff-dfbc-41ae-b686-a4fa678d2208_2048x858-1.png)

I’m also convinced we’re supposed to make this connection on some level, because just as we’re preparing ourselves for Turner to do a mass shooting or god knows what, Weard graciously rips us away from his claustrophobic head and into the much more likable heart, somewhere on the other side of town, of Michaela, a.k.a. Traps. Michaela, played by Weard herself, is a transfeminine sex worker who serves as Turner’s foil—rather than being maniacally self-obsessed, she’s a codependent who tries to take care of everyone around her as a means of putting off attending to her own emotional life.

Michaela has a skill for making herself the center of things by paying attention to others, and is almost always the most vivacious, canny, amusing person in any room she’s in—just a tad more mature than most of her friends, even if she doesn’t actually have her shit together much better than them. She instantly endeared me to her in an early scene where she’s discussing the idea of [“transmaxxing”](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmaxx?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io) with her friends. The ironic, Internet-damaged way she jokes about transition and her body is refreshing in an era of transfeminine cultural production that leans harder toward earnest melancholy, defensive apologetics, or faux-subversive pop cultural brain rot. Weard trusts that her audience will understand what something like “AGP” means and doesn’t feel the need to defend herself against its stupidity. Its validity as a concept is less important than its status in the lexicon as something a trans woman should be wary of being seen as—but also, as Michaela’s friend Adeline laments, can’t entirely avoid being seen as.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/c02e5136-fd35-4ccc-9b37-b12c67597eec_2048x858.png)

Michaela’s transfeminine world feels like a concrete island, isolated and drab, illuminated only by the love these characters have for one another. None of them works in tech as per the stereotype; pretty much all of them are broke. Some of them pass better than others, but you definitely wouldn’t call any of them “fish.” They’re very much the freaks and geeks of transness. Suffice it to say they are not the kind of trans women you normally see on TV or in movies, if you see them at all, and their very presence on the cinematic screen is its own kind of revelation. The goofy fight over the novel *Dune* between two side characters (one wants the other to read the book; the other protests that due to neurodivergence, it’s too hard) is painfully authentic to Pacific Northwest queer culture as I know it from Portland. The actors are exaggerating, but not *much*.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/d21aa490-9731-4247-b115-a7caad0147b6_2048x858.png)

The film’s long takes, which require patience but rarely feel un-called-for, make you feel like you are living with these people. If you’re like them, this isn’t hard—or, to be more specific, it’s only as hard and as rewarding as it is to deal with your actual trans friends. If you’re not like them, the film’s pace gives you time acclimatize to their world rather than just take a quick day trip to it, as one can all too easily in movies like *Tangerine or Paris Is Burning*.

This might be the most politically powerful move in a movie suffused with politics: *Castration Movie*’s sheer length levels the playing field in a cis-controlled symbolic space. It requires a conventionally excessive amount of time to make trans life, so long presented as a circus sideshow in film history, feel normal, so that it ceases to be “trans” at all—that is, to be alien. If Michaela’s nude body is exotic to you, you’ll eventually see far too much of it to feel that way. It will be just as whatever to you as your body is.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/67120b82-9cbd-4f0a-92fc-4485a5bdb656_2048x858.png)

As much of a sweetheart as Michaela is, she’s also got a darker side. She doesn’t take it well when she perceives her companionship as rejected, whether by her boyfriend, Christian, who turns out to not want to be her boyfriend, or by another guy who gives her coke but doesn’t want to fuck her, or by Adeline, who’s just started transitioning and comes to resent Michaela’s maternal treatment as suffocating. While she’s not as loud as Turner, she is, in her own way, equally demanding and self-destructive—the tense scene with Christian ends with her emotionally blackmailing him into spending one last, sad night with her, and it feels *bad*.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/e9d4d390-e567-49eb-a4b0-0ff5b43c5628_2048x858.png)

Michaela’s one dream is to have a baby, but when her doctor confirms she’s completely sterile, she slides into a depression, compounded by her DIY hormone source being dry. By the end of the film’s first half, she’s close to rock bottom. Weard explicitly invites comparison between her two blonde-haired protagonists when Michaela finds Turner’s tirade against women on 4chan, mocking him in response: “Try taking the pink pill, faggot”—in order words, *just man up and transition already—you’re obviously not hacking it as a dude*. We watch the endless threads of 4chan scrolling in a ghostly fashion, as if they have a mind of their own.

This returns me to the question I opened this piece with: why is transition desirable for some of us in the cohort of gender-troubled, male-assigned people, but not for others? Michaela’s taunt is full of multi-layered 4chan irony, of course. No trans woman transitions *simply* because she hates being a man. If you don’t have any instinctual inclinations toward femininity (however repressed they may be), it’s just not going to work. But she’s also acknowledging that this hatred *is* regarded as a potential sign of transness in an ostensible man, and that transitioning *is* a way out of the cluster of conflicts re: masculinity that I’ve been discussing—even if it involves the assumption of an inverse set of conflicts re: femininity that, as we see with Michaela and her friends, doesn’t necessarily make life easier.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/120ef96d-5e77-4bb1-a24f-989f055843ea_2048x858.png)

Given the ironic discussion of “transmaxxing” that opens Michaela’s section, Weard appears to be setting us up to for a return to Turner’s storyline, in which he doesn’t do a mass shooting but instead tries, stupidly, to take Michaela’s advice seriously and solve all his problems by becoming a woman. Seeing him fail at this would be very funny—the sort of intervention that *Envy/Desire* attempted but failed to pull off because the people who made it didn’t really give a shit. Anything could happen, really, but these characters seem destined for one another.

Adding to the intrigue is the film’s ominous epigram: “Now this might strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story should die.” It’s a quote from Norm Macdonaldin a *Saturday Night Live* “Weekend Update” segment from the 90s, referencing the murder of [Brandon Teena](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon%5FTeena?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io). This is probably still the attitude of a lot of people, for whom all this transphobia and trans activism amounts to a bunch of people making a whole lot of noise. The Norm Macdonalds of this world, on the other hand, [just wanna grill](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/030/973/grillingcover.jpg?ref=malloryelliott.ghost.io). They’d be happy to see the queer bashers and the queers, the rightoids and the leftoids, all go to hell—and the name for the hell some of them end up in is 4chan.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/029a8304-f237-4a3f-9a00-fe25badc10c0_2048x858.png)

We are fundamentally opposed to each other, and yet, in this way, we end up together. Just a bunch of maladjusted freaks. Once again, why? Is it only in the false equivalency of the Norm Macdonald mindset? Well, look at the title of the movie—it’s all got something to do with castration—not only literal castration (invoked here in a line of Turner’s weird, insulting poem for his girlfriend and also in a scene of a character recovering from bottom surgery), but the psychoanalytic concept, which is all about the freedom we have to surrender to be a part of society, and how we build our own neuroses by trying have it both ways, secretly hanging onto that freedom while still participating in society enough to get by. Both Turner and Michaela try to pull this off harder than most, only to find themselves outcasts.

Most people just accept their castration to some extent, reserving this or that private pleasure. But to resist it with everything you’ve got—that’s only for the real misfits, those desperate enough to throw everything away for a fleeting and lonely satisfaction. Those of us who take that ridiculous path might wish we had some more normal, marketable material to work with, but all we have is our weird, sad lives.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/68/cc68e97d-7af0-45c2-89f6-b9903d3d3811/content/images/2026/08/6c72080c-16e2-4b7c-8cf7-139fbfe7ed5e_2048x858.png)

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1. The ones living as gay or at least gay-leaning guys are usually much easier to distinguish from cishet beta males prior to transition, and are kind of their own can of worms, so I’m not considering them here. In this, I don’t mean to enforce the Blanchardian “never the twain shall meet” dichotomy between us and them, but simply to observe that we don’t all come from the same place, even if we all end up in the same place. [↩](#footnote-anchor-1 "Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.")