THE MONSTER IN ALL OF US
WHEN I SAW BOYS DON’T CRY—the film based on the 1993 rape and murder of a young trans man, Brandon Teena—during its initial release, I threw up in the bathroom of the movie theater. After finishing the film, I went home and, without yet understanding why, re-read Frankenstein, taking what I can only describe as comfort in the “transgender rage” of Victor Frankenstein’s creation described by theorist Susan Stryker in her seminal 1994 paper, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix.” I get all of it now. A monster is, after all, more powerful than a victim.
As a trans woman, Stryker, too, saw something of herself in the wounded being at the heart of Mary Shelley’s novel. She notes that trans people who have altered their bodies through surgical or medical intervention—like the “creature”—“rise up from the operating tables of our rebirth.” Also like
