I don’t have a fairly good memory of my childhood. It’d always been a running joke with my friends and family that they knew my childhood memories better than I did. The memories weren’t missing, or repressed you might assume, but rather morphed into a vague swirl of general feelings and hyper-specific moments bumping into each other like how you heard galaxies formed as kids. Movies tended to be the exception to this though, as I can trace an approximate line of how my personal memories and self evolved right alongside my memories of certain movies. One such specific moment was when I got to see something I didn’t quite know how to process at the time.
There’s no way I could keep track of all the tons of the movies my brother and I watched as kids but I know we were insatiable for anything with Jim Carrey. In 1994 alone he had Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb & Dumber; all three certified masterpieces as far as we were concerned. I was around 5 or 6 at the time and the slapstick antics, exaggerated faces and ridiculous plots kept me giggling along with my older brother who probably got a little more of the jokes than I did. They were all PG-13 so I was a bit below the target audience.
So I don’t remember when or where exactly I saw Ace Ventura for the first time but I do remember my reaction to this scene and this moment in particular (a scene nearly all transwoman of a certain age can unfortunately recall).
Now I was a very young kid watching this and I will admit I didn’t know exactly what was going on. Prior to this, there was a long scene of Ace finding out that the missing football player looked like the Police Lieutenant but I couldn’t figure out what that really meant or why he was soo disgusted by it (There’s a very long montage of him behaving as if he was incredibly unclean, I didn’t feel the need to include that too). So when the big reveal was about to happen I was still in the dark, confused about what exactly Ace was going to reveal. With a big announcement, Ace forcibly shows Lt. Einhorn’s tucked genitals to the entire police force, Dan Marino, Courtney Cox, and the football team’s dolphin to boot.
And yet, I still didn’t know what I was looking at directly on screen. The idea of someone existing as a trans person in their daily life had never crossed my little eyes before. I didn’t even know it was a thing, let alone a possibility. So I watched as immediately after the reveal every single officer throws up in a group disgust reaction like Ace had not a few scenes prior. My precious, dumb little brain had to come up with some answer, people around me were laughing really hard. Hmmmmm. Well the lady had something in her pants that everyone wasn’t expecting, Oh! she pooped her pants!
It wasn’t a great solution I’ll admit (that there wasn’t any stains in her underwear should’ve been a bigger sign) but I accepted that and that was enough. I didn’t know I had just seen my first depiction of a someone living a life as a woman (and passing!) after being assigned male at birth. Now some months, years later, I can’t recall exactly, I must’ve had the realization of what I actually saw at the movie’s climax. I don’t have a specific memory of that moment. And you know, I’m glad.
If I did have a memory of that moment, I would’ve remember realizing that the mere idea, the slightest possibility of being romantic with a transwoman was enough to make any man throw up instantly. I would’ve remembered finding out that no amount of surgeries, hormones, and lifestyle changes would be enough for the world to think of a transwoman as a woman. I would’ve remembered thinking that the people who would even think of changing their gender are deranged mental cases who are a danger to themselves and those around them.
So, this is for that silly little girl who made up her own poop joke to make a movie make sense. That’s a memory I’d like to remember.
TransLana 