Siobhan McCarthy’s new college comedy She’s The He pokes fun at ‘absurd’ trans bathroom bans

When college campuses shut their doors indefinitely in 2020 as Covid-19 began its destruction, Siobhan McCarthy travelled home, and spent time wandering the streets of their Santa Barbara childhood.

Contemplating the people and places that had defined their school years, McCarthy, now 28, dived into a catalogue of “Y2K nostalgia”, bingeing the high school movies they were raised on: Mean Girls, Clueless, Superbad, She’s The Man.

This period of popcorn cinema-flanked solitude sparked an ingenious thought: “It dovetailed so serendipitously into the genesis of an idea that felt like, ‘God, I wish I had had one of the movies that I grew up on when I was a little baby that was about trans folks.”

In 2024, after conversations with their trans friend Will Geare, that nugget of inspiration began to burgeon into something big. She’s The He was born; debut feature filmmaker McCarthy in the writer’s and director’s chair, Geare in the editing suite. A year on, and it’s screening at London Film Festival this month.

The peppy comedy sees high school seniors Alex (comedian Nico Carney) and Ethan (Survival of the Thickest star Misha Osherovich) pretending to be trans women in order to sneak into the women’s bathroom, convince their peers that they’re not gay, and for Alex to make moves on his crush, the school’s diva Sasha (Pretty Little Liars’ Malia Pyles). Along the way on their madcap mission, Ethan realises that hey, maybe she actually is trans. There’s profound, coming-of-age sweet stuff in among the screwball comedy.

In the wrong hands, She’s The He could have taken such a problematic, MAGA left turn that Trump would have put it on his Letterboxd four. In the hands of McCarthy though, it’s a witty and sharp send up of the ridiculousness of anti-trans bathroom laws, at a time where such laws are being parroted as the solution to all gender-based violence.

In making a trans high school comedy in this climate, “the thing made the most sense – which is absurd because it is kind of the most controversial version of this film – was to make the joke talk about bathroom access,” says McCarthy over Zoom, speaking garrulously but articulately. “Because that in and of itself is such an absurd thing to even be discoursing about from the first place, but it was the funniest and most absurd way to tackle the question of what trans identity means.”

She’s The He is also a perhaps subconscious response to factions of the comedy industry today which insist on punching down against trans people, despite the rest of the world already giving them a battering.

“The much more interesting joke to make is the one that’s been made since Shakespeare, which is how funny it is to take someone of a certain lived experience, put them in a different gendered context, and watch how that turns the entire world on its head,” McCarthy explains.

She’s The Man is the perfect example: McCarthy makes the point that in the 2006 comedy, Amanda Bynes’ character Viola (or Sebastian as she becomes known, dressing up as her imagined twin to stop people underestimating her) is never mocked because she’s not “passing” or because male clothes don’t suit her.

“The second those clothes get put on Amanda Bynes… the entire world believes, from jump, that they are exactly who they say they are. And that is so Shakespearean at its root, that basically ‘the clothes make the man’ – that you can put on anything and the world will absolutely ride with you,” McCarthy says.

It’s “a lovely way to speak about transness,” they continue, “because it never makes the commentary or the joke or presses on the idea of passing or passing politics. It just accepts the idea that when someone tells you who they are, the whole world will respond in kind.”

College comedies don’t typically get paid the respect they’re due, at least not outside of the “cult classic” descriptor used in Buzzfeed articles marking their 20th anniversaries. They may be deemed banal, whereas McCarthy’s addition to the canon has layers upon layers. With the political background as its foundation, McCarthy wanted to up the ante.

“From the jump, I knew I wanted to cast trans men as the leading male characters in the film. Even though an audience isn’t necessarily always going to know that, I think it adds a layer of meta comedy to speaking about not only transness in high school, but also the politics of clothing and gender writ large.”

Its cast, made up almost entirely of LGBTQ+ actors, including the extras, is the facet of making She’s The He that still dumbfounds McCarthy. “Making this movie was all blood, sweat, and tears – and pure luck, basically.” The first time they saw Nico Carney act was the day before filming commenced. Malia Pyles was recommended by Pyles’ boyfriend and McCarthy’s friend, trans actor Jordan Gonzalez. Gonzalez also suggested Misha Osherovich, who joined the cast just a month before filming.

“It was such a random happenstance of friends and people that we knew and coming through friends. We barely got the movie put together and I can’t believe how good everyone is,” McCarthy says breathlessly. “It was literally luck! I’ve never had an experience where I’ve been this lucky in my entire life… still to this day, it feels like I need to pinch myself. I can’t believe it happened.”

The world McCarthy was making She’s The He in is different to the one it’s being released in to. Trump, and his inane ramblings about trans folk, are back and louder than ever. Rather than that souring the experience of the film’s release, McCarthy hopes it can be a “balm for how dark the world is” right now.

“The goal from the outset was to create a film that could be seen and viewed by trans people at a sleepover after a bad day of work… to just give them creativity and joy,” they smile.

“It is so interesting that the world has come to meet the film in a way that was both expected by a lot of us on the team, but it’s also been worse than we thought it would be. That being said, no matter how bad things get, the worst thing that any of us can do is go hide and become quiet because the world doesn’t change if we all lose our voices.”

She’s The He plays at London Film Festival on 14 and 16 October. A wider theatrical release date is yet to be announced.

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