Doctor Who Gave Us A Trans Villain We Can Stand Behind

Image; BBC

When we first meet Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon) in The Devil's Chord, they burst energetically out of the hood of a piano fully at an 11 out of 10. Everything about them is over-the-top. They are an otherworldly being personifying music itself, and they love the tones created by nuclear armageddon most of all.

It's obvious that the Maestro must be stopped — they are the villain, after all. Our heroes, the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), spend the rest of the episode trying to defeat a villain propelled not by shame or stigmatization but by an unabashed confidence in their desires and wants—a characterization that is rare in trans media, even today.

The trope of trans villainy

Hollywood has a long history of demonizing queer people, particularly gender "deviant" people. Sitcoms ranging from The Jeffersons (1975-1985) to The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957-1960) have long played gender nonconformity for laughs, and you don't have to look too much to find downright villainous portrayals.

For example, the infamous Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho (1960) centers on such "deviancy" as a plot twist. The entire film focuses on the murders happening at the infamous Bates Motel. The viewer is led to believe that the mother of the motel proprietor is somehow responsible, but you ultimately learn that she is dead.

Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) has been cross-dressing as her as the result of an alleged mental breakdown. His gender nonconformity is quite deadly.

This legacy relates to The Motion Picture Production or "Hay's" Code (1934-1968) and The Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952-1983), which validated society's anti-queer norms by demonizing LGBTQ+ representation in media. While transness was not referenced directly, the Hay's Code insisted on films portraying the "correct standards of life." The Television Code was more explicit, saying that "criminality," which gender nonconformity was at the time, "shall be presented as undesirable and unsympathetic."

And even when these codes were repealed, this negative stereotype lingered.

For the longest time, the go-to association for a trans person was the serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) from The Silence of the Lambs (1991), who was skinning women alive to create a body suit in order to, as actress Jen Richards remarks in the documentary Disclosure (2020), "appropriate the female form." Before that, there was the murderous Angela Baker (Felissa Rose) in Sleepaway Camp (1983) or the vindictive Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) in Dressed to Kill (1980).

Trans characters should be allowed to be villains — trying to make trans characters positive all the time is equally problematic — but their gender dysphoria shouldn't cause their villainy. That paints the unhelpful association that being trans causes people to be "bad."

There are still transphobic films that get made that fall within the trope of trans villainy, but they are not as common in the present moment, and new tropes are thankfully being built in their stead.

The breaking of the trope

As we have started to move past this antiquated vision of trans villainy, the way trans villains have been depicted has started to become more multifaceted.

A great early example of this is The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), with the vicious alien scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry). While the film was undoubtedly constrained by the norms of the time, there is more empathy for Frank-N-Furter than we see in prior and even many future portrayals of gender nonconformity. When they die at the hands of their former allies Riff Raff (Richard O'Brien) and Magenta (Patricia Quinn), it is played as something the audience should feel sad about — not something to laugh at or applaud.

Mr. Robot (2015–2019) is another more modern example of this three-dimensionality. As the leader of the Dark Army terrorist group, the trans character Whiterose (BD Wong) is brutal in enacting her vision for world domination. She serves as one of the show's primary antagonists, but her actions are driven out of a more philosophical aim to make the world better than out of some innate depravity.

Yet both these examples, although multifaceted, are rooted in the shame that comes with society's rejection of queer people. Frank-N-Furter does not feel like they belong anywhere in the universe, melancholically singing how they feel unease wherever they go (see the song I'm Going Home).

Likewise, Whiterose is driven by a desire to assert herself in a world that hates her. She has been closeted her entire life because she does not think it's possible to assert her identity and hold onto power at the same time. Whiterose has used her vast fortune to invest in a magical type of fringe science that will allegedly remake reality into something not so terrible.

Maestro is different from these portrayals in the sense that they are not of this world. Born outside the universe, they are a queer writer's imagination of what queer evil would be like untethered from the taboos of modern society. When Maestro is first introduced in 1925, a man misgenders them, and they confidently correct him, unbothered by the potential backlash that could ensue.

"I'm them," they explain, bored by the man's very presence.

There is no shame surrounding Maestro's portrayal. Although they may be homicidal and dastardly, they know who they are and do not care about our society's conventions.

In fact, they break them. Maestro steals music from all of humanity for their own selfish desires, and I couldn't be happier to see it (on-screen).

A disconcordant conclusion

Of course, it's impossible to write a character who is truly detached from the norms of our society, as the writer who births them is inevitably very much attached to such things. We are always implicitly discussing the present, even when focused on the fictional past.

Yet it's interesting to see the outline of what transness can look like detached from shame. We talk about pride so much within the queer community. It was a necessary defense mechanism in response to a society that shamed queer people into oblivion.

In Maestro, I see the next step: the glimpses of a world without shame — nuclear apocalypses and all.