Women and Femmes, or Females
At a glance...
- Directed by Grace Carmack & Eden Aztlán
- Written by Nelle Tankus & The Femmes
- Released in 2025
- Watched at the Theater Off Jackson
- Final feelings: feeling more critical and important every day
Live theater is so much different from film that I'm not sure how to approach writing about this, but I know I want to write about Women and Femmes, or Females. I want to write about this play because, in the days after the original viewing I have noticed that it's impossible to even talk about this thing with cisgender people. There is simply no language that is established in the liberal queer mainstream for cis people to access about this work, and yet the whole work is directed so much directly at them. It's incredible, I haven't seen any new movies about transness that felt fully esoteric to the cisgender standpoint (though Castration Movie is on my list and I have never heard a cis person talk about seeing that film). Even I Saw the TV Glow has a large enough distribution that I got jumpscared by a cis man who streams Street Fighter suddenly bringing it up one day while I happened to be watching. But at one single party I went to, I listened as my girlfriend tried to describe the play plainly to a cis man, and his initial reaction was, "oh so is transmisogyny when trans people are misogynistic?" The conversation completely broke down.
Women and Femmes, or Females is a play, but at times it sounds more like a rant, and at other times it sounds more like therapy. I think therapy in movies is its own beast, but one thing about plays is that their proximity to the audience, especially in this small, black box style productions, makes their artifice much less dominating. A movie can envelop your whole world such that you completely lose sight of its nature as a production, but for these small plays the production is inescapable. What that means is that the rantings and therapy that feel tired in indie movies about relating to your parents feel truly at-home on a certain sort of theatrical stage. The play is set in a play, after all. Hamming it up with silly-walks level body motion is one of the chief ways this play initially endears its audience to its toxic white feminist writer character. And at the second half, Nelle Tankus, the one named author of the play who also played the pivotal stage manager character in our show, has a mic-drop level monologue that is so honest, I almost wonder how much of it was written (probably all of it because my guess with absolutely zero evidence is that playwrights are a little neurotic).
Now that I've said all that, the natural question is to ask what actually happens in this play and what is it actually about. Bluntly, it's about transmisogyny, AKA the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that trans women experience and that is violently enforced on all people who may someday choose to throw their cismale lives away. It's specifically about the ways that cis women, trans men, and AFAB nonbinary artists (AKA transmisogyny-exempt or TME people) can violently exclude trans women while still pandering to their audiences' senses of morality with respect to women's equality and empowerment (and pander to their own ethics as well). If you are like the cis man at the party, this review is not the place to start learning about transfeminist theory. Ironically, I am not entirely certain this play is even a good place to start learning about the concepts and language of transfeminism. But even if the theory gets lost, Women and Femmes, or Females is worth seeing. At minimum, you get to watch multiple trans women emote on stage, which is the kind of behavior most of us know better than to do in public if we want to stay safe. Every expression of a trans woman in this play, every look into the audience, every sigh of contempt and every indignant scream, feels like an offering for all the others who have to police their entire existences for the convenience and sensitivity of others. It's a gasping exhaustion and righteous fury at every cis lesbian who has shamed, villainized, and excluded us, at every cis woman who has used us, at every job that has terminated us, and at all the stupid and shit art that passes for feminism because a cis woman wrote it about other cis women.
As a closing thought, I want to give a shout out to the 3 cis women who showed up at this play and sat in the front row, designated for people who wanted to interact with the show, who had no clue about anything in the neighborhood they were in, and who were the easy targets for the 2 rants from trans women in this play that are directed at cis women in explicit and pointed ways. I wish I had interviewed them afterwards just to hear what their deal was and why they were at the play, and how much of what they just saw landed for them. That is something I've only ever experienced once at the movies, and this time I got to feel a satisfaction that they were getting what they deserved, even if it was only in my head.