There’s this ridiculous thing that I think is a big part of a lot of pre-egg-crack trans journeys and certainly was for me: “Just because I hate being a man and wish I could be a woman, or a totally different person, doesn’t make me trans, because I’m not already transitioned.” Which is absurd, but you invent ways to protect yourself from what will be a trauma. You’ve learned through subliminal and not-so-subliminal codes that your family or your friends or your culture are telling you, “Don’t blow up your life like that.” Repression, in this really sad way, is a survival mechanism. I don’t know that I would be alive if I had my egg crack in 1998 in my childhood bedroom. That would have been too dangerous a thing to realize about myself then.
[Making] the film was a very raw and scary journey toward becoming comfortable with myself as an artist. I always thought of myself as a “professional fan”: someone who could get really excited about other people’s art, but, for whatever reason, the idea of making my own art always felt shameful. The process of working on the film and saying to myself, “Yes, I’m trans, and I need to transition to have the life I need to live,” are all one thing. It happened while I was writing the script, and that is the shame I’m unpacking in this movie. When Casey first talks to JLB, she says, “For a lot of people, I know the change that you go through when you take the World’s Fair Challenge is a really big change, like you turn into a clown or an evil vampire”—these simple genre metaphors that we see in body horror movies. But Casey says about herself, “It’s not like that for me. It’s making me different. It’s making me bad.” And the word “bad” is a really important key to the film, because it’s not as simple as Casey role-playing the person she wishes she could be. She is expressing a part of herself that has a level of catharsis and autonomy denied to her in her IRL life, but she’s not at a stage yet where she can explore that outside of fiction and detangle that from feelings of disgust at herself.
Jane Schoenbrun speaking to Sam Bodrojan for Filmmaker, “Portal to Portal: Jane Schoenbrun on We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” April 14, 2022.
