Will & Harper: Feeling hopeful and broken.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30321133/?ref_=tt_mv_close

Will & Harper has just launched on Netflix. In it, comedian Will Ferrell takes a coast-to-coast road trip across the US with his long time buddy Harper Steele. He does this because Harper, someone who has been a good friend since they worked together on Saturday Night Live in the late 1990s has sent him an email that he really was not expecting. Harper, known to Ferrell previously as Andrew, was transitioning, to live as a woman. Wanting to show up for his friend, and to understand as best he could, he suggests that they cross the country, taking in backwoods America. With A-lister Ferrell alongside her (and thus providing some cushioning to the bleak and raw potential terror of entering some of these spaces as a 61 year old early-transition trans woman), Harper takes up the chance to find her feet, experiencing as her new self the reality of places that she’s often frequented in her prior gender. 

I am going to respond to this documentary in two ways. You might want to read both. 

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Dear Cis People.

Watch this documentary. Watch the humanity. Watch the realness of the feelings. Hear Harper Steele. See how she is treated - from the reality of the acceptance she finds in unexpected places, including a dive bar covered in Confederate and Trump flags when drinkers meet the authentic her (yes of course she has the privileged, well-known Ferrell there as cover), to the hatred that pours down on her as she is treated like an object in Amarillo, Texas (in a moment badly handled by the Producers and by Ferrell - perhaps trying to anticipate the bigotry and defuse it through ill-judged humour). 

Watch it all and pick a side. Because you can’t be neutral  - and one side is winning this fight. 

It’s not the side that meets Harper with compassion and humanity - as they often do when freed of the presuppositions implanted into them by politicians, the media or by 'Christian' fanatics.  

It's not the side characterised by empathy or decency, seen even in the Red state bars of tiny Mid Western towns, when the reality of Harper is allowed to contact the reality of those who drink there. 

It’s the side embodied by the Governor of Indiana, who signs into law measures destroying trans people's legal rights to care, recognition and access to public spaces - and then rushes over at a basketball game when he sees Ferrell (with Harper) to get a selfie that he can exploit for Instagram.

It's the side on display in that Texas restaurant and in the rush to hate of those who flooded X with their insults and their threats. 

To be honest this isn’t really a film about who Harper Steele is.

I think it's a film about who you are. 

Please watch it and if you haven't decided, do so.

And please ask others to watch it. 

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Dear Trans siblings

Take some heart that this film got made if you can. There are good people out there. And the film is ultimately about that. 

Ask your cis friends to watch it. Ask them to ask all their friends to watch it. 

When you watch, I'm going to speculate that you won't see or hear anything that you don’t already know. Cis friends have said how they cried. They predicted that I would cry. I didn’t cry. I think tears only come when I find myself accessing pain that has previously been unknown to me, and as someone who went through her own firewalk 16 years ago, there wasn't much in this film that blindsided me. Perhaps that's a feature of the defences I have had to build just to function. Or maybe I have attended too many Transgender Days of Remembrance to have many tears left for a Netflix documentary. 

So I watched it, recognising much, as you might - certainly if you are of my generation. 'Suicidal thoughts? Yep…Self hate? Yep…Fighting it for years? Yep…Acquiescing to endlessly intrusive, unboundaried questions as I was so desperate to be accepted (read this on this topic)? Yep…Hating my features and my voice? Yep…Scanning every room, street, shop for threat? Yep...' The details differed, but Harper said nothing in the movie that, broadly, I hadn’t thought or felt myself. 

Be ready to watch a trans woman early in her transition still in the moment of raw anxiety about whether people would be able to see the real her inside, whether old friends could get past their attachment to someone who used a different name to understand that whilst things had changed, beneath them, nothing had; or for others to get past the objectifications created by FoxNews, or Trump, or Ron deSantis or the Heritage Foundation, or Elon Musk's express train of hate. 

I remember that vulnerability in my own story, that need to test the world, to discover where my new place would be. It still operates, because the world keeps moving it seems; my footing often feels insecure. Back when I was at the stage Harper is at in this film, I didn't take a road trip across America. Unbelievably now, I hired the top deck of London's Tower Bridge to hold a party and relaunch my business (a kind of Big Reveal), using money I really should have kept and that I was going to need when that business collapsed two years later because, as a trans woman, hardly anyone would hire me.  I realised later that some came to that event out of bad-faith curiosity - for the venue maybe, but most likely to see the weirdo who was parading in a dress. They drank my free beer and then ghosted me. That's a moment I want to cry for, for the vulnerable person trying to buy back an acceptance into society that she was worried she had forfeited.  I sincerely hope that Harper Steele doesn't look back on this film in a similar way in years to come. 

Above all, perhaps be ready to watch it and to feel both ‘I’m glad they made this movie’ and ‘I’m broken that they still felt they had to make this movie’.  I have been watching movies and reading books trying to explain to cisgender people that we are humans, with feelings, not monsters, rapists or freaks for over 40 years. From A Change of Sex on the BBC in 1979, to the movies Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Transamerica, to TransParent, to the UK comedy Boy Meets Girl, and the movie of the same name, to the brilliant account of a friend’s transition in the book, Becoming Drusilla...and many, many more. Most of these movies and books have said more or less the same thing in their varying ways. 

I had hoped that some of all this, and all the rest, might have moved the dial to a place of greater understanding and decency towards us. For a time I thought it was happening. These days, it often feels like faith in that progress was delusional.

All we can do is hope, I guess, that the efforts of this Hollywood A-list comic can change the conversation just a little, especially before November in the United States.

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