Debating Authenticity by Paige Macintosh provides an innovative contribution to trans media scholarship, exploring how authenticity claims are constructed and contested through an analysis of structures of authorship, embodiment, and industry dynamics, and how these processes position some film and television texts as more “real” or reflective of trans experience than others. Macintosh, a trans media scholar based in Aotearoa New Zealand with a PhD in Film Studies from Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington, combines theoretical frameworks from phenomenology, paratextual analysis, genre studies, cultural theory and trans scholarship to arrive at a compelling analysis of screen media from across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Just as trans visibility in Western media has increased during this period, frequently described as the “transgender tipping point” after a 2014 Time article in the same title, so has the number of films and television series featuring explicitly trans storylines and characters.

Macintosh’s enquiry adeptly addresses contemporary debates around visibility, calling for movement “beyond arguments about good or bad representation to consider trans media’s relationship with cultural capital and liberal signifiers” (14). They examine the role of trans creatives’ work within mainstream cultural industries, calling for a more capacious consideration of the power structures which govern authorship and production, and interrogate the expectations placed upon trans creatives to produce material considered simultaneously authentic and legible to cis audiences. Consequently, they question the very notion of authenticity conceived through such a framework, criticising the industry’s reliance on neoliberal transition narratives and graphic depictions of trauma as the transgressive capital which produces an overgeneralised set of tropes, rather than reflecting trans people’s actual experiences. This positionality echoes Sandy Stone’s foundational manifesto, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, which outlines the false narrativizing of prospective sex-reassignment surgery patients presenting altered accounts of their lives structured by the necessity to make their experiences legible through medically and culturally accepted models of transition. Macintosh references Stone’s text in their discussion of genre hybridity, where the trans body is described as “a genre – a set of embodied texts” (Stone 1992: 165); in response, they frame trans as a “hybrid genre … that draws on myriad cultural impulses long associated with trans narratives or trans cultural movements” (127). If this volume misses anything, it is an engagement with more recent publications from the discipline of trans studies contesting the concept of authenticity, such as Andrea Long Chu’s Females. There, Long Chu argues that “transition expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire” (Long Chu 2019), positioning trans and cis identity alike as formed in relation to the reciprocal desires of ourselves and others.

Macintosh structures the book in four parts, opening Part I by contextualising their research within the history of trans screen media and prior scholarship within the field. They cite Caél Keegan and Eliza Steinbock who embrace an “inclusive approach to trans media” (6), considering the power of trans viewers to encounter unexpected affinities with non-traditional trans narratives and media outside of the established canon. To illustrate this, Macintosh calls on the way in which the Wachowskis’ transition raised questions “about what constituted a trans film” (7), highlighting the unknowability of filmmakers’ identities to develop a complex understanding of trans cinema which reaches beyond the representation of recognisable trans identities as the genre’s primary investment. Additionally, they highlight media industries’ behind-the-scenes use of trans creatives including writers, performers and consultants “to legitimise trans products … confirming the work’s cultural credibility” (10), further complicating authorship debates.

In the following parts, Macintosh revisits questions raised in their previous publications in the New Review of Film and Television Studies and Global Storytelling, concerning Tangerine (Baker, US, 2015) and Euphoria (Levinson, US, 2019-present) respectively. They analyse the conditions of production and reception for trans films entering the festival circuit, orienting their discussion around A Fantastic Woman (Lelio, Chile, 2017), Girl (Dhont, Belgium, 2018) and Adam (Ernst, US, 2019). Macintosh notes that the films which tend to succeed at film festivals are those committed to neoliberal politics favouring a “normative treatment of queer and trans audiences” (31); furthermore, limited access to festivals shapes reception as overwhelmingly cis critics “determine upcoming trans content’s perceived value” (46). Their discussion of Adam in particular outlines the film’s controversial reception by trans audiences, demonstrating the pressure on trans authors to create authentic products and defend them from both intra-community and external criticism. They also examine the conditions for the production and proliferation of trans content in the multi-platform age, considering the cultural legitimacy of Pose (Murphy, Falchuck and Canals, US, 2018–2021) and analysing the capacity of shows featuring trans content, such as Euphoria, to become prized sources of transgressive content for platforms like HBO, committed to ‘edgy’ programming and the reflection of emerging cultural discourses. Finally, Macintosh looks to genre studies, outlining their characterisation of a developing trans aesthetic uniquely hybridising gothic horror and science fiction with conventions of the musical and classic melodrama – seemingly disparate genres invested in spectacle. To support their argument, they analyse the generic composition of Jupiter Ascending (Wachowski and Wachowski, US, 2015), Repo! The Genetic Opera (Bousman, US, 2008) and Steven Universe (Sugar, US, 2013–2019), highlighting how sublimated trans content may become legible to trans and queer audiences despite the lack of obvious representations or common trans tropes.

At the end of 2025, trans screen studies remains an under-researched field, particularly considering the plethora of trans themes which have appeared in cinema for over a century both directly and implicitly. While the uptake of trans content in film within academic research has increased in the last few years, with recent publications including Maclay and Gardner’s Corpses, Fools and Monsters (Repeater, 2024), Bell-Metereau’s Transgender Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Richardson and Smith’s Trans Representations in Contemporary, Popular Cinema (Routledge, 2022), a particular success of Macintosh’s book is their multidisciplinary approach which calls for a broader classification of trans media. Moving beyond discussions of positive or negative representation of trans characters, which echo audiences and critics’ debates surrounding the frequently perverse themes of New Queer Cinema in the 1990s, what Macintosh does exceptionally is foreground the capacity of trans audiences to read ‘between the lines’ of a vast range of screen media. Their analysis aligns with theories of genre and a phenomenological approach, which draws on Henry Rubin’s suggestion of the method’s usefulness for trans subjects due to its recognition of the significance of individual lived experience. Through this approach, Macintosh is able to reflect on the trans aesthetic as a densely citational language which facilitates the inclusion of less conventional media into the canon through their new theory of trans aesthetics.

While Macintosh’s examples include, among others, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (Schoenbrun, US, 2024) and Darren Lynn Bousman’s Repo! The Genetic Opera, their theorisation will surely be built on and extended to a vast range of screen media by other scholars. In particular, I hope to see further research applying their theory of aesthetics, phenomenology and haptic visuality to the directorial work of David Cronenberg, including his 2022 science fiction body horror drama Crimes of the Future, which was widely interpreted in online forums as exploring themes relevant to trans experience. Likewise, echoes of what Macintosh describes as an emerging trans aesthetic resonate through Vera Drew’s 2022 The People’s Joker: a maximalist, densely citational parody of superhero films which inventively documents Drew’s own transition. Here, transition is not positioned as the reveal of an ‘authentic’, individualised self, rendered legible to cis audiences, but instead as a hectic process of identity formation through comedy, relationality and affinity – to people, fictional characters, cultural texts – creating a truly hybrid genre.