What an infuriating film.
I remember the first time I watched this, in a friend's dorm room nearly two decades ago. They knew I'd like the glam rock; they didn't know I was a woman. The song "Wig in a Box" tore me apart inside, touched the edges of the knowledge of myself that I was so afraid of and so desperate to understand and to live. I couldn't explain it then, but the movie felt so powerful to me. And yet, so... wrong.
The themes of identity and gender and sexuality indulged in this film reflect an incomplete understanding of what it means to be trans. They're a reflection of the dialectics of gender theory present over the course…