Transitioning, obviously, is a constant process. I’m going to be on hormones for presumably my entire life, and it’s not as if your changes stop the second you reach one year—I’ve had friends joke that the essence of transitioning is getting hotter every day—but I’m at a point where I’m settled into my body, I’m used to the sound of my own name, I’m comfortable in my identity and the way I express it to others. Whilst I’m always going to be transitioning, it’s clear to me that, in some ways, I have already transitioned.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about this distinction, especially in the context of writing about my own queerness and my own experience as a trans woman. Especially with the music I write and (supposedly, I’m working on it) perform, I’m concerned with how I think about transness—I’m scared that so much of what I write revolves exclusively around it, but I worry that to not address it would be to cut out a part of myself. It’s hard trying to draw out the mythical personal voice that innately exists within all of us without wondering that my own is a gimmick, an identity marker in place of an identity.

And I can’t help but project these feelings onto the art that I consume. A good part of this, I believe, comes from the labelling of any media made by trans people as trans media. Take the hyperpop genre, for example, a music scene defined by its vocal shifting, experimentation and noisy deconstruction of what pop music actually means, and long associated with the trans community. A Pitchfork article on “hyperpoptimism” identifies the genre’s “cathartic breakbeats” and “pitched-up vocal aesthetic” as allowing trans people to come to terms with their identity (and semi-jokingly notes that “some artists have called the [genre] label a slur”). It’s easy to hear the genre name and immediately think of the trans artists, including the late SOPHIE, who have made it what it is. What happens, then, when a prolific trans musician moves away from the experimental explosion of sound that is hyperpop, and instead decides to expand their range of influences, to explore genres of music less inherently associated with their identity?

I am, of course, thinking about April Harper Grey, AKA underscores, and her stunning 2026 album U (that I have previously expressed my adoration for!). As opposed to previous release Wallsocket, an album much more intrinsically tied to trans identity, U feels concerned, more than anything, with the idea of the popstar, expanding its field of influence to the mastery of pop music in all of its forms: EDM, dubstep, 2000s Imogen Heap-esque synthpop tracks, the mythical pop ballad. It feels reductive to label it as simply hyperpop, almost as more of the same—Sputnikmusic’s review of U describes it as “hyper pop with a capitol “P”,” NME labels it as “zeitgeisty hyperpop for an overstimulated, isolated generation,” and Spectrum Pulse uses the album to facilitate a wider discussion about music “for the girls,” and more specifically, “for the dolls.” Whilst there is, undeniably, always going to be a level of identity-related influence that comes with making art (who would have thought that your personal voice is influenced by who you are as a person?) it feels as if people are quick to label work by transgender artists as, first and foremost, transgender art.

Whilst these are thoughts that I have sat with for quite some time, they’ve been set off by another, even more recent, piece of media, Jane Schoenbrun’s stunning new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. A love letter to shitty horror and the bundle of complicated emotions that come from it, the film follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a breakthrough director who is tasked with rebooting the fictional Camp Miasma franchise, a series of problematic 1980s slashers. Unable to fully explain what about the franchise she finds so compelling, Kris becomes infatuated with recluse actress Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original Miasma film, and the two of them begin to fall down a spiral of obsession, desire, and delightfully dramatic fake blood.

Kris is introduced in a position not unlike my own. Having been out as queer for two years, settled into her filmmaking career and a(n ultimately unfulfilling) relationship, we are introduced to her in a kind of slump that, if anything, seems entirely unrelated to her status of in-or-out-of-the-closet-ness. Her academic fixation on the horror of the 80s belies a deeper sense of repression, as beneath the “flesh and fluids” of the titular film franchise lies a more personal feeling of desire that Kris is unable to truly express. Through this creative process (and her increasingly intimate relationship with Billy), however, she is able to re-examine her own queer identity in an environment decidedly without labels, without the academic pressure of being an indie filmmaker, and reach into a part of herself that goes beyond just the title of queerness. It’s an incredible watch, affecting me in a way that no movie has in quite some time, possibly since Schoenbrun’s previous film, the quintessential trans experience of 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow. I was half expecting to come out of Miasma with the same takeaway—“wow, I need to transition MORE”—and instead was met with something that surprisingly resonated even more with me: a trans filmmaker, making a movie that is decidedly not just about being trans, but about the kinds of feelings that I’m now better equipped to explore now that the initial phase of my transition is complete.

It’s not that Camp Miasma isn’t about transness whatsoever. Jack Haven plays the fictional series’ iconic villain Little Death, a bullied transgender teen, transformed into a menacing monster with an air vent for a face and a massive spear, who emerges from a nearby lake to hunt the people unfortunate enough to stay at the titular camp. The topic is handled with a refreshing level of fun, taking the trans-coded serial killer trope from films like Silence of the Lambs and turning into a cathartic bloodbath of transphobia-induced anger—but it’s only an aspect of the film’s overall message: that even the most mediocre, potentially problematic media can still reveal something about ourselves, and that we have to be open to the ways that media affects us, shapes us, brings out the parts of us that we’ve pushed down. In this way, Schoenbrun presents a narrative not necessarily centred around trans identity, one which doesn’t fall into a coming out story, but rather one in which the characters are queer, their queerness does influence them, but their troubles appear to them only after they have settled into their identity. Kris’s problem isn’t that she can’t accept her sexuality, but that she needs to do something with it. She’s a character who’s gotten past these initial stages and is now allowed to think about sex and desire and shame in a way not many queer characters are allowed to, much in the same way that I, in my own developing sense of stability in my identity, am able to experience joy and heartbreak and pride and peace in a way that I couldn’t have dreamed of even two years ago. I can, the further away I get from the conventional coming out narrative, begin to envision a life for myself that doesn’t simply hinge upon the “what if” of being a woman.

I am endlessly grateful to live in a world where art like I Saw the TV Glow and Wallsocket exists—they absolutely changed my world at a time when I sorely needed them‚ showing a kind of comfort in the familiar hum of the television, or in the bombastic affirmation that “girls, like us, are rotten to the core.” Those who are currently going through the terrifying process of coming to terms with themselves, finding for the first time the words and labels to describe their innermost feelings, absolutely need something like I Saw the TV Glow, a confronting mirror to really, truly look inwards with, but I’m so excited that as they settle into themselves, they have these other incredible works of art to grow and change alongside. Yes, the label of trans art seems inescapable, for better or for worse, but it’s clear that there exists a world of creative possibility that exists alongside it. You don’t stop existing as a trans artist, the transition process is never really done, but there’s incredible beauty in becoming a transitioned artist.