‘Mike reiterates gender stereotypes we are trying to destroy’: Trans man Adam Harry

*Spoiler Alert

Mike, the new Malayalam film about a gender non-conforming person, has problems. Many, many problems. From the lyrics of the song it begins with to the presentation of the protagonists, and the approach towards transgender persons and tranisitioning, Mike is written with little research and a lot of issues. Adam Harry, a trans man from Kerala who has watched the recently released film, tells TNM about all that went wrong with the film.

Directed by Vishnu Sivaprasad and written by Ashiq Akbar Ali, Mike released on Friday, August 19. In the film, Anaswara Rajan – a talented young actor – plays the title character of Mike a.k.a. Sarah, a gender non-conforming person from central Kerala who is frustrated by the privileges they can’t have because the society sees them as a girl. Mike is shown wearing loose clothes and cropped hair, walking in the company of men, drinking atop the hills of Idukki. They wish aloud that they were born a boy, so they could come home late or pee anywhere they want to. Mike has a moment before the mirror, when the character looks at themselves as they try to flatten their breasts. In the next scene, we see Mike looking up hospitals that provide gender affirmation surgeries.

“The film will confuse people and give a wrong idea about gender identities and trans persons,” Adam Harry says. “From the time the trailer of the film came out, something seemed amiss. Then they released a song with lyrics that went ‘Kaalam maarana/ Kolam perukayaano / Penne nee’ (are you changing form to suit the times, girl). The frustrations that Sarah/Mike feels in the film may come to many women – but it doesn’t reach the point of surgery. Trans people do not go for surgery to get the privileges of men. The film ends by establishing that Sarah is not a trans person, but a cis woman. Then how does she experience gender incongruence,” Adam asks. 

In fact, the narrative that transgender men are just ‘confused girls’ who want the privileges that men have has been pushed by transphobic, ‘gender critical’ groups across the world, says Ragamalika Karthikeyan, an editor with The News Minute. “It's a narrative used to deny the agency of trans men, even by people who call themselves feminists. It is problematic to have a film that pushes the same agenda, packaged as a progressive project,” Ragamalika says. 

In the film, Mike goes on a journey to Karnataka to get a gender affirming surgery, and meets a man on the way back. Ranjith Sajeev plays a drunk and depressed man, apparently aimless and little aware of what goes on around him. Adam points out how his character — Antony — is shown to be toxic and aggressive, the qualities used in many films to define masculinity. “His character reminded me of Arjun Reddy (a 2017 Telugu film infamous for its misogyny) — a past in college where he fights and beats up everyone, engages in rash driving and violence, besides all that drinking. It is like the script is asserting his masculinity through these descriptions,” Adam says.

Antony's past is in fact the most poorly written part of the lot — none of it makes sense, the sudden burst of anger in an otherwise ordinary college life, a lot of violent fighting, rash driving, and the death of a dear one. Perhaps the writer didn't want Antony's character to just serve as a supporting one to Mike's. It is difficult to see how such a violent man in no control of himself is going to help, but of course the hero always comes to the rescue. In a particularly irksome scene, the newly acquainted Mike and Antony go to a restaurant in the night when some men at the next table misbehave with Mike. Mike reacts the second time, pulling at the guy's hand until he yelps in pain. When Mike later tells Antony gleefully about it, he nods and walks away, but you are shown how he had beat up all the offending men in the bathroom, and that's what scared them. 

“All of it simply underlines the gender stereotypes that we have been trying to destroy. That to be a man you have to drink or smoke or beat up people, and that if you are a woman, you will be soft and caring. Trans men are often asked such questions, whether we ride bikes to prove that we are men. To express our masculinity we don't need toxicity or aggression. Gender identity and gender expression are two entirely different concepts. Whichever gender one belongs to, one can express oneself the way one wants to," Adam explains.

Even Mike, in an attempt to be ‘one of the men’, consistently puts down women, apparently agreeing with the society's definition of what is expected of them. “Why do you worry like a woman? We men don't need that,” Mike says at one point. 

A quick past shows Mike being abused as a child, and a mother who often asks, “why weren't you born as a boy”. “Trans people are often asked if child abuse is the reason they want to transition. Such back stories will only reiterate these wrong ideas. That there are such ‘reasons’ behind a person who identifies with a gender different from the one assigned at birth. And then again, Antony's character is at one point shown to be supportive of Mike's decision. But at another point, he asks Mike why they need a physical transition when they are already behav like a boy. These are manipulative questions,” Adam points out. 

The film ends with a trans man ‘explaining’ to Mike what gender Mike identifies with. This, in Adam's view, is the most problematic of all. No one, not even another trans person, can tell someone what gender they identify with: it is up to the person themselves. Mike is told that their reasons for wanting surgery seem to be a way of fighting the gender prejudices that the society has created against women, and that they can fight these “as a woman”. Such a statement could give entirely wrong ideas about an already little-understood discourse — that trans people going for surgeries are merely confused and a little talk like this could ‘clear’ their head, or that it is simply a ‘phase’ they will come out of. 

Adam, who was initially approached by the filmmakers to play the trans man character, had refused, finding the script problematic. “The first story was that Mike did not go through with their surgery because they had fallen in love with Antony. That is such a hugely wrong idea, which concerns sexual identity and has nothing to do with gender. It shows how little research has gone into the writing of the film,” Adam says. 

This, in fact, is another queerphobic narrative that is widely used to deny LGBTQIA+ people their personhood, Ragamalika adds. “This assumption that their gender or sexuality can be ‘corrected’ if they just meet the right man/woman — that is the whole idea behind corrective rapes as part of conversion therapy practices.”