Emilia Pérez Is Mediocre Trans Representation

Image; Netflix

If you have been following the 2025 Oscars, you’ve probably heard about Emilia Pérez (2024), the film about a transgender crime lord who stages her own death so she can start over a new life as her preferred gender. The film’s namesake is for this new identity, Emilia Pérez, that she takes on post-transition, and much of the film is about her wrestling with the horrors of her previous life.

A film with this subject matter is naturally going to earn some criticism. We are currently undergoing a global moral panic toward transgender people, and so a big-budget movie that centers a transgender character so prominently will receive a lot of negative reactions, especially from far-right actors.

Yet this film also generated much criticism from people on the left, so I wanted to dive into some of the film’s less ideal elements and what they mean for trans representation overall.

The technical issues

Some of the criticisms of this film are technical. Emilia Pérez straddles the musical and drama genres but does not fully commit to either. It’s both, which means some of these elements occasionally get lost in the shuffle.

It has a fairly hackneyed plot that is a cross between Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and Gone Girl (2014). Emilia spends much of the movie pretending to be a long-lost aunt just so she can spend time around her children, and that premise has an insidious quality to it that I don’t think is ever genuinely reckoned with.

Emilia Pérez continuously does more selfish and self-centered things, and because she has money, she can more or less get away with them. Her desires ping-pong so frequently that viewers will find themselves returning to that money argument throughout the film as she strains her secret identity to its breaking point.

Yet no one ever finds out about her past until she willingly discloses it on her deathbed.

Then there are the film’s musical elements. Much of Emilia Pérez’s songs are just okay. They are not pop hits that will have you returning for more, like Spotify sensations such as Hadestown (2006) and Dear Evan Hansen (2016), but often little ditties that end almost as quickly as they start. The songs in Emilia Pérez are at their best when they are raw reflections on how its characters feel in the moment.

My favorite is Deseo, sung by Emilia Pérez during the early stages of her transition. She spends most of the earlier half of the film awkwardly mumble-singing to the point where you can barely understand her. And then, in Deseo, she starts to talk about how she wants to transition, and you hear a bittersweet song of longing escape her lips, and it’s beautiful. It honestly brought me to tears, and I thought the setup was done competently.

Yet I am not going to listen to Deseo or any other song in this movie on Spotify as I would for Wicked (2024)— another Oscar-nominated musical released this year — because none of them stand on their own as songs, except for maybe the song El Mal. And that’s frankly fine. I don’t think every musical needs to be separated from its context so you can listen to it while driving to work, or at the gym, or whatever.

That’s not my issue with Emilia Pérez as a musical. My problem is that some of its songs are just bad. The song La Vaginoplastia has been pilloried on the Internet a lot, but stylistically, that song has more legs than, say, Lady, which was painful for me to get through. When the lawyer character Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) sang dud lines in Lady, such as “changing the body changes society,” I had to pause the film and restart the song several times just to get through it.

All of this is to say that I understand the criticisms that this movie sometimes falls flat. It has some good moments but also some utterly incompetent ones that left me scratching my head.

Ugh, the politics

Now, there is a larger criticism going around in queer circles about how the film is appropriative. Many queer outlets dismissed it as regressive, with GLAAD calling it a “step backward for trans representation” and Amelia Hansford of PinkNews claiming it was “vacuous in its messaging and yet so confident in its conviction.”

The YouTuber Jessie Gender went even further, asserting that the film centers on cisgenderness throughout the entire process. In their video essay, The Racist Cisgender Nonsense of Emilia Pérez, they argue:

It's kind of wild that the film spends 15 whole minutes grounding us in Rita’s struggles and perspective before we even meet Amelia Perez, the titular trans woman…Rita’s perspective serves as a convenient entry point for cisgender audiences into Amilia Pérez…The film is not about centering Amelia’s interiority, instead we’re shown her through a cisgender externalized lens.

And yes, the film suffers from that problem.

Think about the most viral scene in this movie: the one where Rita travels to Bangkok to learn all about the various surgeries a transgender person can undergo. The viewer experiences this via a musical number where Rita is bombarded with all the various terms for gender-affirming surgeries, and yet these surgeries are never contextualized.

Seriously, the song is called La Vaginoplastia, but I don’t think the average viewer would walk away understanding what that is. It’s simply this wacky magical experience to Rita, and that’s a very outside-looking-in perspective.

There are a lot of details, both technical and emotional, that the film skips over. We see none of the various issues that come with waiting for the body to heal in between surgeries (because there are many, not just one) or the emotional turmoil that occurs as one waits in that in-between: a topic that would have occurred if this film was less centered on the cisgendered experience.

Instead, we essentially skip that lengthy period and jump to four years later, after Emilia has already perfectly integrated into womanhood. There is no attempt to humanize this experience, and quite frankly, I think the reason for that is, again, that the writers didn’t want to include that interiority—the film's transgenderness was merely set dressing.

Other issues have been brought up, too. Emilia Pérez’s deadname is used frequently after her transition. There is also an argument Jessie Gender proposes that the film frames transness as dangerous. But I think you get the point: for a film so focused on trans representation, its trans representation isn’t very good.

An angry, trans conclusion

Emilia Pérez is not a great film. I would not even classify it as a good film. It’s a middling movie that occasionally hits on some good points but is mostly tired and sometimes offensive.

It’s the type of appropriative movie I expect to see whenever a marginalized identity enters the spotlight, and that’s okay. It’s fine for there to be a trans film that is mediocre. One of the bigger problems with media representation right now is that there are not a lot of mainstream trans characters overall, so subpar pieces of work end up meaning more than they should.

Truthfully, Emilia Pérez is only in the spotlight right now because of the ongoing moral panic toward trans people. A lot of cisgender people in the Academy wanted to make a statement about their support for trans rights, and this is the film that was available to meet their arbitrary standards. While elevating a mediocre movie to make such a statement is paternalistic and arguably transphobic (and I would have much preferred we elevated a trans director with a good film to have made that statement), it’s the type of token allyship I have come to expect from Hollywood.

Is that better than the regressive backlash we are experiencing from conservatives?

Yes, I would much rather suffer through these bad attempts at allyship so cisgender directors can learn from our community’s criticisms than the alternative. But hopefully, we can transition to a third, more progressive option during next year’s Oscars, where we celebrate trans films that are actually good.

In the meantime, if you want to see a trans film released last year that was neither offensive nor terrible, go see I Saw the TV Glow.