Yes, Rocky Horror Is Transphobic. Why Do We Still Like It So Much?

Smells like teen discourse, gals and ghouls.

As is their right, queer people on the internet have been spending October problematizing The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with “transmisogyny” and “bad representation” among the allegations being leveled against it. Cultural consumers have taken issue with Rocky Horror’s overall ickiness around trans identity in ways that are not necessarily new, but new at least to them. Paired with the creator’s truly abhorrent views that trans women simply aren’t women, calls to “de-canon” Rocky Horror echo again in a familiar way.

Since its release in 1975, the spoopy musical comedy starring Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon has transcended its indie budget costumes and disjointed plot development to now be considered the longest-running theatrical release in film history. This is because an entire ecosystem of Halloween screenings has grown in tandem with the film’s success year over year, galvanizing huge crowds to dress up as the characters for midnight movie screenings with sing-a-longs, mandatory audience participation, amateur shadow-casting, and a series of etiquettes passed down in oral tradition: No suits, don’t wear a striped shirt, prepare to get wet. When you hear “Janet,” scream, “Slut!” When you hear “Brad,” scream, “Asshole!” To refer to Rocky Horror as a “cult classic” is almost an understatement. It is a contender for thee cult classic. It is a classic that has actually created a cult of personality and an army of people who’ve found solace in the ethos of freakdom and a gender-fucky mantra of “Don’t dream it, be it.”

Where Rocky Horror’s fandom spans generations, demographics, and orientations, it’s fair to say that it is an explicitly queer phenomenon. Frank-N-Furter and his gang of goons are aliens from the planet Transsexual, Transylvania hiding from the government in their earthly castle. Furter is a self-identified “sweet transvestite” and sings a whole song about it. But beyond the character’s gender nonconformity, the movie is also incredibly anarchist (and quite bisexual, too). Frank-N-Furter employs (yes, problematic) sexual usurpation, there is an inexplicable Meat Loaf cameo, and the power of song ultimately helps Brad and Janet shed their normcore sensibilities before the mansion launches off the earth like a rocket back into space.

And I’ll say it: on the craft level, the movie is not incredibly complex. It has indeterminable themes of gender nonconformity that reek of the cisgender gaze and gay panic, all while conflating gay men with trans women, and trans women with crossdressers. Frank-N-Further immediately reminds us of Julia Serano’s seminal essay on the two available tropes for the depiction of trans womanhood: “pathetic” or “deceptive.” Frank-N-Furter is somehow both: slithering and dishonest, a shape-shifting seductress, and hopelessly in love with a muscled-up golem that he created in an evil laboratory to be his sex doll.

Yet its cartoonish gesture toward a vague lesson of societal liberation has withstood the test of time and now Rocky Horror is an anthem for outcasts of any kind. Its unambiguous critique of heteronormativity was weird even for the 70s and likely part of the reason its initial reviews were so unfavorable; audiences weren’t prepared to see themselves humiliated, to be prodded at and shoved into an uncomfortable world of freakdom. Perhaps there’s a connection between the grievances then and its post-“trans tipping point” reception now. Behind the cries of “groomer!” and “representation!” lies perhaps a deeper unwillingness to see trans characters as imperfect, selfish, or downright diabolical.

And on that note, let’s get into some imperfect discourse. This is a conversation between Them’s top dolls on whether Rocky Horror still deserves its place in the queer canon.

Fran Tirado: So, the kids are not alright, once again. You know, we as trans people get to choose our problematic icons. (As a transfemme, I love Mrs. Doubtfire, and I don’t need anyone else to agree.) And if Frank-N-Furter isn’t for the kids, that’s perfectly fine. I was never a Rocky Horror devotee, but I feel weirdly protective of it now that discourse has emerged around its less-than-nuanced depictions of gender nonconformity just in time for Gay Christmas. These critiques are based in truth, it’s worth saying. Rocky Horror conflates “trans” identity with cross-dressing and extraterrestrial mutation, all while framing it as a kind of hostile indoctrination. And honestly, I think that’s fab. This movie is trans canon, in my opinion, but not everyone has to feel this way. Yet, still somehow, hearing critiques of it in 2024 feels… basic?

Samantha Allen: Discourse is cyclical, but I think especially so for trans people given our fractured and often inaccessible cultural history. Instead of us having had some big blow-up Rocky Horror debate one time and putting this topic to bed, it feels like every microgeneration of newly hatched eggs needs to air their feelings.

When I’m feeling like a patient trans grandma, I want to say, “Go ahead and get it out of your system.” I watched the movie for the first time shortly after coming out in 2012, and I remember feeling leery of its depiction of Frank-N-Furter: Was this how society saw me? The character largely struck me as a semi-harmful caricature embraced not by other trans people, but by the sort of cis people who thought they were so cool for attending the Genderfuck Dances at my state school.

But my feelings softened, and became more nuanced, after I encountered the queer and, yes, trans culture around local showings and productions of Rocky Horror. In hindsight, I’m glad that I didn’t write some anti-Frank screed before I went out and touched some grass. So when I see this kind of Twitter discourse cropping up in 2024, the less-patient trans grandma inside me is like, “Stop that racket, children!”

F.T.: I do feel very “grandma” about it. It’s unclear exactly if the current discourse around Rocky Horror is directly from Gen Z, but I suspect it’s mostly coming from newly minted trans babies working through a trans rite of passage: being angry on the internet about everything trans. I want to plead with the trans babies: “Listen before you speak!” “Read before you critique!” It’s a very born-yesterday take.

When I first watched Rocky Horror as a preteen, I didn’t even know I was trans yet, so my brain couldn’t quite wrap around the transgender nuance, but I do remember experiencing the kind of simmering worry about whether it pathologized queer people or made us out to be all-powerful intergalactic invader freaks. (It does, and we are.)

When I watched it again as an adult, I fell absolutely in love with its irreverence. I’ll admit I do have very specific taste (See: Mrs. Doubtfire). In my own media consumption, I’d much rather watch something absurd, extreme, maximalist, and flamboyant than something measured, nuanced, and that checks all the boxes of “authenticity” — or whatever it is that might render a movie like Rocky Horror fit to be called good “representation.”

For those who’ve never seen it or feel out of the loop, it might be worth it to dig into the allegations, so to speak. Why is Rocky Horror considered transmisogynistic by some people? What seems to be causing most of the reaction?

S.A.: Rocky Horror is based on a horror template stretching at least back to 1932’s The Old Dark House: a couple of waylaid, straitlaced travelers end up taking shelter in a house full of freaks. See also Beetlejuice and many others. In Rocky Horror, Brad and Janet are our straight couple and Frank-N-Furter is the Freak-in-Chief overseeing a house full of carnivalesque characters. And Frank’s not a great person! He kills someone with an ax almost immediately after being introduced. He has questionable sexual encounters with Brad and Janet that make for uncomfortable viewing today. And then he is essentially penalized for his transgressions with — spoiler alert — death by laser.

So, the argument that this is a transmisogynistic piece of media is essentially that it co-signs the idea that transfeminine people are inherently predatory and need to be punished.

But as we’ve seen with so much horror media, queer people tend to reclaim monstrous and even intentionally hurtful depictions of our community. Villains become icons. Killers become heroes. Does that mean we support violence and murder? No. And this is where we enter rhetorical territory that doesn’t fit in pithy tweets: Queer characters should be allowed to do bad, and even terrible, things. Stories aren’t interesting if everyone is operating with the same set of ethical rules. Movies don’t need to be morality tales.

I think the current discursive flare-up stems from the emerging view that depictions of bad behavior onscreen are equivalent to an endorsement. It reminds me of this meme I saw on Twitter once in which someone had edited violent scenes from Scarface to have a flashing-red chyron informing the viewer: “Murder is bad. Do not do this.”

F.T.: Right? Like, I don’t think Rocky Horror is a good representation of queer people any more than I think Dumb and Dumber is a good representation of cishets! It’s an absurdist farcical comedy, and discarding cultural objects because we think they’re “bad representation,” whatever that means, is kind of anti-intellectual and not to mention extremely un-fun.

Trans people deserve to be villains. In fact, that is progress, to me. Since the end of the Hays Code, LGBTQ+ people have only been openly depicted in film and TV for a little over 50 years. Cishet people have had since the dawn of cinema, by contrast, to create “representation” of themselves. We are really only just now approaching the “2.0” of queer protagonists, which allow us to be messy and complex and even evil. One could argue that Rocky Horror depicting a kind of queer villainy was almost ahead of its time, as we don’t really get queer villains these days as much as we get queer heroes or sympathetic characters. That villainy, as you’ve named, has a basis in transmisogyny or trans panic tropes, but honestly, so does something like 2024’s Netflix movie Uglies, wherein a dystopian society with mandatory cosmetic surgery for all 16-year-olds stars none other than Laverne Cox as the villainous operations leader Dr. Cable. It’s worth mentioning that Cox also played Frank-N-Furter in Fox’s 2016 live TV musical version of Rocky Horror.

As a final challenge, I want to get nerdy and pick apart the semantics: “A sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania.” What are your thoughts on the language of trans identity employed and perhaps flattened in this movie?

S.A.: Oh, God. Obviously a lot is happening in the lyric “a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania,” but to me it reflects the fact that a film audience in the 1970s would see many forms of gender non-conformity as fundamentally the same — and honestly, many viewers still would bunch them all together: In the psychiatric literature, transvestism typically describes something more akin to “cross-dressing” whereas transgenderism describes a deep sense of internal identity that conflicts with your birth-assigned sex — but for a casual consumer of culture, it all kind of gets flattened into a mental image of “man in dress.” There’s no denying that’s how Frank-N-Furter is meant to come across in the original, and the Laverne Cox remake you mentioned is a fascinating (and in my opinion, not super successful) attempt to reinterpret that creative intention for an audience that knows what “transgender” means.

This is where I’m at in my trans grandma journey: I’m in more of a “fewer terms, please” mood lately. There’s something almost endearingly and nostalgically sloppy to me about Frank-N-Furter being a “transvestite” from the town of “Transexual” compared to the almost clinical list of 58 gender options that appeared on Facebook in the 2010s. That doesn’t mean I want to be called a “transvestite” and I’m fine saying so if anyone makes that mistake! But I do kind of accept that most cis people approach gender in a fairly blurry, kind of tactile way.

Maybe it’ll be different for Gen Alpha and beyond, but I’m stuck with the long shadow of Frank-N-Furter and other problematic late 20th-century transfeminine characters. My energy is probably better spent finding people who love, accept, and understand me for who I am than trying to enforce semantic boundaries between various trans identities, or labeling some of them as “outdated” or “offensive.” Even in 2024, there are still plenty of sweet transvestites in the world!

F.T.: Samantha, you are absolutely preaching right now. Any parting words for trans babies looking to get into the discourse?

I would issue a plea to anyone looking to problematize Rocky Horror, or any cultural object really: Dissect it, don’t discard it. Over the last decade, we’ve created an online culture that’s quick to erase, censor, or toss out anything deemed dangerous for marginalized people. But it’s much more interesting to me to dive in, to relish, to find deliciousness in the dated. Ugly Betty remains my favorite TV show ever despite its incredibly problematic depiction of another iconic trans villain, Alexis Meade. So when I talk about it in 2024, I like to make fun of its completely wonky ideas of medical transition, and still enjoy the show in the process. Instead of striking it from the record, you can be a part of ensuring that the context sticks to it.

S.A.: Look, in an era of canceled-upon-release streaming shows and immediately memory-holed movies, we might have to live off the media of the past for a while yet. Does that mean engaging with offensive depictions of our community? Yes. But at least old stuff has a certain sturdiness to it that makes it worthy of discussion. Actors were actually in the same room back then! Movies weren’t all gray and washed-out! I’d personally rather hear the T-slur a dozen times than have to sit through another streaming original in which the dialogue scenes have no blocking, and just play out in shot-reverse-shot for minutes on end.

Thirty years from now, we’ll still probably talk about the 1975 Rocky Horror because it has a permanence to it and the 2016 version will be a barely remembered footnote. We’re stuck with the “problematic” stuff so, as you so sagely put it, we might as well make the most of it.

Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.