Inside TGirlsOnFilm: An archive for the future of Trans cinema

In no small part due to the rise and fall of the Nazis, McCarthyism and Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28, there is a scarcity of films exploring Trans Femme narratives. The ones we do have tend to favour Transness deemed palatable for cis audiences, failing to represent the lived truth found within our communities. Typically there are common and harmful tropes used to define Trans Femininity in cinema which diminish us to a cheap joke. Cinema will include trans femme characters solely for the apparent thrill of a genital reveal, or the popular Freudian plot-twist where the closeted Trans or crossdresser turns out to be a perverted, sadistic serial killer obsessed with wearing her mothers clothes. In the words of the late, great Cilla Black: “Surprise, surprise!”

Since Time magazine’s ‘The Transgender Tipping Point’ article in 2014, there has been an increase in Trans femme representation yet many were and still are directed by Cis-men, however the past decade has seen a proliferation of Trans Femme directors and screenwriters, many (but not all) of which Hudson has brought into the programming for BFI Flare 2025: Nyala Moon, Zackary Drucker, Louise Weard, Jane Schoenburn, Victoria Verseau, November Nolan, Theingi Win and Augustine Caille to name a few. However this increase in visibility has sadly come at a price, riling up transphobes and becoming a “political football” in the house of commons and UK legislation. The ‘Trans Issue’ has become a divisive political sound bite used by the right wing in the culture wars to stoke hatred, dehumanise our community and normalise cis people debating whether or not we deserve healthcare, access to public spaces, and basic human rights. This relentless persecution of Trans women is one of the reasons Jaye Hudson’s profound work as the curator behind TGirlsOnFilm is significant to our community now more than ever.

From Medway in Kent, Hudson studied English and Film at the University of Leicester, or in her own words was “trapped in the midlands with lots of girls who went to private school in West London who secretly wanted to be doing drugs in Leeds”. After University Hudson moved in with the head of Fringe Queer Film Festival. Their “friendship bloomed sharing lots of Queer film references with one another…from Pete Burns to Pedro Almodovar.” Eventually Hudson was employed as Marketing and Programming for Fringe Queer Film festival for three years between 2021 to 2023 before taking a step away to focus solely on TGirlsOnFilm in 2023.

Initially setup as an Instagram account celebrating archival clips of iconic Trans Femmes in film – Romy Haag, Angie Stardust, Candy Darling, Amanda Lear, Holly Woodlawn – Hudson describes the early days of the account being “archival in theme but without a physical archive…I’m not Bishopsgate Institute.”

As the account consumed Hudson’s time, a friend and employee of Prince Charles Cinema (Sarah Cleary) contacted Hudson about collaborating on an event. Hudson explains “we didn’t have a moniker but knew we wanted to be programming events. So we teamed up and mapped out this Transploitation series of films for the Prince Charles.” With Cleary now programming her own screenings under the moniker Funeral Parade Presents, Hudson is adamant that without being employed at Dalston’s Rio Cinema and working with Cleary at PCC, her programming career may never have come to fruition due to startup costs and financial constraints. “There’s all these pictures of me in my nappy just staring at a television when I was a small child,” Hudson recalls. “My sister told me she had a nightmare where we’d promised to watch a film together but we didn’t, and then I died, and she was like ‘you always want to watch a film’ so that’s what I’m doing with my community now: just making everyone come and watch a film with me so I’m not on my own.”

I ask Hudson if there was a catalyst for her to venture into film programming. She replies “Many times I had gone to see a film, a Trans documentary or something at the ICA and the audience would titter when one of them was in a dress or whatever and it made me feel uncomfortable.” A self-confessed “frustrated performer at heart”, Hudson’s amiable sense of humour, experience on stage as an actor and witty intelligence has led to regular TGirlsOnFilm introductions, resembling the depth and details of a mini-lecture but with added theatrical flourishes. Humour became a key tool Hudson deftly uses to teach Trans femme audiences about their own history in an accessible manner, breaking down bourgeois academic language and creating an intergenerational dialogue in the process. Hudson’s intent is to broaden the context of each film in the hope that “any cis audience members that would have tittered at the wrong moment feel like they can’t, so it’s turned on them.”

Hudson’s mini-lectures also offer to coalesce these terms into a single thread and weave them through decades of variable socio-political shifts, finally presenting them in a palatable context for her intergenerational audiences. She tells me “It was a way for me to hold their hand, explain that the language or images might seem like it’s bad but actually it’s really revolutionary, or the opposite and talk about why it’s bad and what it meant for people at the time.” These intergenerational dialogues have fostered creative collaborations with Trans femme elders, such as Roz Kaveney (with the Tranny Central zine) and a potential Sex Change! Shock! Horror! Probe! sequel in the works with Kristiene Clarke.

Earlier this year Hudson joined the programming panel for BFI Flare 2025 which involved her watching 200 film submissions. Through this experience she noticed something missing from the current film landscape: “Trans fictions are still a rarity, full-stop…pushed into the documentary space and often times if the writer or main actor is Trans, these projects still feel inauthentic or cliched because the trans creative lacks any power and any influence is oppressed.”

It seems the focus around Trans Femmes being pushed into the documentary space correlates with our value being intrinsically linked to the voyeuristic sell of the transition. Hudson expands upon this, replying “there are lots of documentaries being made that do feel in conversation with our worth being about being prodded and under the needle, I mean that not just in a surgical sense but the glorification of the transition. What it means to be trans is still the same cliches like ‘how did the family react, what did you look like before’.”

But is there anything to be done to prevent certain trends becoming commonplace? She thinks for a moment before saying “a way out of that is to give money to Kickstarters for Trans led projects.” It’s a valid point considering the number of projects being overlooked by institutional funding bodies due to them not ticking the correct boxes.

Hudson brings up the sanitisation of Transness, for example when characters “are inexplicably really strong in every situation and have the perfect comeback for any argument or they have everything done and look gorgeous.” I ask Hudson why she thinks this is the case, and she humorously replies “Oh God, it’s so hard, everyday I wake up and ask myself ‘Why am I not serving Cunt?!” But adds it might be “a holdover from 2010s well-meaning attempts of rectifying 100 years of transphobic imagery, but with Emilia Perez foreboding a different political atmosphere in terms of how the Cis gaze use our cultural relevance.”

TGirlsOnFilm’s programming has included Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, Louise Weard’s Castration Movie, Mervyn Nelson’s Some of my Best Friends Are…, Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, Doris Wishman’s Let Me Die a Woman and many more. But is there anything in particular she looks for when programming? “A lot of my stuff comes from wanting more complicated stories and understanding that progress is not linear”, Hudson explains “But I do think you can see in the wave of Trans Femme directed films we’ve got in the past couple years…has seen the rise of anti-sanitised Transness and it’s very much in conversation with [writers] Torrey Peters or Casey Plett’s work.”

The success of a programming organisation like TGirlsOnFilm is dependent on independent cinemas and spaces. Hudson’s skillset has been honed working at independent Queer-led festivals like Fringe Queer Film Festival and Scottish Queer Film Festival, and she will continue to screen events at smaller Queer-led spaces too such as Fort London and Transmissions at Superstore, because “It’s wherever is community-orientated and cosier and that lacks the threat of the gendered world. I have to be versatile, I have to think broadly and be open.”

Looking towards the future, Hudson is interning at the London Community Video Archive,  programming a series of free screenings at the Museum of the Home in Hoxton; she has just returned from a screening of Kristiene Clark’s Sex Change: Shock! Horror! Probe! at TITE Festival in Dublin and promises “there’ll be more Trannylicious content as I want to continue to research and look into often unscreened moving image work such as television, pornography and archive home movies.” Considering how much she has achieved in a short period of time, I ask her what keeps her driven to continue, she succinctly replies “I think it’s important for trans filmmakers to have a platform and a space for transcentric audiences to relax, learn and get to know one another.” Hudson’s determination to provide a space for Trans femmes has become an integral mission to TGirlsOnFilm, even more so since the recent transphobic Supreme Court rulings. As her audiences’ basic human rights are erased and violently debated, Hudson explains how she’d like to “encourage more cinema spaces and art institutions to stand up for the Trans community, specifically for Trans femme people, by offering employment opportunities and spaces in which they feel safe. It’s not about just putting on Too Wong Foo once a year.”

Follow TGirlsOnFilm on Instagram for information about all their upcoming events.