How Trans Coming-of-Age Comedy ‘She’s the He’ Plays on Locker Room Hysteria to Tackle the ‘Fear Around Every Corner’ of the Trump Era

variety.com:

SXSW on Sunday, high school seniors Alex and Ethan decide during the last week of school to pretend they’re trans so they can sneak into the women’s locker room.

If that sounds like a premise lifted right out of MAGA-era attacks on trans rights, it’s because it is — that’s the point. First-time writer-director Siobhan McCarthy dreamed up the idea just over a year ago, in February 2024, after discovering online that the one high school comedy that spoke to them as a teenager — the 2006 Amanda Bynes comedy “She’s the Man” — was just as formative for many other trans kids.

That led to a conversation with their friend, Will Geare (who co-edited “She’s the He” with McCarthy), about the kinds of trans stories they both wished they’d been able to see when they were younger. “I made a joke about, what if we took that conservative fear of [trans people] going into the bathrooms and we really played that out?” McCarthy tells Variety. “What would that look like?” McCarthy finished the first draft of “She’s the He” just a few days later, and by July, they were shooting the film with a cast and crew that was almost entirely made up of trans, nonbinary and queer people — including all of the background actors.

To achieve that cast, McCarthy leaned heavily on the tiny network of trans professionals within the industry. “It was incredibly difficult to not only find trans people to be in a film — and this many trans people, which is fairly unprecedented — but to then find the right people for the roles we were trying to cast, which is the goal of any film,” McCarthy says.