Building the New Queer Canon is a monthly column exploring a new or rediscovered LGBTQIA+ film, and whether it deserves inclusion in an ever-growing “canon” of queer cinema. VV’s She’s the He essay contains spoilers. Siobhan McCarthy’s 2025 film features Suzanne Cryer, Misha Osherovich and Mark Indelicato. Check out more movie coverage in the film essays section.

Have the lowbrow teen comedies that reigned supreme from the 1980s to the late 2000s disproportionately affected how the heterosexual public at large view queer people? Decades of gags at the expense of gay men and transgender women — who were largely only visible in Hollywood as the butts of mocking jokes — certainly didn’t help with progress on that front, although it’s only through subverting the formula of a raunchy coming-of-age comedy where you can come to terms with how many of the narrative tropes have fed into the current iteration of the endless anti-LGBTQ moral panic. However, She’s the He, the delightful directorial debut of nonbinary filmmaker Siobhan McCarthy, doesn’t aim to deconstruct the genre so much as find a place for queer and trans identity, even within its most regressive form, boasting a narrative that would likely have few changes if it were produced as a reactionary original by The Daily Wire instead.

Starting from a place that’s instantly familiar to anybody who has ever seen American Pie (1999) or Superbad (2007), McCarthy introduces lifelong best friends Ethan (Misha Osherovich) and Alex (Nico Carney) — two high school teenagers determined to lose their virginity before heading to college (the fact they’re perceived as a gay couple by their peers hasn’t helped matters). Ethan is on the verge of her egg cracking, but before she can tell her perpetually horny best friend that she’s begun questioning her gender identity and might be a woman, Alex comes up with a particularly problematic scheme to get laid: pretending to be trans to get into the girls’ locker rooms. Yes, it’s a staple of the genre since it was first mined for laughs in Porky’s (1981) more than 40 years ago, but its wider moral implications have never been assessed once the set piece’s laughs have dried out. Typically, it’s just one of several schemes a teenage boy character –typically the live wire sidekick — would come up with to see boobs and hasn’t warranted any deeper analysis beyond just how creepy the setup is, no matter how self-aware the film around it might be.

She’s the He Essay: Related — Building the New Queer Canon #1: Isao Fujisawa’s ‘Bye Bye Love (Baibai Rabu)’

In She’s the He, the central plan derails the very formula of the genre itself, initiating a push-and-pull between the two friends that could easily be a metaphor for the existential quandary about continuing to perpetuate its most enduring tropes. How much can the stupidity of a teenage boy take center stage at the expense of someone who would have previously been nothing more than a punchline in their story before the viewer starts laughing with them and not at them? It’s a storytelling experiment McCarthy takes on with ease, as the broad and crass sex comedy slowly diverts into an earnest coming out story without diluting the misjudged behavior of the male lead. Making mistakes is a narrative necessity of any coming-of-age story, and the writer/director manages to use that cluelessness to help add tension to a trans coming out story set within an otherwise warm and accepting crowd.

She’s the He Essay: Related — Building the New Queer Canon #2: Bruce LaBruce’s ‘The Visitor’

The film’s two most apparent influences are Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) and Emma Seligman’s Bottoms (2023), which both feel like crucial stepping stones in the integration of queer characters into mainstream teen comedies. Yes, Wright’s protagonist, played with typical aloofness by Michael Cera, was in his early 20s, but his overall arrested development — Cera pun not intended — rendered him an overgrown teenager in a sea of other young adults who similarly hadn’t got their shit figured out. The PG-13 studio comedy had one of the fastest turn arounds from box office disappointment to cult favorite we’ve seen this century, and a key factor in this might be the blasé attitude it took towards including a myriad of openly queer characters, whose sex lives weren’t sanitized for the sake of an MPAA rating. For closeted teenage viewers, seeing LGBTQ characters who were central to the ensemble, not included as mere punchlines for the straight protagonist to encounter, would have been eye-opening; that it escaped the fate of an R rating is an under-discussed watershed moment in the easing of censorship on queer stories. On a far lower budget, McCarthy adopts something akin to its visual sensibility, aping the grammar of comic books via alliterative drawings which accompany character movements; the director introduces the story by highlighting the genre at its most cartoonish and artificial, gradually shattering this archness as it progresses.

She’s the He Essay: Related — Building the New Queer Canon #3: Olmo Schnabel’s ‘Pet Shop Days’

The raucousness of Bottoms is a more apparent point of comparison, similarly focusing on two protagonists who have come up with a deeply problematic ruse in the name of getting laid — two lesbian teens (played by the noticeably not-teenage Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott) start an all-girl fight club with the ulterior motive of getting to touch up the popular girls. Already divorced from reality at its offset, the gradual descent into Fight Club-style hyper-violence and gendered attacks from the male antagonists transforms the story into nihilistic slapstick, following the influence and irreverence of prior queer cinema pioneers like John Waters to confront the darker side of contemporary teenage life through jet black comedy. She’s the He is far more palatable to a casual viewer, not looking to provoke an animated response in the same way, but does similarly depict a full breakdown in relations between the sexes once the school’s gaggle of jock dudes decide to start dressing as women to infiltrate the girl’s locker rooms for themselves. It’s the moment where the film firmly confronts The Daily Wire-esque trans panic comedy it shares a template with, directly addressing the kind of reactionary headlines about trans people using public bathrooms.

She’s the He Essay: Related — Building the New Queer Canon #4: Louise Weard’s ‘Castration Movie’

I don’t want She’s the He’s political commentary to overshadow the tender, genuinely touching coming-out story at its core. Even to a cis viewer like myself, it’s always apparent when trans and non-binary creatives shape stories of gender awakenings, but even with that semblance of personal experience on the table, it’s still close to miraculous that intimate moments can register so powerfully when surrounded by bawdy sex gags. A heartfelt self-awakening story isn’t cheapened by sharing space with lowbrow genitalia jokes — quite the opposite in fact. More so than any previous queering of the teen sex comedy genre, She’s the He is a successful attempt at not just carving out a space for LGBTQ identity amidst the overbearingly heterosexual narrative tropes, but also bending those tropes so they can fit into a tale of trans awakening, not the other way round. Even more importantly, McCarthy’s film wears this subversive weight lightly; one can happily enjoy She’s the He at face value as a silly teen sex comedy and still find it as refreshing as it is funny.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

She’s the He Essay: Related — Building the New Queer Canon #5: Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex/Dreams/Love Trilogy