The Anti-Trans Cowardice of ‘White Lotus’
Image; Max
Max’s White Lotus (2021–present) is a show that advertises itself first and foremost as a satire. First Hawaii, then Italy, and now, in its third season, Thailand; it is an anthology in which each season takes place at one of the prestigious and fictional White Lotus hotel chain locations, where the rich and powerful go to play.
The show has prided itself on being a biting exploration of the intricacies and cruelties of the wealthy. Every season, we follow a cast of vain, petty, and sometimes self-aware characters on their vacations, along with a few hotel staff, as the viewer tries to suss out which of them will be the perpetrator of a violent crime, usually a murder. It’s a fun premise, and the show has developed quite the following. (I believe, in no small part, due to its bop of a theme song in the second season.)
Yet despite excellent acting and a tantalizing premise, when it comes to trans representation, the third season provided a toothless and occasionally offensive commentary — one that deserves criticism as the U.S. entertainment industry slides further into a reactionary backlash.
What is and is not missing
If you have been following the discourse around White Lotus, you may be aware that a minor trans subplot was cut following the 2024 election of Donald Trump. A group of friends gets into a minor argument about one of them voting for Trump, and one of the more liberal characters is meant to reveal that they have a nonbinary child. As actress Carrie Coon (who played Laurie) tells Harper’s Bazaar:
You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans, and going by they/them. You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting. It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question [in episode 3] of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world.
The reason this minor scene was cut was allegedly because showrunner Mike White felt the reaction would overwhelm the narrative. He rationalized to The Hollywood Reporter, saying:
[The trans storyline] felt right in March of last year. Now, [that Trump has been reelected] there’s a vibe shift. I don’t think that it was radical, but that’s not the kind of attention I want. The politics of it could overwhelm whatever ideas I’m trying to talk about.
This is a cowardly excuse.
Mike, I am sorry this trans backlash is inconvenient to your show about rich people being mean to each other while eating salads. It must be nice to be in charge of a successful project so focused on white, cisgender heterosexism that you can choose to avoid reactionary criticism.
It’s the type of reasoning that would have made me upset by itself, but after the showrunner admitted to cutting this scene because the stakes were suddenly higher, it incensed me that the trans scenes he did include skewed in a decidedly more conservative direction.
One of them is small.
The second episode (Special Treatments) has the white evangelical Ratliff family reacting to Kathoey servers at the hotel with mockery (Kathoey refers to a third gender in Thailand), using the fraught term “ladyboy” instead. “You know what they say,” the arrogant older brother Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger) quips, “Having sex in Thailand is like eating a box of chocolates. You never know which one’s gonna have nuts.”
It’s not a scene affirming that perspective (Saxon is consistently portrayed as an asshole), but since we don’t have Carrie Coon’s counterbalancing scene, it doesn’t take much of a stance on Ratliff’s bigotry one way or the other.
It’s frustrating that the show’s creator felt comfortable including this conservative anti-trans reaction, and cutting the more liberal, affirming one, and that again speaks to the showrunners' level of cowardice. It seems Mike White is okay reflecting the bigotry of the rich, but his criticism of that bigotry is not as decisive as many other critics believed.
And that is before getting to the more salacious bit of commentary, which is that after axing this scene, he also decided to keep in one of the more offensive trans stereotypes of the last century.
The autogynephilia of it all
In episode five (Full Moon Party), the character Rick (Walton Goggins) meets his friend Frank (Sam Rockwell), who gives a monologue explaining his orientalist fantasy of wanting to be an asian woman due to a sexual fetish:
…One night I took home some girl, turned out to be a ladyboy, which I’d done before, but this time, instead of fucking the ladyboy, the ladyboy fucked me. And it was kinda magical. And I got in my head that what I really wanted, was to be one of these Asian girls, getting fucked by me and to feel that.
.…So I put out an ad, looking for a White guy, my age, to come over and fuck me…I got addicted to that. Some nights, three, four guys would come over, and rail the shit out of me. Some I even had to pay. And at the same time, I’d hire an Asian girl to just sit there and watch the whole thing. I’d look in her eyes while some guy was fucking me, and I’d think ‘I am her and I’m fucking me.’
This trope of a man deriving sexual or romantic pleasure from the thought of being a woman has a name in anti-trans circles, autogynephilia. The psychologist Ray Blanchard coined the term in 1989 in his paper, The Concept of autogynephilia and the Typology of male gender dysphoria. In it, he proposed the hypothesis: “that all gender-dysphoric males who are not sexually aroused by men (homosexual) are instead sexually aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women (autogynephilic).”
In other words, a person’s transness is not about their gender, but really related to their sexual orientation. They are either, as YouTuber Natalie Wynn quips facetiously, “effeminate gay men who can’t get enough dick” or “inscrutable perverts who can apparently get off just by looking in the mirror.”
It is essential to stress that this is a false narrative that does not align with the mainstream scientific consensus. People transition for a variety of reasons, and at various points in their lives. There is also nothing particularly pathological about being sexually attracted to the thought of your own body, imagined or otherwise, and it’s an objection that is more puritanical than scientific. Academica Julia Serano dismissed Blanchard’s hypothesis in her 2020 paper, succinctly stating: “…in reality, the theory has never been widely accepted within sexology and psychology, and numerous follow-up studies have disproven its primary claims.”
Yet despite autogynephilia being an oversimplification that essentializes natural desires as pathological, it is a justification that anti-trans critics have continued to use when dismissing trans identity. “We need to be honest: autogynephilia is a psychological condition that we just have to live with, one writer argues in UnHerd. “If gender identity is not sexual in origin, then there is no reason those fantasies should be erotic,” another argues in the Quillette.
And because of this theory’s dominance in anti-trans circles, unsurprisingly, many such critics were very quick to praise the autogynephilia subplot in this White Lotus episode, as validating the hypothesis. ‘White Lotus’ Goes Where Few Have Dared, goes the title of a Newsweek article. “Maybe,” argues another UnHerd article, “if [Frank had] grown up in a world that admitted autogynephilia existed, he wouldn’t have had to stop being sexual. Maybe he would have found a way to navigate AGP, or manage it.”
It doesn’t help that showrunner Mike White went on center-right commentator Andrew Sullivan’s podcast, The Dishcast, and the two talked about the theory, though I get the sense White is not very informed about autogynephilia and was merely reacting to Sullivan.
In the end, autogynephilia has been used by pseudo-academics, bigots, and also, apparently, in the fictional TV show White Lotus: take of that information as you will.
A tired conclusion
I cannot stress how frustrating it is for Mike White to justify cutting what couldn’t have been more than a two-minute scene mentioning (not affirming, but mentioning) the existence of a nonbinary person, only to incorporate one of the most painful anti-trans stereotypes out there. It’s not consistent logic, and while I have no doubt that unpacking such a trope could be done well, I don't think Mike White put in an even baseline amount of research necessary to do that work.
White comes across as intellectually lazy in this regard, and I think the meander