Blue is for boys and pink is for girls
But I'm A Cheerleader and Euphoria explore conversion therapy for queer youths, yet the taste it will leave in your mouth isn't the same
Last week I went to see the excellent film But I’m A Cheerleader for the first time in about fifteen years. I had watched it the first time when my friend Anna from pony camp showed it to me, and I thought it was very fun. I then showed it to my bestie Lilith, and we probably watched it a dozen times over the years. Much to our amusement, Lilith ended up being the gayest woman on the planet, and maybe this film had something to do with it. This is enough evidence alone to prove that it’s nature and not nurture which makes us gay; this film went right over my head and I ended up liking boys, much to my dismay.
High school senior Megan (played by a baby Natasha Lyonne) is just a regular gal on the cheerleading squad at her high school, but her joyless friends, douchey boyfriend, and well-meaning yet ignorant parents suspect her of the crime of being a BIG OL’ LESBIAN and stage an intervention. Amongst other things, she is accused of not enjoying kissing her jock bae Jared (see GIF below, no wonder), having pictures of hot women rather than hot men in her locker (gay), listening to Melissa Ethridge (gay!) and, worst of all, vegetarianism (the gayest of them all!). She is then shipped away to the True Directions rehab centre for gay kids, where Cathy Moriaty and RuPaul cure gay kids of their ailments by enforcing strict gender roles.
The girls and boys are separated by gender (which seems like an odd choice for a bunch of gay horny teenagers but hey, what do I know), dressed in pink and blue respectively, and taught the correct ways to behave for their gender. For girls, this means cleaning, changing nappies, ladylike sitting (less cute than in The Princess Diaries), and other such dreary housewifery. For the boys, it’s fixing cars, chopping wood, and American football. There is very funny sexual tension throughout these gender classes. Oh and the director of True Directions’ son is always lurking around, being gay as hell, to the total obliviousness of his mother.
Megan catches the eye of trust fund baby Graham who is a pretty loud ‘n’ proud lesbian but risks losing her trust fund and college education until she completes the programme. The storyline is kinda cute, with the kiddos sneaking out to go to a gay club with a cute couple of ex-ex-gays who are escapees of True Directions and run a halfway house for runaway gays. Eventually, almost all the class graduate from straight school, but not before Megan dons her cheerleading outfit and professes her love for Graham. The two escape together, and the final scene shows Megan’s parents at a “parents and friends of lesbians and gays” support group where they all learn how to be better parents to their gay kids. It’s weirdly wholesome.
When I was a teenager, the satire and silliness was funny because of course I knew that gay people existed and you couldn’t change that. But the depth and entire point of learning who you are and living your truth was pretty lost on me. Makes sense, to be honest. Being straight and cisgender, and what I identify as and who I date are both mainstream and have never been questioned. It’s been a pretty easy ride, all things considered. As a teenager I found the pink and blue divide visually pleasing, and thought it was funny that one of the girls was called Graham. Fifteen years later, I realise that this film was likely very helpful and affirming for a lot of young people. Probably including my best friend. It came out in 1999, after all.
Just over a decade before, Princess Diana opened the first AIDS clinic in the UK and was photographed holding the hand of a patient. During a time when people feared catching “the gay disease” from touching infected people, the then future queen of England showing the world that these people weren’t dirty, disease-riddled degenerates had an enormous impact in de-stigmatising the illness and giving the gay community a little bit of their humanity back after years of homophobic rhetoric. Royals can go fuck themselves, but Diana was something special. Very rarely do people with influence make a positive social impact with total selflessness. She had absolutely nothing to gain from this. The queen even asked her politely not to. Well, fuck you, Liz. She is the queen of my heart!
This is old news, though. The gays are everywhere and we’re fine with it, right? We’ve had gay people in charge of Ireland, Iceland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Serbia, and, erm, San Marino. Iceland’s former Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, is a bad bitch. She took over Iceland’s government after the financial crisis well and truly fucked the nation, and under her leadership the bankers responsible ended up where all bankers belong - in prison. She was the world’s first gay head of state - in 2009. TWO THOUSAND AND NINE. Not long ago, is it! Extremely fucking recent, as far as I’m concerned.
So have we come a long way? I mean, sort of. There are rainbow flags flapping out the windows of every other block of flats where I live in Amsterdam. Pride is a public celebration attended by thousands of people of all genders and sexualities. We’re all watching Drag Race and Eurovision and we love Graham Norton and Joe Lycett and Sandi Toksvig and Sue Perkins. Having AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Gay people are, amazingly, just regular-ass people who live among us.
It can be hard to discern how “bad” things are, especially if you’re just on the sidelines like me and the rest of the straight people. It’s not up to our queer friends to give us regular updates on how structurally crap things might be for them. Thankfully, someone’s done the data gathering for us and, hoooooo boy, it’s not looking good, guys. The 2023 Rainbow Map - the ranking of European countries (plus Turkey and the Caucasus) based on their “legal and policy situation” on LGBTQ rights - has been published by the European contingent of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA-Europe). Pink News has reported that, until 2016, the UK consistently topped the charts in terms of affording its queer citizens "rights, protections, and freedoms” they rightly deserve. Since 2016 (a year in which nothing really bad happened in the UK), we have not been doing so great. We’re now ranked 17th out of 49 countries. You can read the whole report here. It’s super depressing!
The blue and pink hues of But I’m A Cheerleader reminded me of another piece of pop culture that I’d seen recently - but it was far less cute and kitsch. At the end of 2022 I tried to give HBO’s Euphoria a watch, though I never made it to the end of season 2 because it was honestly too harrowing. For the intro of each episode there is a little backstory for each of the main characters. The one about Jules, a trans girl, has stuck with me. I think about this clip all the time. It’s NSFW, but if you can handle a spot of nudity and some psychological distress, it’s worth a watch:
Same pastels, same gender segregation, same group therapy and “re-education”. Visually similar, but the “problem” with the kids is different. Time is a flat circle, guys. A horrible circle where someone has to be the bad guy. Now that we’ve accepted the gays, we had to find someone else to demonise. Enter, the trans kids.
Let’s just clear a couple of things up before I go any further - sex is a biological category based on what your body contains and is capable of reproductively, most commonly “male” and “female.” Gender is a social category based on constructed characteristics that we have developed over centuries and applied to “men” and “women”. Most of the time, these match up and life is pretty easy as a result. For some people they don’t, and their gender identity changes based on how they feel it can best apply to them personally. Beyond identifying as a man or a woman, other gender identities such as genderfluid (floating between man and woman) and non-binary (neither man nor woman) exist, as well as a whole host of cultural “third genders”, from Native American Two-Spirit to my motherland of Argentina’s travestis, Samoa’s fa’afafine to the hijra of the Indian subcontinent. Got it? Alright, let’s go.
Jules in the above clip is a trans girl and she is sent by her mother to a psychiatric inpatient unit for trans kids. She is essentially incarcerated, with the other kids assigned male at birth who are guilty of the crime of questioning their gender identity and sent away to be “fixed”. We don’t see it, but I’d say it’s safe to assume that there’s a unit next door with pink walls and pink uniforms for people assigned female at birth.
Ok sure, we all know Euphoria isn’t representative of real teenage life - the whole series is a safeguarding nightmare. Who on earth is in charge of that school? But it does manage to capture the true horror of unpleasant experience and the intense emotional distress that the characters experience. Some are relatable to me, some aren’t. Jules’ backstory certainly isn’t. Though I have spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence having my mental health dealt with, I had nothing but positive experiences and was very well looked after, with my consent. I was never locked up, because I guess I wasn’t perceived as having done anything wrong; bad things had happened to me and I needed help getting better. Which is, honestly, how all mental health issues in children should be approached.
Jules is not afforded this kind of compassion. The scenes from the psychiatric unit are obviously stylised for the cinematographic vibe of Euphoria, but the horror is real. The narrator of Jules’ intro tells us that Jules hates herself, everything about her body, her brain, and it makes her life miserable. Her torment is internal and she tries to fix it by expressing her true self externally. I imagine she started wearing more feminine clothes and asking to be called she and her, and by a new name. We don’t see this happen, but she clearly did something that made her parents notice. Of course parents would worry. Your kid is saying that they’re someone else, not the person you thought they were. It’s probably a good idea to get them professional help to figure out what’s going on, especially if something is making their life so miserable. I’m no parent (see my last post), but I’d hazard a guess that driving your depressed and gender nonconforming child hours away, and tricking them into a “tour” of a psychiatric centre which is actually them being trapped into gender conversion therapy, is maybe not in your child’s best interest. It’s in the best interest of the parent who wants their “old” kid back.
That’s the thing with this bullshit “trans debate”. Even putting “debate” after someone’s identity is insane. Change it to something else and see if it makes you uncomfortable. The “women debate”. The “gay debate”. The “Muslim debate”. The “Black debate”. I’m don’t want to throw a live hand grenade into this situation, but I’m pretty sure the debate of a particular group’s humanity about ninety years ago was the first step towards the biggest genocide in human history. Taking a certain group - social, ethnic, religious, ethnic, whatever - and arbitrarily downgrading their humanity to being below the rest of us never ends well. I am never going to understand the obsession with trying to prevent a certain social group from existing. What exactly is the aim of all this anti-trans rhetoric? That they stop transitioning and “act normal”? That they become cisgender? That they emigrate or die or just vanish into a puff of smoke?
The “gay debate”? We already did that. Between 1988 and 2003 “promoting homosexuality” was against the law thanks to Section 28. We already demonised gay men during the AIDS epidemic and the refusal to see them as human beings deserving of care and compassion led to millions of deaths. We lost an entire generation of queer men to ignorance and cruelty. And let’s not forget the lesbians who played a crucial role in caring for their sick and dying gay brothers when everyone else turned a blind eye. Then - we realised that gay people are actually fine and we let them take part in normal society. Now they’re everywhere and it’s fine! We look down on parents who refuse to accept their gay children, we support government legislation against gay conversion therapy, we scoff at the ignorance of Westboro Baptist Church and other religious bigots, and we straight people enjoy queer culture, often without really understanding the huge sacrifices that were made to make us realise that gay people were human beings too.
What we see now with trans kids is what would have happened to a gay kid maybe thirty, probably forty, certainly fifty years ago. The concern about the children who struggle with gender dysphoria so often silences the children and appeases the parents. Parents and “gender critical” people claim that these children are mentally ill because of their gender dysphoria. And to be honest, they’re right. But they don’t really understand why. It’s very likely that a trans child, especially one with parents who are not accepting, is struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts. This is not because having gender dysphoria makes them mentally ill. It’s because feeling like, and being told by the people who are supposed to love you the most, that what you are is wrong and in need of “fixing” would make anyone feel like shit. And it’s funny, because these same parents would probably be fine with having a gay kid. They probably wouldn’t do what Megan’s parents did, and send her to gay conversion therapy. They’d probably laugh along at the satire of But I’m A Cheerleader and understand how absurd it is to send a daughter away to learn how to cook and clean and be more feminine and pink to stamp all that gay away. They have probably accepted non-mainstream sexualities, they wave hello to the gay neighbours over the garden fence, and even if they’re not waving a flag at Pride or setting up a monthly direct debit to Stonewall, they’d balk at the idea of being called homophobic.
In the end, Jules from Euphoria lives with her dad and transitions in her teens. Her mum, in fact, is the one who is not well, and in the end she is sent away to get better. Here in the real world, there are many wonderful parents who truly accept their children as they are and let them live as who they want to be. There are also many brave parents who struggle to understand initially, and make the huge effort to educate themselves to become better parents to their child in their new identity, because they know that they cannot force their child to be anyone other than themselves. Becoming a parent means accepting whoever you give birth to or adopt, however they turn out. There are many worse things your kid can be than trans. They could be a hedge fund manager or a landlord, for fucks sake.
That Rainbow Map I mentioned earlier? The UK’s fall from grace on the matter of LGBTQ rights - their human rights - is heavily fuelled by the UK’s new favourite hobby, which is shitting all over trans people and making their lives difficult. The government, upon passing legislation to ban gay conversion therapy, then stipulated that it wouldn’t cover trans conversion therapy. Poisonous anti-trans rhetoric, often under the guise of “just asking questions” about whether trans people should be afforded the luxury of existing, is all over the press. Trans hate groups go unchallenged, in a way that hate against any other group would never be tolerated. The debates about bathrooms are fucking endless (that bathroom you have at home is gender neutral, TERFs). There are discussions about amending the 2010 Equality Act to change the legal definition of “sex” in a way which would deprive trans people of their rights overnight. Teachers are now being told to snitch on pupils who come out at school and are being ordered to tell their parents, even if the child is not ready to come out at home. Gender affirming healthcare for teenagers - which can often massively improve the quality of life of children who know what is best for themselves - is increasingly impossible to access. Even trans adults are forced to endure months, sometimes years of humiliation in having to prove that they are gender dysphoric enough to deserve treatment.
It’s not enough to simply know that your birth sex and your gender identity don’t quite match up and that access to hormone therapy would be helpful for addressing that imbalance. You have to be (or appear to be) completely overcome with misery with the agony and torment of dysphoria to even be taken seriously. These hoops have to be jumped through to be legally recognised as the gender that you feel you are, because you cannot get a gender recognition certificate without meeting this ever growing criteria that was decided by cisgender people about whether people are trans enough to deserve to legally be who they are. Do you have a licence for that gender, sir… I mean madam!
Just in case you wanted some stats - 0.05% of the UK’s around 68 million population is transgender. Rather a lot of column inches for so few people, right? The media discourse surrounding trans people is blowing the “issue” way out of proportion. Reporting from the Gay Times shows that 74% of 18-25 year olds who hold anti-trans views don’t know any trans people. And that’s the age group typified as being the most open minded and progressive. It makes sense I guess - if you read all this stuff in the papers accusing trans women of taking over women’s only spaces and preying on them and 99 other myths about trans people, you’d probably be a bit concerned. They become this terrifying evil mass hiding in bathrooms up and down the nation, ready to pounce. Which is quite the feat, given how few trans people there are and how many bathrooms they’re supposed to be occupying. I would like to suggest that a prerequisite for holding views against a particularly social group is that you should have at least met one person from that social group and spoken to them. Otherwise you’re just hating a concept, an idea, based on scaremongering right wing news reporting, which affects people’s literal human rights. Come on, you’re smarter than that. Go out and make a trans friend today! They might be really nice!
It’s getting so bad that even the United Nations is telling the UK to please chill the fuck out about trans people. The researcher correctly identified that the “debate” over trans people and whether they’re allowed to exist or not has become toxic to the point that hate crimes are soaring and decades of progress on strengthening rights for gender and sexual minorities are being obliterated. The researcher, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, has urged the UK government to make decisions free of stigma and misconception, alluding to spiralling NHS waiting lists for gender affirming care, the potential removal of trans womens’ rights from the Equality Act, and the overrepresentation of LGBTQ people in homeless populations as major causes for concern.
Whilst this is a dramatic development, the UK government doesn’t have a great track record with listening to UN experts. When UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston published a damning report into the extreme poverty in the UK - a direct consequence of government policies - the government response was “no it isn’t. We’ve actually lifted loads of people out of poverty. The UK is the happiest place on earth. Your extensive trip around the UK in which you spoke to hundreds of people actually experiencing poverty is clearly wrong, and we, a bunch of privately educated Oxbridge twats on giant salaries who live in homes funded by the taxpayer, are right. Go fuck yourself, Alston.” (I’m paraphrashing). These sorts of reports are helpful at exposing blatant truths, but are always met with derision by those with the power to make any actual difference.
It’s a shame that we’ve managed to come up with a new group to dehumanise. Before gay people were second class citizens, it was women, or ethnic minorities, or certain religions. But we did eventually, to a certain extent, overcome all of those biases in the mainstream. Women got the vote and (in theory) equal pay eventually. Gay people have been allowed to marry. No more “no blacks, no dogs, no Irish” in the windows of BnBs. The Prime Minister, the Mayor of London, and the First Minister of Scotland are all of South Asian descent (though just to be clear, Rishi Sunak is a massive cunt). All these things would have been laughable at various points over the last century. That fact does actually give me hope, that this too shall pass and that we shall as a society learn to accept that transgender people are human beings, just like we learned to accept feminism, multiculturalism, and queer culture as normal parts of a vibrant and diverse modern society. Trans people are people, trans women are women, trans men are men, and trans rights are human rights. One day, the rest of the world will catch up. Just make sure you’re on the right side of history for this one.
This article is dedicated to my oldest and dearest friend Lilith, who has taught me so much about love and acceptance.
But I’m A Cheerleader is available for steaming on Amazon Prime and Roku, and available for rent on YouTube, Google Play, and Apple TV. More info here. It sadly isn’t showing anywhere in the UK at the moment, and screenings have stopped at De Uitkijk in Amsterdam for now, but it comes back around every now and then. Euphoria is available for streaming on HBO Max and Hulu.