Hollywood’s Weird, Oscar-Bait LGBT Movie Is Even Worse Than You Think

Typically, I wouldn’t bother to watch any new LGBTQ movie Hollywood puts out. But the one about a Mexican cartel boss who decides to transition to a woman was just novel enough to pique my interest.

“Emilia Pérez” is already racking up awards. With four Golden Globes under its belt already, it’s sure to go on to carry some hefty Oscar weight. From a purely cinematic standpoint, it’s not half bad. Zoe Saldana plays the consigliere-enabler to the titular cartel chief, Emilia, a newcomer transgender “actress” who admittedly gives a pretty solid performance. Pop star Selena Gomez plays his jolted wife, Jessi, struggling to adjust to life without her husband while caring for their two young children. As a “woman,” this vicious killer and deadbeat dad tries to make amends with his family as their gentle long-lost “auntie.” It’s a laughably absurd premise — the reformed tranny with a heart of gold — but then they made it a musical to boot. This could only be a Netflix release; no legacy studio would touch this inevitable box office flop.

In some ways, it was exactly as bad as expected. The gruesome reality of transgender surgeries gets typical Hollywood gloss, with the horrific recovery process packed into a single 30-second scene. After the rugged gangster blossoms into a butterfly, his transgender identity is treated as a moral good in itself; sins are wiped clean in the surgical rebirth of repressed identity. Yet, probably inadvertently, the film depicts how it’s women and children who suffer most when an adult man selfishly decides to live out his sexual fantasies, his “true self,” at the expense of his pre-existing commitments.

At this point, I’d normally give a spoiler warning— but let’s be real, I watched it so you don’t have to.

Jessi remains a pawn in her husband’s life, first forcibly sent into hiding then forcibly brought home so the new Emilia can be near his kids. The two sons, honest as children are, resent the move and recognize something is not right with their new “auntie:” he “smells like papa.” Emilia cannot escape his maleness. Racked with guilt toward his children, Emilia projects outward rather than making tangible amends. He launches a non-profit, uncovering the remains of cartel victims so other families can find peace — an abstract venture that does nothing to absolve his paternal sins, but at least he feels good about it. This philanthropy is portrayed as an act of moral transformation, but as we often see in the real world, transgender ideologues will do just about anything to insulate their narcissistic ego from the cold light of reality.

And yet, nature always comes back with a vengeance.

The tragedy all comes to head in violence, as is often the case with violent men. When Jessie decides to move on with a new man, Emilia reverts to the domineering husband he once was, claiming the children are “mine” and becoming physical to prevent her from leaving. With his true identity revealed, and a kidnapping plot gone wrong, both Jessi and Emilia plummet to their deaths, leaving two young boys with no parents at all.

My reading is most certainly not the filmmaker’s intent. The film fancies itself a feminist screed; much to my chagrin, my take actually is. It’s all meant to be a reflection on repression; the tragedy of a society that cannot accept people for who they are. If only Emilia was free to be “herself” in the first place, there would be no more suffering. Eye roll. Yet the real message, rooted in reality, is a cautionary tale against transgenderism: men cannot outrun their commitments in a sea of indulgence, let alone their nature.

If it ended there, this would simply be another boilerplate piece of LGBT slop. But the film goes to great lengths to hammer home the immutability of Emilia’s identity, effectively centering this violent middle-aged man’s civil rights as the issue of our time. In an early scene, the gender doctor probes Emilia’s psychological dysphoria, ascertaining that he always felt this way, even as a child, and this “true self” transcends biology. This does exist in some cases of transgenderism, where innately feminine homosexuals covet femaleness from an early age. Yet “transgender” as a category is too broad; a better diagnosis for Emilia is likely autogynephilia.

As no lesser authority than the National Institutes of Health explains, autogynephilia is defined as a “male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female.” In other words, it is “erotic desire;” a fetish, not an identity — no matter how much it is repressed. The term is Greek in origin, translating literally to “love of oneself as a woman” — a narcissistic disorder. The autogynefile emulates the woman he is attracted to, not the woman he wants to truly be. Expect to see it in older, successful, intelligent, otherwise masculine men, for whom the traditional gamut of sexual experience is no longer enough; think Bruce Jenner. And despite achieving female form, he nevertheless retains all domineering aspects of maleness. This seems to fit Emilia’s archetype far more accurately. In a subplot, he even pursues a buxom femme fatale and begins a relationship with her. They somewhat resemble each other.

No one disputes that autogynephilia exists, but it has become a hot topic in the medical world. It’s easy to see the implications: if transgenderism is just a fetish, then why are we restructuring our civil rights laws around it? Trans activists will say autogynephilia is a weapon “used to try to reduce transgender women to perverted men,” so they want it shut down. But the real goal is offense, not defense: they want to close the book on conceptualizing transgenderism once and for all — on their own terms, of course. It’s not about dignity or civil rights, it’s about normalizing the decidedly abnormal. Portraying such an extreme example — an aggressive, masculine Mexican cartel boss — as a “woman on the inside” is part of that ploy.

Under the vision of a different filmmaker, or perhaps an entirely different cultural zeitgeist, this could have been an interesting, unique and genuinely transgressive film. Yet it still wins the title of one of the most insidious films to come out of Hollywood  in quite a while. If only the Oscars had an award for that.