For the last six months I’ve been working on the screenplay for a trans adventure movie/play. I just completed the first draft.
The story is about two French-Canadian trans people as they attend the World Lumberjane competition in the UK. At one point these absent-minded characters get lost, and are seen close to the axes on television. This kick-starts a new moral panic that devolves into “Rapid Onset Violent Transgenders”. The rest of the story is the characters trying to get home and all the ridiculous things that happen on the way.
This first draft isn’t good. The writing is juvenile overall; it’s preachy; the dialog is too similar between characters; the end too abrupt; etc etc. Furthermore, the humour in this screenplay relies on the absurdity of this anti-trans moment, but reality just keeps outdoing anything I come up with. We’re in the third week of January, and there’s already 321 bills in American legislatures this year to purge society of trans people. My hometown saw unprecedented organized transphobia. Politicians are jumping on the trans thing being more transparent than ever about eliminationist objectives:
So I come up with absurdly terrible stuff for this screenplay, and then these transphobes just outdo the fiction. I revise my work accordingly.
My current intent is to get to a second draft. I don’t know how long that will take.