Let’s admit it: cisgender people are really curious about us trans women. They want to know things such as: what’s it like to have a surgeon rearrange your genitals? How did you know you were really a girl all along? Does it suck having to be on the downside of sexism now?
For our own part, trans women are curious about cisgender folk, too. We want to know things like: do you actually think I’m female, or am I just a deluded guy in a dress to you? If I try to have a beer at your bar, will you violently assault me? Am I ever going to get to use a public bathroom again?
These two forms of curiosity come together in problematic, uncomfortable and occasionally satisfying and even touching ways in the documentary Will & Harper, which is about actor Will Ferrell realizing that his longtime friend and SNL collaborator is not in fact that man he always presumed her to be. No, she’s actually a trans woman named Harper Steele, and they’re going to have a road trip all across the red parts of America to figure out what their friendship looks like now.
Will & Harper is partly about Steele’s process of figuring out which parts of America are actually physically and emotionally safe for her to be in now that she’s medically transitioning her gender, and it’s also about Ferrell learning how to exist with a trans friend. The best thing about it is how rawly it shows all the uncomfortable emotions, glaring missteps and acts of genuine kindness that are necessarily a part of this process.
As someone who did this dance so many times with so many cis friends so many years ago, I really feel for Steele’s vulnerability, as much as I cringe at the numerous times Ferrell does something to her that you’re never supposed to do to a trans woman. Will & Harper poses their learning journeys as two sides of the same coin – which they are to an extent – but it needs to be pointed out that the stakes here are extremely uneven: Ferrell’s power and privilege absolutely dwarf Steele’s.
Case in point, halfway through the movie, Ferrell point-blank asks Steele “How are your boobs?” and then proceeds to prod her for the details of what it was like to wake up from breast augmentation surgery. He follows that up by essentially asking her if she’s going to get a vagina. I really can’t imagine anything that Steele could demand of the cis world that’s remotely comparable to that. And if she ever tried to do so, it could be an extremely dangerous moment for her.
Later on, when Ferrell and Steele are at the Grand Canyon, a random woman asks Steele how long she knew she was a girl. It emerges that the reason this woman wants to know is that she’s a therapist – in the 1980s she had a client who was probably a trans woman in the early stages of coming out, and she’s guilty over how she handled this client.
In these moments I burned with indignation for how these people were using Steele for their own satisfaction, and I longed for her to set some boundaries. That’s not what Steele does – throughout the movie, she is game to answer any of the questions the cis world has for her, and she even gives Ferrell complete carte blanche to ask her anything whatsoever. She doesn’t give any indication that she feels the sense of violation that many of us do feel at such personal invasions.
I once felt like that too. Giving in to so many things that the cis world demanded of me for its own sake, because I hurt so much, because I wanted to be seen and heard so badly, because I felt like I had to do anything to please these people who held my future in my hands. Looking back, I sometimes ask myself if it was right to compromise myself so much – but the fact is that I never had any real choice in the matter. It’s extremely hard to survive a transition with your dignity intact, in large part because very few people stop to consider that a man trying to transform into a woman is in such an infinitely more disempowered position than they are.
Steele says she’s about a year and a half into her transition, which I recall as being such an extremely delicate time in my own process. It’s uniquely vulnerable, to feminize your appearance and your personality, and to put yourself out there for the world’s approval. You are doing the one thing that – for your whole life – you have been absolutely screamed at to never, ever do. You are going against every last survival instinct you have, because it’s the only way.
The people around you handle it the best they can, but inevitably you’re going to get hurt a lot in the process. And yet, you still keep opening up yourself for more. Because you want to know what they think of you so badly, and you want nothing more than to fit back into their world. I understand that intense desire to make yourself comprehensible to the world, to have it hear the story of your life that has been hidden for decades, to share all the pain you’ve tucked away. When I watched Will & Harper, I really wished that Ferrell might have stopped to ask himself why his friend seemed so eager to tell him about every last personal detail of her life and why she was willing to expose herself to one dangerous situation after another during their road trip. It’s the questions I wish my cis friends would have asked themselves when I was in the thick of it.
One of the reasons transitioning is such a risky thing to do is that for a period of years you’re setting yourself on the outskirts of humanity, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get back in. I was one of the fortunate ones who managed to reclaim my pass back into humankind, and now I have the immense privilege of getting to decide who exactly is safe enough to inform about my past. Those who aren’t that fortunate have to do their best to find a place in a world where we’re a widely misunderstood, stigmatized and increasingly vilified 1% of the population. That’s an extremely hard task that results in things like unemployment, depression, homelessness and suicide.
Will & Harper portrays Steele at a moment when she’s trying to negotiate the path back in to humanity. Partly this is a matter of learning to live with bars full of rowdy Donald Trump supporters, but it’s more fundamentally about finding safety around the friends and family who are trying to learn how to relate to her. It’s an important thing for the cisgender world to see, and Will & Harper does its best to portray it in a thoughtful and heartfelt manner. It’s a movie with its share of blindspots, but it’s an honest, valid attempt. I very much hope that those who watch this movie are ready to see it.
Will & Harper is now available on Netflix
