Susan's Place Transgender Resources

This may take or need a little creative licence, there is only one androgyne film as far as I know and that is 'Orlando' and that's a so/so film.

So, providing you can provide a little evidence, or are prepared to stand up to any challenges... I propose a Susan's top X androgyne films to go to public vote when there is enough.

Also remember that an androgyne need in no way look androgynous - makes it harder.



My first wish for inclusion is the film Amelie.

I reckon it is an androgyne love story, and the two main characters - Raymond and Amelie are the androgynes. Aside from the fact that neither seem to be very invested in their gender. Their activities are largely solitary. They seem to drift through the world, trying to connect with people (Amelie through her good deeds and Raymond through his photos). All these things seem quite like the experience of androgyne.

More shakily, they both display strains of non-linear thinking (something that seems to happen a lot in our threads.) as the following quote from the narrator shows;

"Nino is late. Amelie can only see two explanations. 1 - he didn't get the photo. 2 - before he could assemble it, a gang of bank robbers took him hostage. The cops gave chase. They got away... but he caused a crash. When he came to, he'd lost his memory. An ex-con picked him up, mistook him for a fugitive, and shipped him to Istanbul. There he met some Afghan raiders who took him to steal some Russian warheads. But their truck hit a mine in Tajikistan. He survived, took to the hills, and became a Mujaheddin. [Increasingly angry] Amelie refuses to get upset for a guy who'll eat borscht all his life in a hat like a tea cozy."

May is a horror film released in 2002. It stars Angela Bettis, Anna Faris, and Jeremy Sisto, and was written and directed by Lucky McKee.


   I don't know if this counts.  The main character seems unconcerned with people's gender.  She messes around with a guy and a woman.
   I don't know if it's supposed be this way, but she seems to have no sense of identity.  When I saw this movie, I identified with May even though I didn't know why.  I didn't know I am an androgyne or anything at the time that I saw this film.

   It's a horror or thriller or just weird.
   The woman uses body parts from males and females to create a friend.  Like gender doesn't matter.

   It's definitely a deep movie.

to speak to you in adult mode a moment...sounds icky.

It is terribly grotesque.  But it's the type of macabre that makes sense.

I just discovered a film where androgynity definitely occurs (even if it's never called 'androgyne'). It's the fifth installment of the Child's Play movie series, also called Seed of Chucky. It's not the main plot, but a rather important sub-plot.
To make it short, murderous doll Chucky and his doll bride Tiffany encounter their long lost child. Chucky would have prefered a son, Tiffany a daughter. Since the child lacks (unlike his parents) any sexual characteristics and doesn't know him/herself if s/he is a boy or a girl, they call the child Glen or Glenda, respectively, and quarrel with each other throughout the whole film.
Glen/da sufferes because his/her parents seem to need a decision on this matter so desperately.
I won't tell the outcome so I won't spoil the movie for anyone, but I will tell that much: I feared Glen/da's conflict would have a simple, binary, now-this-poor-child-has-finally-overcome-his/her-tempory-confusion ending which was not the case.

The film is a mixture of horror and comedy, sillyness and seriousness, I personally liked a lot (and the transgender theme was nice too :)), but it's definitely not everybody's cup of tea--their is a large amount of splatter and morbid humor.

Totally off-topic, but Amelie will forever be a favorite film of mine, simply for this (entire) shot:

(https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.resonancedigital.com%2Fskipping.jpg&hash=96cee5004bd08a00ed5708511f06a6429d063940)

If you squint really hard, you can see me in that photo.  I'm in the background.  I play leaf #161 on tree #3

This was the gig that brought me to the attention of that little italian guy who makes gangster films. He desperately wanted me for the part of knife #7 in "Gangs of New York", however, I had another commitment playing Hamlet in "A Streetcar Named Desire".


and you were concerned with being off topic?

Monty Python meaning of life a skit where someone gives birth after the event the mother asks is it a boy or girl the doc replies isn't it a bit young to be ???????? them
I don't remember the exact words I think it was stereotyping or labeling them. I always liked that line 

I reckon Dr Who is an androgyne. Who else but an androgyne would go round with a piece of celery in their jacket, offer everyone jellybabies, own a Tardis shaped like a police box, create a robot dog for a pet, be maddingly playful in the most serious of situations, use such a passive device like the sonic screwdriver, such a sense of casual style - obscenly long scarfs, dapper suits, a cricket uniform when not playing cricket?

He is my Androgyne hero, isn't he a dream boat?  ^-^

betty was an androgyne's car.

Posted on: March 16, 2025, 08:27:13 PM

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another character, Kay Lee Winnet from Firefly...the ships mechanic.
(https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mutantreviewers.com%2Frmoviegirlfriends2.jpg&hash=1a98feeb788472f061e8ff70017bfcc2949b645f)

hell yes, Kay Lee is great

I remember watching the film Victor/Victoria a few months ago. I love love loved it! It was so funny and old-school. Plus the main character's really came alive for me. I <3 musicals.

Quote from: Kinkly on July 23, 2008, 11:33:04 PM
Monty Python meaning of life a skit where someone gives birth after the event the mother asks is it a boy or girl the doc replies isn't it a bit young to be ???????? them
I don't remember the exact words I think it was stereotyping or labeling them. I always liked that line 

Dr.: (Spanks the baby)
Baby: Waaaa!
Mother: Is it a boy or a girl?
Dr.: It's so young, who can tell?

It's not a film (yet) but Marvel Comics' "Runaways", which, for a time, was being authored by Joss Whedon, has a romantic subplot between a teenage girl and a teenage alien shapeshifter.  The interesting element being, the teenage girl is a lesbian, and the 'shifter switches back and forth from male and female almost every other page.  There was an issue where they worked this out, and the girl figures out she's actually just in love with the alien's personality, which she sees as 'feminine', regardless of what shape she's taken, and that's good enough for her.  Very deep and touching, especially for a comic book about a bunch of young kids.  But then, Joss is great for the deep stuff.  :)

I can't think of too many movies specifically with androgyne themes, but there are definitely some genderblending characters in otherwise "manly" films...

For films, I have to go with Hackers...  Kind of a cheesetastic film, sure, but Renoly Santiago's character is always wearing girl's tops (pink sweatshirts with kitty cats on them, etc, etc).  He doesn't behave particularly feminine, but is definitely blending.  Interestingly enough, when he later appeared in Con Air, he played a trans prisoner, although with a much more obvious "gay" bend.  He, unfortunately hasn't done much else.

Ooo, Pitch Black, the Vin Diesel launch vehicle, there's the teen boy character who SPOILER ALERT turns out to be biologically a girl.  Although that's probably more of an FTM theme...

The Fifth Element, "Ruby Rod" is, well, most likely supposed to be very male (Chris Tucker) but the outfits are definitely not saying "I'm full of testosterone."  :) 

Johnny Mnemonic, the two "bodyguards" in Udo Kier's employ.  Both look feminine, but tough, and one of them is obviously not genetically female...  Definitely some androgyny there (or maybe just more MTF, with "empowered women" as a subtheme).

Feel free to disagree with these -- I'm still trying to feel out what "androgyne" *really* means.  :)

...Paul

PS> BTW, anyone catch Robert De Niro as a crossdressing pirate captain in "Stardust"?  Awesome, but unrelated.  :)

i'd do some disagreeing... ::)
to me androgyne means a person who can't anchor their identity in a male or female space and so shift up and down, or switch between the extremes or float around the grey middle, or step out of it altogether.
So it's more about the inside, and i'm not sure looks like a gender thing...i think genderblending/bending can be expressions that androgynes can use to feel comfortable as an androgyne, but they don't immediately signify androgyne.

I always thought Ruby Rod was very male and it's just that in the future the ways of behaving male have changed.

Quote from: CryoMax on August 27, 2008, 02:53:37 PM
Ooo, Pitch Black, the Vin Diesel launch vehicle, there's the teen boy character who SPOILER ALERT turns out to be biologically a girl.  Although that's probably more of an FTM theme...

The Fifth Element, "Ruby Rod" is, well, most likely supposed to be very male (Chris Tucker) but the outfits are definitely not saying "I'm full of testosterone."  :) 

PS> BTW, anyone catch Robert De Niro as a crossdressing pirate captain in "Stardust"?  Awesome, but unrelated.  :)

It's been a while since I saw Pitch Black but I think I remember that part and jumping for joy inside for some reason, lol.

Also, Ruby Rod was fabulous xD lol. First time I saw the movie I thought he was annoying but then I came to like him as a character and looked forward to seeing him in the movie whenever I watched it.

Oh, haha, and yeah I was intensely happy to see Robert DeNiro prancing around in Stardust for some reason.

It isn't an androgyne film, however I highly recommend XXY. The lead character is intersex.

Z

Quote from: Pica Pica on August 27, 2008, 06:29:22 PM
i'd do some disagreeing... ::)
to me androgyne means a person who can't anchor their identity in a male or female space and so shift up and down, or switch between the extremes or float around the grey middle, or step out of it altogether.
So it's more about the inside, and i'm not sure looks like a gender thing...i think genderblending/bending can be expressions that androgynes can use to feel comfortable as an androgyne, but they don't immediately signify androgyne.

That's pretty difficult to portray in a movie, I think, unless you really focus the movie on the character in particular and gear it towards that inner monologue.  You are right, though, in that most of those cases, we simply don't know what's going on "inside", especially since most of them are fairly minor characters.

Case in point, I thought about Vasquez in "Aliens".  Obviously a woman, but she keeps her hair cropped short, military style, she's a pulse cannon jockey (big gun), and she's got an attitude that rivals the men's.  But without being explicitly told what her "deal" is, we can't know if she's going for an androgyne balance of masculine/feminine, if she's in line for an ftm transition, or if she's simply just a "tough chick".  The answer is probably the latter (a kind of over-the-top version of the "strong woman" image to help show Ripley as an empowered woman who, at the same time, is still very motherly and feminine), but there just isn't a good way to know without explicitly being told by the movie.

Whereas "Pat" from "It's Pat" is kinda in-your-face, with the dialogue and plots being specifically based around his/her androgyny.

I honestly can't think of any other movies with a "solid" androgyny subtext.  Anything else tends to be "all the way" in on direction or another (MTF, FTM, drag queens, crossdressing, etc)...  Although IMDB lists 151 movies with the keyword "androgyny"...  I'll have to look through them (The Fifth Element is one of them :) )

...Paul

Quote from: CryoMax on August 29, 2008, 03:18:18 PM

There just isn't a good way to know without explicitly being told by the movie.

that's why it's a creative act to find such films. that is the game. s'all about the interpretation.

Quote from: CryoMax on August 29, 2008, 03:18:18 PM
I honestly can't think of any other movies with a "solid" androgyny subtext. 

well there's the thing. i'm not talking about androgyny. i'm talking about androgynes.

Does anybody remember the movie Powder? It has been over ten years since I seen this movie but the main character seems kind of  Androgyne from what I remember.


Anna

I remember Powder being a little effeminate, which was probably partly because of his albino-ness, but he didn't really strike me as an androgyne. Just quiet and sheltered. And maybe gay.

Ooo, I thought of another good one last night.  In Constantine (a guilty pleasure movie of mine), Tilda Swinton plays the archangel Gabriel.  :)

...Paul

Quote from: CryoMax on September 05, 2008, 05:38:34 PM
Ooo, I thought of another good one last night.  In Constantine (a guilty pleasure movie of mine), Tilda Swinton plays the archangel Gabriel.  :)

...Paul

I remember, I loved her hairstyle, it makes curly look good. On a off topic note I'm taking ballet in two days and got my shoes and leotard, they smell awesome. :) God I want to look like Muto from princess tutu so badly.

we were watching this anime in anime club (NERD ALERT!) and this guy (i think), looked like a girl.  majorly.  i was like WTF.  lol  it confused me a lot.  his name wa michelle too!!! but i had been americanized, so im pretty sure he was a feminine man and the americans casted a female voice actor but kept the male pronouns...?  there was also another character.  a rather short squat one... with GINORMOUS BOOBS.  im still not sure on that one.  sounded like a woman imitating a man and acting like a man.  with boobs.  so idk.  lol  do these even count?

out of curiosity, what series were you watching?

i dont remember.  it was VERY french though.  like more french than that one really french show on [adult swim].  it was like starwars almost.  haha

Posted on: September 14, 2008, 08:27:24 PM

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just talked to a friend.  its called glass feet.

wow, I have not bee online in ages (stupid lack of internet)

Anyway, on movies I woulf have to say Gabriel from Constantine, played by the lovely Tilda Swinton, the fact that Gabriel cannot be classified as m/f does not fit in either category, almost as if it transcends those boundaries. Another great one (played by the same amazing actress) is Orlando, though he does switch from being physically male to female, the change is unexplained. You're never sure why it happened or if it is permanent, ir if Orlando will last in that form for a while before changing into something completely different again.

Hmm...I've never heard of glass feet.  I'll have to check it out.