Rule 1: There is a right answer to every situation, and a right way to respond to every query.
Rule 2: All who cannot give the correct answer in any given situation will be summarily executed and disposed of.
Rule 3: Everyone has “points”.
Rule 4: If someone has more “points” than you, you are free to disregard them, and vice versa.
Rule 5: The goal is to be the most correct.
Rule 6: When you’re incorrect, you’re incorrect forever.
Castration Movie is an anthology of films by Louise Weard, currently in production of its third part (Year of the Hyaena), projected to come out in 2026. Its first two parts, i. Traps and ii. The Best Of Both Worlds, are both 5-hour-plus long, shambling epics. Finishing any one of these movies is like stumbling your way over the finish line of a marathon— at that point, you don’t care you didn’t place first, you’re just happy you’re alive. Though you may not be all that happy to be alive once you’ve finished the second one. They’re not the most lighthearted of movies.
These descriptors sound like they’re critiques, and they are, and I also wouldn’t have it any other way. I would honestly love to see a director’s cut of these movies down to your usual 90 minutes because I don’t even know what that would look like. Maybe they would secretly be the most perfect movies ever. These movies are incredibly decompressed, meandering through every sequence in essentially real time. We, the audience, dragged through every whimsical and painful conversation through the view of a shaky handheld. Here’s my disclaimer: I am not a movie buff, I am not a film critic, and I barely understand where I am in the world. Maybe everything about this movie is actually incredibly rote and gouache and done better by some other movie filling out half the runtime. I don’t know. If that movie exists, I haven’t seen it. All I know is that I haven’t yet watched anything else that made me feel the way these films did.
It may sound like instead of critiquing the movie I’m justifying to you why I even watched it. Unfortunately, there’s more. I’m trans myself, nonbinary and agender (if you want to call it that), and transmisogyny exempt. I live on the occupied stretch of land colloquially called America and am of Asian descent. I wonder if hearing any of these descriptors changed your perception of me and my ability to critique the film. Or anything at all for that matter. In my own mind, it feels kind of like preemptively handing the audience tomatoes. Leading with a big sandwich board that says, “Just so you know, I’m bullshit, I already know I’m bullshit, so if you want to call me bullshit it’s okay, like I said I already know”. If you’re not very online or involved in social media spaces, you may wonder where I even came to this conclusion— the things I listed are neutral, factual descriptors about myself. I promise, over time, you learn to intuit them. There are times and places for conversations involving You. That time is usually not now. There are usually a lot of other things to worry about.
In the words of some negative and positive(!) reviews, Castration Movie is an irresponsible product. The first part features incels, 4channers, a trans woman protagonist who is (in no particular order) a sex worker, an aspiring mother, emotionally abusive to her closest friends, and fucking her chaser boyfriend to hold up the illusion that they’re going to be a happy family together. The second part is even more striking in this regard. It begins in a sterile basement housing a trans separatist cult, but the heart of the film lies with detransitioners. The main character’s love interest (if you want to call it that) is a woman who proclaims many many times she was “nonbinary in college”, who heads many conversations that were so uncomfortable to sit through I felt my body physically clench up. The metatextual joke of her casting, and a side character who is a detransitioned trans woman, is that both are played by the stars of Actors, a heavily polarizing film about cis people pretending to be trans for clout. I hear part iii’s gonna have a TERF or two, which is not something you hear every day in movie news.
To me, Part ii is a more flawed product, but the images conjured by it have sat for longer in my craw. Partly because in the Weard-outlined sequence of “frog being boiled”, the dial lands squarely on “boil”. It opens with a ketamine-fueled transfem orgy (👍). We are thrown right into the mix with Circle, our protagonist, and her bewildered, alienated journey through the cult’s antics. The other members are leery of her. She just can’t seem to do or say the right thing. Their figurehead is an AI chatbot named Polygon which spits out nothing but jumbled slop that every member scrambles to interpret. Most of it centers around withdrawing from the world and its impurities— “only the cup that is never filled is never emptied”. The cult resents Circle for wanting the outside world, for being bored with the basement, for wanting to eat more than plain hot dogs every day. They are offended by her refusal to let go of her personhood, because said personhood rejects their unity. Why isn’t she content with what she’s given? The world outside holds nothing but hate, betrayal, and pain. Doesn’t she understand that this is the best it gets?
Community is a slippery concept. It’s obsessively talked about by people who are part of nothing of the sort. It seems that online community is increasingly you and your three mutuals against the world. Any attempts to invoke a wider, united community is laughable, naïve. There are years of intracommunity discourse at varying levels of nichehood that have never been resolved. What does community mean in a space as abstract as the internet? Mostly a lot of fear and anger. Shared rage. Passing around the same 20 dollars. Warning each other about users who’ve done stuff we can’t abide. Which community am I even talking about? The gay community? The trans community? God forbid we invoke race. A lot of POC on the internet, for good reason, do not feel welcome in most of these so-called community spaces. Black and brown users get the worst of it. The label itself, POC, has its own baggage as an unserious, condescending term— who wants to be called the more neutered, politically correct word that’s often misused anyway? (“POC characters”, anyone?) It feels, in a word, lame.
Eclipse, played by Jamilah Sandato, is the only member of the Polygon Angels that isn’t white. Her role in the film is… weird, identifiably. She’s one of the authority figures of the Polygon Angels, subservient to the white ringleader Roxie. She leads the group in performance with nothing but her voice and a guitar. She later uses the same voice and guitar to terrorize Circle, who has been stripped naked and corralled into a dog cage: “You will die like a dog! You will die like a man! You will die like a bitch!” I cannot deny that the performance is spellbinding, one of the most memorable parts of an already striking second half. I also don’t know if the way she’s written is fully intentional. As one of the cult’s main enforcers, Eclipse excudes menace and physical aggression. This is in sharp contrast to the wheedling, tear-filled buzzwords spouted the other main enforcer, Devon, who spends much of the film berating Circle’s perceived transgressions under a paper-thin blanket of warmth. You never really get a full look into Eclipse’s view of the cult, how much she really buys into it— many of the other members don’t, despite their devotion. The lack of definition to Eclipse’s motives ultimately hinders the movie by making her character inconsistent. She is one of the most aggressive tormenters during Circle’s hour of terror, but when the cult abruptly comes crashing down, Eclipse holds the abandoned white mask of the cult’s leader Roxie, considers it, and tosses it aside. If we had gotten any prior insights into her character, we could draw something from this. As it stands, it’s a sudden, surreal 180 from just minutes ago. And then she’s gone and the film is uninterested in answering the questions we are left with: the show’s over, move on.
Rule 7: Everyone is out to get you.
Rule 8: It will always be for two categories: 1) an immutable part of who you are (disregard) 2) An opinion you expressed (indicative of your character for the future forever).
Rule 9: When you’re correct, you have the right to remain human.
Rule 10: Your struggle is unique. No one will ever understand it unless they’ve gone through the exact things you have, and even if they did, there will always be a discrepancy— in race, class, country of origin, neurodiversity, social status. Your trauma is inseparably, immutably, yours. No one else will ever be able to lay claim to it but you.
The eternal question: to be represented badly or to not be represented at all? Castration Movie is not a film very preoccupied with Tasteful Representation, but that doesn’t mean it’s being offensive for the sake of it. At its core, it is trying to sincerely portray its characters and their humanity. Still, I have to ask myself what it was going for with Eclipse’s portrayal— if it was deliberately uncomfortable, ill-considered but ultimately of negligible impact, or actively harmful. It could be interpreted that Eclipse’s presence is a microcosm of such dynamics in many trans communities— the token friend in a sea of white faces, there to be a rallying force, a source of endless guidance, and the one who does the dirty work because if you’re allowed to do it then they definitely can too. Because this is the crowd that’s closest to you, even though you’re not really the same.
Here is the part where I regale you about the horrors of being a Person of Color in a predominately white community. Here is the part where I also tell you that it isn’t great in Spaces of Color either. The concept of approaching another person and going “Wow, you’re also Asian! Let’s be friends now!” is completely inane. That’s not really how we go about it. We tend to drift toward one another, knowing implicitly that there will be some things that we understand about each other better than white people might. On one level, it really is a relief, and I wouldn’t give up my current connections for all the well-meaning white people in the world. On the other hand, I think we fallaciously attribute an inherent moral superiority to the marginalized that is unhelpful and ultimately alienating. I cannot think of the last time I brought up my heritage on social media in a context other than refuting someone else’s rhetoric. I’ve definitely said a lot of embarassing things in service to it, desperate for the chance to assert myself in the wider conversation despite not knowing a lick of theory or much else other than my personal experience, because I knew if I didn’t speak up I would be complicit in my own silencing.
But who am I to complain? No one is making me this way. If I wanted to be better, I could simply choose to be better.
The magic word is privilege, and netizens are adept at using it to instantly dismiss other people’s entire lived histories. Rather than [nuanced description here] it’s a checkmark on an invisible social ledger. People really need good guys and bad guys in their lives, and they need themselves and everyone they know to be good. To fuck that up is a betrayal not just of yourself, but everyone you love. When this happens, you must disintegrate yourself forever. No one says as such, but it will follow you. To apologize is to guilt trip. To promise to do better is self aggrandizing. To leave your transgressions unaddressed is monstrous. What we’ve decided is that honestly, you should just fucking get hit by a car. With all love 💕. Here’s my ko-fi link for wasting my time.
I think the online community is largely not ready to let go of retribution. (Which community I’ll leave up to you.) For all our talk of abolition, no one really wants to give up the chance to see some goddamn justice for once, because it’s so hard to see tangible justice anywhere. We’ve already gone through so much and we’re supposed to be martyrs for the people too ignorant to understand that? We all feel this sense of schaudenfreude when it Actually Happens— just look at what happened with everyone popping bottles over that healthcare CEO— and this plus the incentivized urge to dunk on people when they’re publically wrong is a powerful combination. I am not immune. It’s fun to see someone get put in their place, until it’s you. And it could be you, if you made the wrong move. Especially if you don’t know exactly what you’re talking about. Especially if you misinterpret things written solely in text easily. An incorrect person is incorrect forever.
It’s my guilty pleasure to look at readups on internet drama. Not really in video form because those are largely the same, very depressing, and tend to be made by dudes of at least mild alt-right persuasion. Written posts— and Google Docs— are where it’s at. Pages and pages of written testimony to make a stenographer blush. You could build a library of Alexandria with all the callouts on the internet. There are some interesting standouts, but for the most part they follow a standard pattern— person of interest strikes up friendship with much younger person, often a fan of their work, relationship becomes more intimate, inappropriate and traumatizing interactions follow, partner eventually writes a callout doc about it, do not pass go + go to jail.
Not every callout has veracity nor sticking power. There are some presences on the internet who just stick around no matter how many times they’re called out, and there are rarer times when the accused have turned the tables on their accusers, Uno-Reverse-carding their way out of the court of public opinion and out of pariahdom. It doesn’t help that there is a real variance in severity with callouts, despite the uniformity of the language. A callout for aphobia sounds exactly like a callout for racism sounds exactly like a callout for running a secret pedophile/zoophilia ring. I mention all this to outline how the language of callouts has leaked into how we engage with art and each other, how at any time we are subconsciously primed to see The Document pop up in our feeds, and how we are incentivized to collect data on each other for future evidence, and to avoid guilt by association.
I Saw The TV Glow needs no introduction. I watched it much, much later than everyone else. I watched it directly after Audition (1999), which is also a fun romp I recommend for the whole family. The movie follows Owen, played by Justice Smith, who forms a friendship with an upperclassman named Maddy, played by Jack Haven, over a TV show called The Pink Opaque. It has a particularly devastating reputation among trans viewers. Jane Shoenbrun, director of I Saw The TV Glow, has a minor role in Castration Movie Anthology, as well as Jack Haven in part ii, a role that I only retroactively recognized them in after obsessively poring over post-movie Wikipedia articles (as you do). They should play them back to back in movie theaters with charcuterie boards to lure in the unsuspecting, in order to force transition rates in America up by 45%.
I’m happy to report, it worked on me: it did indeed blow my insides out the back of my ribcage like a shotgun blast. It was Jack Haven’s monologue that did it—
Time wasn't right. It was moving too fast. And then I was 19. And then I was 20. I felt like one of those dolls. Asleep in the supermarket. Stuffed. And then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over on a DVD. I said to myself,
“This isn't normal.”
“This isn't normal.”
“This isn't how life is supposed to feel.”
Well, fuck.
I Saw The TV Glow feels cold. The fluorescent, buzzing lights of the vegetable aisles in the supermarket. The frigid back rooms of the dead-end arcade where Owen works for decades. The stifling air of the parking lots, the stiff rows of houses, the lowest level of surburban Hell awash in neon green and pink. You get the sense Owen is freezing. Owen is stuck. Owen is trapped in a life and body and world that is rotting from the inside out. Owen screams for a long-dead mother, anyone, to come save her. No one does. I found the themes of I Saw The TV Glow very self-apparent, to the point where categorizing it as trans ‘allegory’ confuses me even though it’s technically true— it is a trans story, deep down in its pores. Only by reading trans people’s upset reactions to others in the theater did I get the inkling that cis audiences might not have the same interpretation. It really must be horrible, to sit through a narrative that touches on these pillars of trans identity so closely that it could be called tangibly life-changing for a lot of people, only to have some fucking chud three rows back guffaw at how ‘confusing’ it was. I’m not interested in dissecting those opinions, which are the product of essentially common ignorance; more interesting critiques and reactions spawn from other trans people.
I’ve seen others react negatively to the same atmosphere I praised, that the bleak, hopeless ending was just too much. I personally don’t see the ending as hopeless, but I can easily see how someone else might. I don’t begrudge any other trans person their reaction to such an emotionally harrowing watch— it’s a hard damn film to get through. It is so specific, so direct a line to the soul, that of course it has spawned waves of reinterpretation through fanwork, redraws of stills with characters from other TV shows. Such a phenomenon often happens with popular works, and toes the line between respectful and inappropriate. What’s the line between reinterpretation and regurgitation? I couldn’t say, but I think it really falls down to whether or not people think the things being compared are Good.
Then I was scrolling and found a furious rant from one user about how transmascs on TikTok were appropriating the I Saw The TV Glow trend, something transfems were using to accept themselves and celebrate their own identity, to mourn the loss of their female cis selves, how ‘pretty’ they were, before they transitioned. I can’t verify the existence of these videos, but I believe they happened because some bullshit is always happening on TikTok and it usually seems to be transmascs slash tmes saying some shit. I don’t think this user’s reaction was unfounded— I was similarly baffled at how these people came away with essentially the complete opposite of what the film was trying to say. Ironic since you could quite easily read (at least I read it as such) that Maddy is nonbinary and/or transmasc. The whole thing just made me profoundly sad. For every piece of work powerful enough to touch hearts across the community, things like this always seem to crop up and redraw indivisible lines in the sand. We can’t seem to stop hurting each other.
When you read such things you wonder if the things you’ve said have ever hurt someone like that. You don’t want to do that to anyone.
Rule 11. No one but your own community will understand you.
Rule 12. No amount of talking, explaining, or pleading will make them understand.
Rule 13. If someone can see you, they can pass judgment on you.
Rule 14. No thought is private.
Rule 15. Keep doing the correct things, or you’ll become incorrect.
Rule 16. When you’re incorrect, you give up the right to be human.
The empty cup spills nothing. You can’t hurt anyone if you say nothing. Look at your friends and count how many are in a group you’re not in. If you have no friends of this nature, you’re bigoted against that group. If you have one friend, you have made them the token friend. If you have more than three friends, you’re probably a fetishist. Have you ever posted online on the same username you’re posting now? You can be tracked down with that exact username and have everything you’ve ever done stamped onto the archive for anyone to see. You are not allowed to write stories about a marginalized community that does not belong to you. You are bigoted if you do not include at least one character from a given marginalized community in any given story. You should use your voice for good. You should use your knowledge of your heritage for good. You do know about your own culture, don’t you? Well, you can’t speak for everyone. No one needs a voice like yours right now contributing to the global hegemony. America is disgusting. It should be bombed. If you ever had an opinion on something and posted it publically, it is attributed to you forever. If you change your mind and don’t post about it, did it really happen? You need to use your platform for good. You need to build up your platform to use your platform for good. You need to make activism fun for the average person to enjoy. Are you fucking kidding me? You know that posting isn’t activism, right? Activism isn’t fucking fun. Unplug. Delete your social media. Raze the one thing that is essential for anyone trying to have a living anywhere for pretty much anything in our surveillance state. Get a real job, dickhead. Vote with your wallet. Donate. Is it bourgeois to own money? Is it bourgeois to own a house? He who brings an empty cup will not be asked “the question.” How can I make you understand me? I don’t need you to think I’m right, I just need you to understand I never meant any of this to happen. I wish I could take all the hurt from you. Of course, it’s not about me. There are important conversations that have to happen. If you have nothing of value to say, don’t say it at all. Your mistakes don’t happen in a vacuum. Your posts don’t happen in a vacuum. Someone has seen you grow into the person you are from the moment you logged on and they aren’t impressed. You have nothing of value to contribute to the wider conversation. It would be better for everyone if you stopped talking. Your constant need to be a victim is taking away from the actual suffering in the real world, out there, outside of you. Your greatest sin is that you are so annoying that no words coming out of your mouth would matter even if you were the second coming of Jesus Christ. People would be justified in not listening to you because you are so fucking annoying. Everything that has ever happened to you is your fault. You deserve it because you could have been better, and chose not to be. It is so fucking easy and you can’t do it you stupid motherfucker. Why can’t you do it? Why can’t you be better?
A full cup is a promise to suffer later.
I think sometimes people treat the marginalized like unicorns, mythical creatures which emerge once in a blue moon to give them a societal litmus test on how good or bad they’re doing. If there was a pH level type measurement for ‘situational purity’, I’d sure as hell be using it. But of course it’s not that simple. Of course confining myself to engaging with identity and politics in a social media environment that regularly doxxes people and documents personal information has caused me to develop holes in my brain. It was arrogance, plain and simple, and childish innocence, that caused me to believe I could navigate such a situation with any grace. That and the encouragement of everyone I looked up to on said sites, who told me and their faceless followers that it is the right thing to do.
It feels like a personal failing not to be able to handle such an environment anymore, but it would be a bold-faced lie to say that I was contributing much to the wider discussion before my mental break officially took hold. I was just some kid and now I’m just some guy. Some of my old posts may be floating out there, with one reblog being all it takes to relaunch them back into circulation. Social media is deceptive in its ease of access. It doesn’t feel like you’re saying anything to anyone if you don’t see the visual feedback of a like on a post or a follower account going up, but your words travel farther than anyone intends. The more marginalized the user, the more incentivized they are to run on the hamster wheel of Just Saying Some Shit, contributing to the conversation, inevitably drawing negative attention from people who haven’t sat through those same arguments. Slowly the spaces where you are allowed to be yourself are leeched from you, and replaced with yet more places for endless discourse, endless demands to explain and defend yourself. No one sets out to create a landscape for themselves like that, but it begins to feed you deceptively righteous patterns of behavior— that everyone who approaches you has malicious intent, that everyone who has the “wrong” opinion on something is doing it on purpose, that the things you say to rebuke them have a positive effect so you must keep doing it. It’s no wonder in such an environment you close yourself off to everything except your one or two people you trust, if not that, and why the wide world of social media is such a hostile, bleak wasteland. The trouble is, like with many OCD rumination cycles, there really are people there who will say some bullshit to you just to make you upset, there are people who are never going to get it no matter how many times it’s explained to them nicely. You are under no obligation to explain yourself to those people— but the fact of the matter is, that’s not the whole world. It’s probably even less people than you think. I would know; I am an expert of making up guys in my mind to get upset at, which is why in the last few months I have taken up writing.
It would be really nice to go outside and touch grass have all these strange, self-destructive mindsets fall away. Unfortunately, it needs to be worked on more consistently than that. It’s January and the sun here sets as I’m getting home. Right now, I’m watching a lot of movies. In fact, last night, I watched I Saw the TV Glow and a couple weeks ago I finished Castration Movie Anthology Pt. ii and I started the first episode of PLUR1BUS, which I was aware had lesbian shit in it but did not know it started as soon as the first episode. Nice.
Castration Movie Anthology parts i and ii are monumental and flawed pieces. The things that touched me most about them, once I got past my intense discomfort throughout the second part, was its ultimately empathetic lens for shitty, flawed people. If you told me in 2017 that I’d be sympathetic towards a TERF-adjacent antagonist, I’d have told you to shoot me with a gun. But facing that automatic recoil is the point, facing the taboo is the point, and even though the perspectives of this white transfem protagonist and myself are quite different, I think it would be immature to act like there’s nothing of value to be gained by watching. Even if I ended up hating these movies, I think they’d be worth experiencing, and I think it was worth making them. I eagerly await part iii, and any future projects Jane Shoenbrun is cooking up.
I can’t stay on social media for extended periods of time, despite the fact that it is my main avenue for promoting myself and my work. I curate who I follow very closely so I control what I see on my dashboard. I don’t follow most of my friends (though I read their blogs like newspaper). I found this blog ocdheritageposts recently which made me roll on my bed with laughter with the shit I read that is just like the inside of my head. I don’t think it’s too late to make a better world. I do think if we’re serious about community, more than the three mutuals we have liking each other’s posts, we need to really question ourselves and others in ways we are incentivized not to. We need to allow people to be wrong, because we’re not so much more special than anyone else on this planet that we’ve evolved past the need to learn and grow.
I want to get out of the basement now.