TARF (Trans-Affirmative Radical Frankenstein) By Way of Guillermo Del Toro
“I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.” —Susan Stryker, 1994
Director Guillermo Del Toro has never hidden his affectations for El espíritu de la colmena (<Spirit of the Beehive> dir. Victor Erice, 1973), a picture whose narrative centers upon a Franco-era Spanish village holding a screening of the beloved 1931 James Whale Frankenstein film, and so it should come as no surprise he has selected for adaptation Shelley’s classic novel, one that holds the mighty distinction of being named as a foundational text for both horror and science fiction literary genres. Indeed, I purchased the commemorative 200th anniversary issue of DePauw University’s Science Fiction Studies (Vol. 45, July 2018), which testified to its literary power at its bicentennial and proves surprisingly relevant to the film review at hand.
“I am… the child of a charnel house… I am obscene to you, but to myself I simply am.” -Creature
Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1994), this picture aspires towards hyper-fealty regarding the source novel. We are initially introduced to a Royal Dutch Naval expedition lodged on ice near the North Pole in 1857. The crew brings aboard the maimed Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaacs), who in turn is pursued by his artificial Creature (Jacob Elordi), the result of experiments in reanimating human cadavers. The two end up in the quarters of the ship’s hell-bent Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen), narrating their respective sides of the story.
Let’s begin with the date: The original novel was published/set in 1818 while Del Toro’s film is set in 1855-1857, the immediate aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. Considering the director made two movies set during and immediately after the Spanish Civil War, it is not hard to perceive the political ramifications that he desires to import into the film. As a Mexican national, 1855 for Del Toro means the final exile of Antonio López de Santa Anna and the beginning of La Reforma, the secularization and anticlerical measures taken to create Mexican liberal democracy. Likewise, the latter date in the diegetic film timeline is the year of the new Mexican Constitution, one that was denounced publicly by Rome. In March 1857, Archbishop José Lázaro de la Garza y Ballesteros proclaimed Catholic Mexicans who swore allegiance to La Constitución Política de la República Mexicana de 1857 risked excommunication. This was a response, in part, to a thirty-five article land reform package, the Lerdo Law, initially proposed on June 25, 1856. If we grant some leeway in the proposition that the director has selected this two-year diegetic film timeline to intentionally correlate with the Mexican Reforma, the confrontation with Modernity is only that much more obviated and it is delivered in bodily terms.
Here I would borrow from the Black Feminist Hortense Spillers, who described the body and its flesh as its own form of “text,” something unto which is inscribed various histories and legacies we call life. For Spillers, this “reading of the body” entails a deeper confrontation with the Triangle Trade and the history of slavery; Spillers reads the scars of the slaver’s whip upon the back of an African held captive as a slave and recognizes these marks connote an entire history, an entire narrative, of struggle against captivity. Stryker likewise reaches for this framework, writing “You, as much as I, are responsible for the monster that I am.” A trauma history is not solely a written document, it is a set of experiences that are permanently and irreversibly written into your neurological system. Stryker herself confirms in retrospective interviews that her initial work with the Shelley novel emerged simultaneous with her engagement with the San Francisco BDSM scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where the body is subjectively treated in a powerful manner pursuing pleasure, inscribed with objectification in an affirmative manner.
Del Toro utilizes a medical apparatus that includes life-sized cross sections of the lymphatic system, laid out on a slab of wood and regarded as an educational text by medical practitioners. Victor’s use of cadavers is unanimously denounced by his academic superiors, leading to the termination of his professorship, following a vivid demonstration of the technological marvel. The Creature narrates his half of the diegetic film narrative, a text in its own right. Throughout the film, Victor fills his notebook with explanations of his method. Bodies are objectified and “read” as texts that create narrative developments; the Creature returns to the site of his birth and comes upon Victor’s aforementioned notebook, enabling him to comprehend who and what he is as the Creature.
Like Mexican society, the premodern Frankenstein family exists in the post-Napoleonic world and this is about their confrontation with Modernity. The Creature symbolizes a level of collision with Modernity, insofar as the revulsion expressed by various humans towards the Creature demonstrates a distinctive reflex that is equivalent to the transgression of norms and boundaries such as the gender binary or, in the case of Mexico in 1855, a social contract privileging the Church.
To begin his half of the story, Victor Frankenstein’s saintly mother (Mia Goth) dies birthing younger brother William (Felix Kammerer) to his beastly elder father (Charles Dance), feeding into the Freudian modus operandi of the mad scientist’s aspirations to conquer death. Henrich Harlander (Christoph Walz), the rich uncle of William’s betrothed Elizabeth (Goth, again), eventually steps forward to finance Victor’s experiments after he is purged from academia.
Del Toro is like a kid in a candy store during this first section of the film, featuring blood and gore splashing everywhere in homage to his own low-budget horror roots in pictures like Cronos (1992). This is a Gothic wonderland rivaling the best of Tim Burton, showing clear influences from German Expressionism as well. Isaacs and Walz ham it up on gloriously Baroque sets with magnificent costumes, the centerpiece being the tower where they enact their experiments upon freshly-hung corpses harvested from the gallows. If there is one thing that merits emphasis, it is that this is a neo-Gothic Romantic picture, not a gory horror film, and so this affords Del Toro space for exuberant blood-soaked glee akin to contemporaneous Sweeney Todd penny dreadfuls, creating a cinematic haunted house filled with all sorts of intriguing architectural joys.
Although Del Toro said his Pinocchio (2022) concluded the informal Antifascist Trilogy begun with El espinazo del diablo (<The Devil’s Backbone>, 2001) and El laberinto del fauno (<Pan’s Labyrinth>, 2006), it is difficult to ignore how he yet again returns to a recurring theme, the instrumentation and objectification of the female reproductive capacity within a wider social matrix underwritten by militarism and carcerality. In a post-Dobbs post-Roe v. Wade landscape, these themes take on a deeper gravity than the aforementioned productions might have been capable of. In one scene, it is all-but-stated that Father Frankenstein did something dastardly in the delivery room in order to rescue the unborn baby boy at the cost of his wife’s life; by contrast, transition and trans identity hinge upon negation of precisely those social coordinates, seeking to eliminate patriarchy. Stryker’s article includes a deeply personal reflection of being made to feel enraged in the midst of a childbirth by her partner; after three days of a complicated delivery, someone saying “It’s a girl!” triggers the author. Stryker interrogates this to its furthest degree possible and argues that imposing such an identity upon a child is a form of violence. We can ascribe parallel argumentation to the assignation of “Creature” as opposed to “human” for the reanimated cadaver at the center of the story; “the Creature” connotes character descriptors such as “demonic” or “inhuman,” delimiting what level of human empathy it should be entitled to. To be trans or to be the Creature is to be criminalized, unworthy of sympathy, stigmatized and ostracized.
We further witness how such normative expectations and privileges still underwrite the plight of the Creature. Father Frankenstein tutors his son in distinctly premodern medicine, quizzing the boy about the body’s various humors as opposed to the nuances of Modern discoveries about the pulmonary system. It warrants mention here that 1853-1855 also was the period when the despicable Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau first published and promulgated his theories of scientific racism; his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races demonstrated another kind of response to the confrontation with Modernity that is presented by the Creature. It is likewise hard to ignore the obvious level of similarity between Gobineau’s scientifistic demonization of the non-Aryan and the scientific treatment of the Creature. In the first half of the film narrated by Victor, he admits to shamelessly beating the Creature. This dehumanization shared by Gobineau and Victor underwrites the larger challenge presented within the film: Who is the true monster, the Creature or Victor Frankenstein? If we acknowledge how sci-fi/horror has often relied upon framings and constructs that replicate the notions of racialism uncritically, we see how the Creature is dehumanized via mechanisms and processes reliant upon a racialist hierarchy. The cinematic truism is that the Creature might not be human because he is inhuman, endowed with eternal life and regenerative healing capability. And yet, it is the humanity of Victor Frankenstein that is subject to true scrutiny.
“An idea, a feeling became clear to me. The hunter did not hate the wolf. The wolf did not hate the sheep. But violence felt inevitable between them. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way of the world. It would hunt you and kill you just for being who you are.” -Creature
Frankenstein, regardless of how you package it, always carries at its core the Cartesian critique of consciousness and the inquiry into human agency. It is easy to read the film as just an analogy for artificial intelligence, or just an elaborate same-sex romantic analogy, without grappling with these deeper Cartesian queries, namely, “If indeed I do think, has that validated my existence and consciousness?” The aforementioned James Whale version gave us Boris Karloff as a hulking and incompetent mass as opposed to the agile, brilliant character Shelley had created in her novel.
Susan Stryker argues that there is an affinity between Victor Frankenstein and gender-affirmative healthcare providers. “I emulate…Mary Shelley’s literary monster, who is quick-witted, agile, strong, and eloquent,” she writes. Stryker sees gender confirmation as akin to the construction of the reanimated corpse. “The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that which it was born,” she says. The rage she experiences/designates as a result of transphobic violence, like that experienced by the Creature, grants her the courage to assert the Cartesian declaration of agency, to fearlessly claim trans identity, cogito ergo sum.
The Creature’s perception of “the way of the world” and how brutal nature becomes is very deeply applicable to the criminalization of LGBTQ+ bodies, and especially intensified criminalization of BIPOC bodies in such circumstances. The Kaiser Fund writes “KFF polling shows that a majority of trans adults (64%) say they have been verbally attacked and 1 in 4 say they have been physically attacked because of their gender identity, gender expression, or sexual identity. The share of trans adults who have been physically attacked because of their gender identity increases to 31% among trans people of color.” The Trump era mandates every non-cis person make a daily decision, whether or not to “go stealth” so as to not risk harassment or assault/battery by transphobic individuals. Indeed, since the last Election, it has “felt safer” to present as a cis male rather than a trans woman. If I let my facial hair grow out for a few days, two things happen: People will “safely presume” I am a cis male and this extended facial growth will give me an extended panic attack linked to my dysphoria. The itch and scratch of facial hair triggers my dysphoria symptoms in ways that generate a slow, grinding, endless stream of anxiety.
We cannot avoid this criminalization because of who we are and how we transgress hyper-policed trajectories and boundaries for “appropriate” or “acceptable” expressions of trans identity. Likewise, the Creature cannot escape prejudices imposed upon him. As normative gender expectations structure a set of social codes governing trans bodies, so too the Creature is confronted with similar policing.
The question becomes one of simile: Is it appropriate to structure our understanding of the Creature in the same way we structure our understanding of gender, or is there a deeper meaning that is being obscured? Again, the Cartesian thesis “I think therefore I am” carries tremendous gravity in this inquiry. Gender is a social technology, yes, but gender dysphoria is a concrete diagnosis for my symptoms. I use hormone therapy so as to alleviate distinct anxiety, distress, and bodily sensations. Even if “gender” did not exist as a binary social construct, I would still experience dysphoria’s symptoms owing to lack of estrogen and progesterone. By contrast, the Creature has no diagnosis (and indeed, Del Toro goes the extra mile by giving the character instantaneous regenerative healing powers, emphasizing its immortality). This is a divergence along the lines of bodily ability.
What is it that structures our understanding of trans bodies and identities as necessarily “acceptable” or not? While trans integration moves forward haltingly, the challenge of imposing cis-normative expectations upon trans bodies stands without having many contenders. One vivid example of this was the rather atrocious interview Congresswoman Sarah McBride gave to Ezra Klein in June 2025. The combination of news camera cinematography, lighting, and the body language of both interview participants established a clear message: Sarah McBride is represents not only her constituents, she represents trans woman identity itself. Because she is subject to higher scrutiny, because she is frequently misgendered by her colleagues during the Congressional sessions, because she has demonstrated she is able to be elected by a moderate state like Delaware, she needs to be seen as a role model that all other trans women seek to replicate. Klein, McBride, and The New York Times Editorial desk that published this video/podcast made obvious that they desire to see trans identity delimited to a Clinton-style neoliberal and imperialist feminism, delivering a persona that would be at home in the Head Accounting office of you local bank.
The expectation that a trans person embrace all normative components that we define as “cis identities” hinges upon unexamined privileges regarding issues like pediatric bullying or ability. “The consciousness shaped by the transsexual body is no more the creation of the science that refigures its flesh than the monster’s mind is the creation of Frankenstein,” says Stryker. To be trans is not to aspire to look as a cis person does, contra Sarah McBride; using “she” pronouns does not connote a desire to replicate cis feminine virtues, expectations, or normativities. Because we are bullied and traumatized, our symptoms preclude us from taking advantage of these archetypal identities.
So too is the Creature precluded from such “acceptability.”
“Forgive. Forget. The true measure of wisdom: To know you have been harmed, by whom you have been harmed, and choose to let it all fade.” -Old Man
One classic element of the story is when the Creature takes refuge with a blind Old Man (David Bradley). Throughout the story, the blind man’s Son (Kyle Gatehouse) repeatedly fires his rifle at the Creature out of revulsion and disgust. The reflex is so distinctively anti-human, in the sense the shooters abrogate any potential for humanity to exist within the Creature, that one is compelled to equate this with militant policing. The alpha son/male of the household defends not just hearth and home; gendered hierarchies, sexual mores, and notions of bodily autonomy likewise are administered by this same technologies, creating a patriarchal social ordering.
The Creature hides in the blind man’s barn, espying the Old Man tutoring his young granddaughter in literacy, which in turn eventuates a highly-literate monster, versed in both the Bible and John Milton. This sequence of education by the kindly Old Man whose blindness prevents perception of the Creature’s most ghastly features demonstrates a powerful analogy for the way gender is learned and performed as a social practice. It would be relatively easy to substitute a non-cis person for the Creature in this landscape and see Shelley’s original sequence transformed into a morality play on gender conformity in the 19th century.
The Old Man’s incapability of prejudice towards the Creature offers a deeper seam for contemplation. What he advises the Creature is, fundamentally, the most relevant words about trans experience possible. The Old Man’s “blindness” to transphobia, so to speak, demonstrates Del Toro’s distinctive humanist ethos.
“I sought and longed for something I could not quite name. But in you, I found it.” -Elizabeth
In stark contrast with the cis-/hetero-sexist ordering of society, the Creature and Elizabeth find refuge together. Her unabashed sympathy for the Creature makes her, along with the Blind Old Man, the only other person that dignifies his humanity.
The Creature is built of human parts, just as the trans body is human and “built” via medical interventions.
As such, the criminalization of these two bodies is a location of both pain but also liberation.
“Confronting the implications of [gender’s] constructedness can summon up all the violation, loss, and separation inflicted by the gendering process that sustains the illusion of naturalness. My transsexual body literalizes this abstract violence,” writes Stryker. “We do have something else to say, if you will but listen to the monsters: the possibility of meaningful agency and action exists, even within fields of domination that bring about the universal cultural rape of all flesh. Be forewarned, however, that taking up this task will remake you in the process. By speaking as a monster in my personal voice, by using the dark, watery images of Romanticism and lapsing occasionally into its brooding cadences arid grandiose postures, I employ the same literary techniques Mary Shelley used to elicit sympathy for her scientist’s creation.”
This has been an ugly decade for trans rights. In 2015, the Obama administration rolled out its final anti-discrimination regulations for health insurers, outlawing non-cis patient discrimination. For decades, gender confirmation had been an expensive set of health options that most insurers designated as “inessential” procedures on par with plastic surgery. Now, overnight, two major developments: mandatory coverage and, more drastically, re-definition of gender dysphoria from “disorder” to “normative” within the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th Edition (DSM-V).
This was meant to eliminate a decades-long case of queer medical discrimination that had impeded non-cis employee performance. Indeed, one should lend particular notice to how tremendously conservative this implementation was. It still came at the expense of the Public Option during the Obama administration negotiations around the Affordable Care Act. The ACA’s expansion of Medicaid has saved untold lives, including my own; yet the mandate to purchase private health insurance via the exchange system, the opt-out capability granted to the state level governments, and numerous other systemic flaws result in outcomes where 8.2% of Americans were uninsured in 2024.
As Klein rightfully pointed out in his interview with McBride, the Obama administration failed to present an adequate and meaningful public health education program so as to inform the public about this topic, instead leaving it in the hands of clumsy workplace HR officers who never even heard of Judith Butler. Unlike AIDS, tobacco consumption, lead paint, or other public health education initiatives, the federal public healthcare establishment has continued to neglect this obligation.
As a result of this negligence, the American right mobilized a Culture War during the start of a Presidential Election cycle. A frequent matter of interest parallel to the Trump versus Clinton contest was the matter of trans integration, with Time Magazine having declared 2014 “The Transgender Tipping Point.” Yet inadequate public health education made this much more volatile than the original headline editors initially considered.
I therefore chose a rather inopportune to initiate gender confirmation and continue to struggle along such lines. The truth is that I have been hurt and likewise have hurt others as I have traveled down this very messy path. I “knew” as early as third grade I wanted to wear Catholic school jumpers. Challenges I have encountered included serious illnesses and episodes of trauma. In that regard, I, like Stryker, can see the Creature in the mirror.
And it is in this regard that I commend the picture under discussion. Yes, it is so colorful, with such elaborate and gorgeous costuming, that it is impossible to ignore the pure gaiety of the production values in the most vividly queer sense. This is an ornate adaptation that opportunes important discussion about gender.
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