25 Years Of Transphobia In Comedy

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Later movies of the 2000s have shied away from this trans woman as deceiver trope, replacing it instead with another method for distancing “normal” men from transgender attraction. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the virgin man in question, Andy (Steve Carell) gets set up with a transgender sex worker whom he rejects. Later, Andy confronts his friends about the incident, in a scene rife with transphobic jokes, designed to depict the trans woman as inhuman and disgusting.

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Part of the joke is that Andy’s friend Jay (Romany Malco), who hired the sex worker, couldn’t tell she was trans despite the obvious signs. It’s curious that in a bro comedy genre dominated by white men (none of the previous movies discussed so far have any prominent male minority characters), it’s now the black guy who can’t tell an “obvious” trans woman apart from a cis woman. It seems as though the white male director (Judd Apatow) and screenwriters (Apatow and Carell) were hesitant to have a white man play the part of a trans-attracted male.

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