Siobhan McCarthy | She's the He / 2025

playing it straight

by Douglas Messerrli

 

Siobhan McCarthy (screenwriter and director) She's the He / 2025

 

I started out watching director Siobhan McCarthy’s (they/them) film She’s the He with a few winching moments as its two central figures, cis-gender boys Alex and Ethan, best friends and already thought be gay by the homophobic bullies in their school, decide to pretend they’re tans just to get inside the girl’s locker room of this obviously very liberal, open-minded California high school that would make any Maga maniac tremble in horror. Here, even the coach protects the gay boys.

     All right, I said to myself—knowing just from the title of this film that something different was going to come of it—this work is taking on the genre of bad high school boys and girls that goes back to Sixteen Candles (1984), American Pie (1999), and even earlier movies that McCarthy has perhaps never heard of besides the obvious references to the movies which admittedly actually influenced them, such as Mean Girls (2004), She’s The Man (2006), and Superbad (2007); they also cite the TV series Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2206) and Czech director Věra Chytilová’s 1966 comedy Daisies.

     But just maybe this film was going to possibly imitate the genre more that in transformed it, I feared, particularly given the character of Alex (Nico Carney, he/him) the more dominant of the cis duo, who convinces Ethan (Misha Osherovich, they/them) to go along with his plans just so that he can convince pretty girl Sasha (Malia Pyles) that he truly loves her and that he’s not really gay. Little did I know that in real life Pyles (famed for playing in the HBO series Pretty Little Liars) identifies as queer.

     Yet it didn’t take too long for me, even without a press kit, to realize that just perhaps Carney was actually a trans male (he is a trans male stand-up comedian) who, in this instance, was playing a cis gender bad boy pretending to be trans woman. And the movie, itself, particularly after Ethan hooks up with Forest (Tatiana Ringsby, also known as Tatchi, she/they) who in McCarthy’s film seems like a sensitive femme lesbian who truly has a thing for Ethan even before he pretends to be trans.

     Forest offers makeup and costume suggestions (as Tatchi does online) to help him transition, and before you register that the two are falling in love, the already long-haired Ethan begins to like what “he” sees of “herself,” and realizes that perhaps she actually is trans.

     The women in the locker room are only too pleased in this world to invite trans women into their private spaces, going as far as to permit them entry into Sasha’s own house at a party for women only. At the party, Alex attempts to get to know Sasha better and in the process—particularly when she shares her private longings for a man as sensitive as the trans Alex—he accidentally admits that he is neither gay nor trans but is definitely interested in becoming that man.

     The admission gets him and Ethan kicked out of the party at the very moment that Ethan, for the first time in her life, was really beginning to like who she has become. When her mother, soon after, discovers her arriving home in a dress, wearing makeup, and in a different hairdo, she rejects the son upon whom she has for so long, after her husband’s departure, depended on for male support.

      Alex may be a “bad” boy, but his heart is truly in the right place, and planning to room with his bestie Ethan when go off to college, and with graduation coming up in just a few days, he is now faced with the enormous problem of explaining not only that his own intentions were pure, but that his best male friend Ethan has realized he’s a she.

      He visits Ethan’s mother, promising to become her male “replacement” if needed. She politely declines him, but his comic gestures certainly put her into a different frame mind which we are now certain with be able to accept the changes to her former son.

      Don’t worry it you’re now a little bit confused, so is everyone in the movie, and it gets only worse as the school’s real homophobic jocks, hearing what the gay boy duo (in their mind they’ll always be gay boys) achieved, they decide to also break into the girl’s locker room. Who can save these lovely maidens?

     It doesn’t strike Alex for a moment that they may very likely be able to save themselves, as he joins up forces with Ethan, Davis (Mark Indelicato, openly gay)—a handsome loner who everyone believes “turned” gay just to get closer to the women, but in fact turns out to really be gay—and the mechanical genius Forest’s creation, a “graffiti bombing gun,” in order to ward off the school jocks (most of who in reality are also played by gay or trans men; trans actor Emmett Preciado is their leader) who the Trumpites warn us are flocking to the girl’s bathrooms nationwide. It is finally, the women, however, who lobbing their bloody tampons at the intruders like hand-grenades win the day, and force the men to go on the run in utter disgust.

   Nearly all these actors, despite the raucous plot that often overwhelms them, give wonderful performances; but particularly Ethan, as he truly discovers his own beauty within himself—in a manner which Eddie Redmayne could never quite conjure up in The Danish Girl (2015)—his eyes darting back and forth with the wonderment of transformation Sasha and Forest help him undertake, elevates his role to new levels. We fully understand how, unknowingly, this is what he needed—as he watches the frizzy haired slightly pudgy boy become a true feminine beauty—to discover herself alive in the world for the first time in his/her life.

     Similarly, critic Siddhant Adlakha writes in Variety:

 

“…One needn’t get bogged down by wistful reflections on the state of the world when discussing She’s the He, if only because Carney channels a young Steve Buscemi and delivers such an enormously funny performance that he swallows the movie whole. His conception of Alex is a blast. It’s both a satirical portrait of toxic, over-eager teenage masculinity (with interjections like “bro!” and references to “getting pussy” galore), but at the same time, makes for a surprisingly empathetic look at young men who fall short of masculine expectations, and the ways in which they overcompensate. To have a trans man in this role is both a meaningful reflection on what elements (and struggles) of manhood are learned and adopted, as well as a downright gut-busting parody of the type of bro-y teenager that usually appears in Hollywood’s teenage comedies.”

     By film’s end, the two bad “boys” have reconciled, even if they determine that perhaps it might be better not to share the dorm room after all.

     If on the whole the film is at times far too cartoonish for my taste, one must admit that this movie is filled with heart opening itself up to us with every maddened beat.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).