Tonight I watched this beautiful film with my girlfriend. It wasn’t the first time seeing it – a decade earlier, I watched it alone as a closeted trans lesbian, quietly wishing for what I have today. Thankfully, this time, I was accompanied by the love of my life and we enjoyed it together.
Honestly, I enjoyed the film in part, because I found the characters to be mostly kind people trying to navigate the complexities of their relationships. I’m not going to go into detail about the story – but watching Mia come to terms with herself, and her father trying to maintain his relationship with her, was heartwarming. After Lasse’s initial confusion, his acceptance of both his daughter and soon to be daughter-in-law, left me in tears, particularly given my own family’s non-acceptance.
After we finished the film, we shared our opinions; my girlfriend felt Mia and Frida were less than stellar – despite her sympathy for them, she felt both going behind their partners backs was incredibly hurtful, selfish, and unfair. While I agreed with her that it was hurtful, I didn’t blame either of them. In fact, from my position, I think the damage both relationships suffered come from a homophobic society that causes people like Mia to remain closeted and confused, which is what led to the eventual demise of her relationship with Tim. In my opinion, it was no fault of either Mia or Tim, but rather, a result of societal disacceptance that pushed heteronormative lifestyle, resulting in her total confusion about her sexuality.
Through the film, she discloses as much; she states she felt she had no choice but to live the life everyone else wanted for her rather than the life she wanted for herself. The perniciousness of a society that doesn’t make space for queer relationships is that by default, everyone expected her to live a straight, heteronormative life; find a guy, marry, have children. It was only at the last minute as she approached the cliffs edge – marriage to the wrong gender, coinciding with the serendipitious falling for her lesbian sister-in-law, did she make space for her true self.
In fact, disaccepting societies have cascading effects that are often not even considered. How many true loves have missed one another because one or both partners were/are closeted and are denied the capacity to live their true, authentic lives? And how many relationships have failed because a partner was closeted LGBT and/or Q but never afforded to live? How has disacceptance altered the trajectory of LGBTQ lives? Even more, how much of the dating pool is reduced due to non-acceptance? How many true loves pass by one another because society constrains people to fulfil heteronormative expectations? And finally, even those who do find one another – how does stigmatisation take a toll on LGBTQ relationships?
When society doesn’t make space for non-heteronormative and non-cis gendered relationships, the result may be what we saw with Mia and Tim – a woman pressured by society into a straight relationship she doesn’t want. As a consequence, in the end, not only is she hurt, but Tim, ultimately an innocent by-standard, is caught in the middle and left heartbroken. And with that said, actually, this may be why the story resonates with me; having grown up in a religiously conservative family, this dynamic mirrors my own life experiences to some extent, but unfortunately, it took several broken relationships for me to really learn to accept myself and realise that no matter who I date, I can’t untrans myself; I’m a trans lesbian woman, and it’s intrinsic to my core identity and inextricably a part of me.