- <\/ol>\n\n\n\n
This analysis began as a viewing diary rather than an academic exercise. I watched the original 1975 Rocky Horror Picture Show in 2026 and made brief notes as it unfolded: what I saw, what amused me, what disturbed me, and, most importantly, how it felt<\/em> to watch it as a woman who had actually transitioned. There is much about Rocky Horror that I like. It is funny, ridiculous, glamorous, knowingly theatrical and frequently charming. Columbia’s glittering tap dance is delightful. Frank’s lipstick is rather good. Rocky is undeniably easy on the eye. Eddie arrives on a motorbike and briefly provides an entirely different sort of visual interest. The film knows that it is absurd and invites its audience to enjoy the absurdity. It has meant something profound to generations of queer people. Frank-N-Furter’s refusal of shame, the collapse of conventional heterosexual certainty and the film’s enthusiastic mixing of masculinity, femininity and sexuality have made it an important cultural space for people whose desires or gender expression were otherwise condemned. I do not want to take that history away from anyone, but neither will I acquiesce to my own marginalisation. The film announces its artificiality immediately: blood appears to drip from the title lettering, while a disembodied pair of lips sings about science-fiction films, androids and muscular heroes. The imagery is theatrical, knowingly ridiculous and faintly sinister. We are then dropped into a conventional 1970s wedding. Brad and Janet occupy a world of heterosexual respectability. Brad proposes. Janet wants the ring. Their imagined future appears stable, conventional and reassuringly legible. The obvious reading is parody. The film establishes heterosexual normality in order to explode it. Yet the treatment of Janet already exposes something about its understanding of women. I use the term woman in these reflections to include both cisgender and transitioned women; I see no reason to separate the two when discussing the relational and social dynamics at work here. Janet’s desire for marriage is made to seem simplistic. She wants marriage, and this apparently tells us what sort of woman she is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is conspicuously invisible is everything that might sit behind that desire: permanence, emotional safety, shared domestic life, loyalty, family, being chosen, growing old with someone, mutual obligation, and having another person whose welfare becomes inseparable from one’s own. That entire relational world is compressed into a joke about conventional femininity. This matters because the film will later claim, implicitly and explicitly, to liberate Janet from that conventional role. Yet it never makes much effort to understand the woman from whom it claims to be liberating. It treats the visible symbol, the ring, as if it were the whole emotional structure. Brad is similarly reduced, although in a different way. He is initially the dependable heterosexual fianc\u00e9: slightly pompous, slightly dull, socially conventional, and coded as the person who will provide Janet with the expected future. He is not explored as a particularly complex emotional subject either. What matters is only that the pair together represent heterosexual order: marriage, fidelity, conventional gender roles, and a socially recognisable future. That makes what happens later more interesting, because the film does not merely disrupt their sexuality. It disrupts the moral and relational structure that binds them together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frank’s separate sexual encounters with Janet and Brad are crucial here. In each case, Frank impersonates the other’s partner in order to initiate sex. Through a contemporary lens, the problem is obvious: neither Janet nor Brad initially understands who they are consenting to. The deception is not incidental; it is the mechanism through which access is obtained. Watching these scenes in 2026 makes it difficult for me to treat the deception as simply camp. By this point the film has already surrounded Frank with transsexual and gender-variant symbolism, and that gives his behaviour an uncomfortable significance. Frank does not merely withhold personal history; he deliberately impersonates the specific person to whom Brad or Janet believes consent is being given, yet the film places sexual deception alongside transsexual language and gender variance nevertheless. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The result is an uncomfortable cultural association between gender variance, concealment and sexual threat. Although the circumstances are not identical, I could not escape the parallel between Frank\u2019s treatment of Brad and Janet as sexual conquests and my own experience of being manipulated, seduced, used, or reduced to an instrument of somebody else\u2019s desire. The objectification of transitioned women remains a significant and familiar obstacle in the search for a loving partner, and it was a painful lesson that desire does not necessarily imply care, responsibility or even much curiosity about the person being desired. I was never \u201cliberated\u201d by being made the object of somebody else\u2019s appetite. Rocky Horror therefore creates a structural inversion \u2013 for Frank, each encounter is fleeting. Once the seduction succeeds, the person becomes disposable and he simply moves on. A queer reading may celebrate Frank\u2019s conquest of heteronormative certainty and the apparent fluidity of sexual desire, but from where I stand, relationships are not about conquest at all. My emancipation was found by learning to maintain boundaries and resisting being swept along and seduced while still preserving the possibility of sexual freedom, fun and the joy of early intimacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Janet sees Brad with Frank and interprets what she sees as betrayal. Yet she does not place her own encounter with Frank inside the same moral framework. What matters is not simply hypocrisy, but asymmetry: her own hurt is immediately intelligible to her, while the possibility that Brad may also have been deceived, vulnerable or harmed receives far less moral attention. That asymmetry feels disturbingly familiar to me. Much of my contemporary exclusion from \u201cwomen\u2019s spaces\u201d is justified through the language of protection: protecting women\u2019s privacy, dignity, safety and vulnerability. Yet there is remarkably little space within that framework for protecting mine. My privacy can be overridden, my dignity subordinated, my vulnerability treated as collateral, and my exclusion framed as morally neutral so long as it is said to serve somebody else\u2019s protection. A framework presented as universal becomes selective in practice: one woman\u2019s discomfort is treated as ethically weighty, while another woman\u2019s humiliation is treated as the acceptable cost of solving it. My safety and dignity are rarely permitted to enter the same moral equation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is a power relationship disguised as moral consistency. The person with greater social authority gets to define what counts as harm, whose fear is rational, whose privacy is inviolable, and whose suffering can be discounted. If Janet\u2019s experience is mitigated by deception, Brad’s deserves the same consideration. If her experience counts as infidelity, then hers must be examined too. Instead, Brad becomes the object of judgement while Janet effectively exempts herself. Her route toward Rocky does not emerge purely from autonomous sexual discovery. It is partly reactive. Her response appears to turn perceived betrayal into permission: Brad has hurt me, therefore the relational rules no longer bind me. Janet certainly becomes less inhibited and acknowledges desire more openly in pursuit of Rocky. There is agency in that, but whether she becomes more emancipated is another question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film pays little attention to reflection, reciprocity or relational responsibility. Janet does not pause to ask what happened to Brad, what happened to herself, or whether both of them have been manipulated. Instead, the collapse of trust becomes a springboard into further sexual experimentation. Rather than liberation, it appears to be a combination of disinhibition and moral asymmetry. That distinction becomes even more important when Janet is considered not merely as a symbol of heterosexual repression but as a woman embedded in a relationship. Many women are socially conditioned to be acutely attentive to relationships: to maintain bonds, anticipate emotional needs, protect partners, sustain families and hold together small networks of care. That conditioning can become oppressive when women are expected to sacrifice themselves endlessly for others, but relational responsibility itself is not the same thing as oppression. A psychologically richer Janet might therefore have asked: What happened to Brad?<\/em> What happened to me?<\/em> Is Rocky safe?<\/em> What is Frank doing to the people around him?<\/em> What do I actually want?<\/em> What do I owe the person I love?<\/em> How do I pursue desire without abandoning care?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n None of those questions would make Janet less sexually free. Quite the opposite: they would make her freedom more mature because it would be exercised with awareness rather than simply in reaction to injury. This is where the film’s understanding of women feels especially limited. It can imagine a woman wanting marriage and rejecting sexual restraint, but what it struggles to imagine is a woman whose internal life contains both desire and attachment at the same time. A woman can want marriage and sexual autonomy; she can want permanence and erotic novelty all while remaining loyal and still experiencing attraction to other people. She can prioritise care without being submissive, she can protect others while maintaining boundaries and she can be sexually liberated without becoming relationally detached. The film seems to require that she move from one simplified role to another: from innocent fianc\u00e9e to sexually awakened woman, but real female interiority is largely misunderstood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From my own perspective, this limitation is particularly obvious. My relationships do not feel like obstacles to freedom; they are part of what gives freedom meaning. Love, intimacy, responsibility, loyalty, sexual desire, emotional security and mutual protection are not competing categories. This makes Janet’s supposed liberation feel tenuous at best. Because of that, Brad and Janet’s story establishes one of the film’s recurring contradictions: Rocky Horror is very good at imagining the destruction of rules, but much less interested in imagining what a richer, more humane set of relationships might look like afterwards. My relational life makes this binary particularly difficult to accept. I am not monogamous, yet I do not experience sexual freedom as the dissolution of attachment. My intimate relationships depend on care, communication, loyalty, emotional responsibility and an awareness that each person belongs within a wider network of consequence. The existence of more than one loving bond does not make those bonds disposable. If anything, it makes relational responsibility more visible. From that perspective, Janet\u2019s \u201cliberation\u201d feels oddly impoverished: she gains permission to act on desire, but the film shows remarkably little interest in how desire might coexist with love, responsibility and care. If Janet represented one part of me, Columbia represented another. I liked her almost immediately: her hair, the glittering outfit, the colour, the tap dancing and the sheer pleasure she seems to take in being visually exuberant. Where Janet arrives dressed for conventional respectability, Columbia looks as though she has escaped it altogether. At first glance, the film seems to offer Columbia as an alternative model of womanhood. Janet represents attachment, marriage, convention and restraint, while Columbia represents colour, eroticism, performance and freedom. While Janet’s desire for commitment and belonging makes sense to me, so does Columbia’s flamboyance and her apparent enjoyment of desire. Columbia may be free to dress extravagantly, dance, flirt and desire, but she has remarkably little authority over the world in which those freedoms exist. Frank remains the organising power around her. His desires shape the household, determine relationships and ultimately decide what happens to the people Columbia cares about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her relationship with Eddie exposes this especially clearly. Columbia loved him, and that fact immediately gives her a depth the film only briefly acknowledges. She is not simply part of Frank’s decorative entourage; she has loyalties and attachments of her own. Frank then murders Eddie, and although Columbia’s grief is visible, it deliberately occupies remarkably little narrative space. Eddie’s death functions primarily to tell us something about Frank: his jealousy, violence and capacity for control. This creates an important distinction between visibility and subjecthood. Columbia is extraordinarily visible. We notice her hair, her clothes, her dancing, her sexuality and her body. She is one of the most visually memorable people in the film. Yet that visibility does not make her a fully realised subject. We are invited to enjoy how she looks and how she behaves far more than we are invited to understand what it costs her to live within Frank’s world. Her emotional life is present, but it repeatedly has to compete with the spectacle surrounding it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She demonstrates that sexual expressiveness and liberation are not necessarily the same thing. A woman can reject conventional respectability while remaining subordinate. She can be sexually open while having very little control over the conditions in which her sexuality is lived. She can be permitted to display herself while still existing inside somebody else’s system of power. The castle may have removed many conventional sexual rules, but it has not removed hierarchy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eddie arrives with a very different kind of energy from Brad or Frank. He is loud, physical, masculine and immediately coded through the familiar imagery of the biker: leather, noise, rebellion, sexuality and danger. He is also attractive; Columbia\u2019s response to him makes that explicit. She is drawn to him not despite his difference from Frank\u2019s world, but because of it. That complicates any easy reading of Eddie as merely an outdated form of masculinity that the film is happy to kill off. A queer reading might understandably see his death as symbolic: the rough, macho, heterosexual-coded biker displaced by Frank\u2019s theatrical, sexually fluid world. But Columbia does not experience Eddie as something that needs to be transcended. She desires him. Her attraction suggests that conventional masculinity does not simply lose its appeal because a more flamboyant form of gender and sexuality enters the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I recognise something of that response; Eddie\u2019s aesthetic works on me too, but that does not mean the danger itself is attractive. Emotionally, what I value is almost the reverse: gentleness, sensitivity, kindness, affection and safety. The man can look like the bad boy and still be, underneath it, a teddy bear. That distinction matters because the film tends to package masculine desirability together with aggression, criminality or instability, as though excitement and emotional safety were somehow incompatible. Eddie is therefore doing more than simply representing conventional masculinity. He is also carrying the film\u2019s wider association between deviance and danger. He is described retrospectively through criminality and mental disturbance, and his character is folded into the same imaginative world that already links sexuality with madness, instability and social disorder. By the time Frank becomes the central focus of that world, these associations are already familiar. Rocky Horror repeatedly makes its outsiders compelling by surrounding them with risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eddie\u2019s relationship to Columbia reveals how differently attraction and judgement can operate. She is not necessarily attracted to criminality, violence or mental instability. She may simply be attracted to him, to masculinity, or simply wanting to be swept away with him. Yet the film has bundled those qualities together. The result is another false binary: the respectable man may be safe but dull, while the exciting man is dangerous. Brad and Eddie almost become two ends of that spectrum. Brad represents convention, dependability and social legibility, but he is deliberately made rather unexciting. Eddie is exciting, sexual and physically expressive, but the film codes him as unstable and criminal. What is conspicuously missing is a man who is both compelling and safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That absence matters from a woman\u2019s perspective. Masculinity itself is not the problem. Nor is female attraction to masculinity evidence of submission or conservatism. A woman can desire strength, physicality, confidence, stubble, leather, motorcycles or any number of conventionally masculine qualities while still requiring emotional safety, tenderness and mutual respect. Desire for masculinity does not imply desire for domination. Columbia\u2019s attraction to Eddie therefore adds another complication to the film\u2019s treatment of liberation. She occupies Frank\u2019s supposedly sexually emancipated world, yet remains drawn to a form of masculinity that world seems to mark as crude or outdated. Her desire resists the idea that sexual liberation must also involve abandoning conventional masculine attraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so Frank kills him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The murder immediately changes the meaning of Eddie\u2019s presence. He is no longer merely the rebellious biker or Columbia\u2019s former lover; he becomes evidence of Frank\u2019s willingness to destroy what competes with him. Eddie\u2019s masculinity is not simply mocked or displaced. It is violently eliminated. That violence also exposes the power imbalance surrounding Columbia. Eddie matters to her, but Frank decides whether Eddie gets to exist. Her desire has no equivalent authority. Frank\u2019s jealousy and control overwhelm whatever emotional significance Eddie has for her. The later suggestion that Eddie may have been served as food pushes this still further into grotesque territory. The joke is intentionally excessive, but it fits a broader pattern: bodies in Rocky Horror are repeatedly treated as objects available for other people\u2019s use. Rocky is manufactured for Frank\u2019s pleasure, Brad and Janet are sexually manipulated, Columbia is subordinated within Frank\u2019s household, and Eddie is ultimately reduced to meat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is something revealing in that progression. The film presents itself as a celebration of freedom, yet so many of its characters exist according to what somebody else wants from their body. Eddie contributes to the film\u2019s repeated clustering of sexuality, masculinity, criminality and mental illness. These associations are presented playfully, but they are culturally significant. The world outside conventional heterosexual respectability is not merely different; it is populated by people who are unstable, dangerous, criminal, sexually excessive or violent. For someone who once feared that her own difference might mean she was mentally ill, that clustering is not entirely harmless. It reinforces a very old cultural habit: taking people who fall outside expected social roles and placing them together inside the broad category of deviance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eddie is not transsexual and does not represent gender variance in the way Frank does. But he helps construct the imaginative environment into which Frank enters. Madness, danger and criminality already surround the castle before the word transsexual becomes central. This makes Eddie more than a disposable secondary character. He is part of the film\u2019s larger architecture of otherness, and Columbia\u2019s attraction to him introduces something valuable into that architecture: the possibility that what society marks as \u201cdeviant\u201d may also be genuinely desirable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rocky is introduced as Frank\u2019s \u201cbeautiful creature\u201d: an idealised masculine body, muscular, blond and conspicuously designed for sexual appeal. From a contemporary perspective, there is an obvious parallel with the intense visual investment in the male physique found in parts of gay male culture, though I am observing that from the outside rather than claiming it as my own experience. What matters more here is that Rocky is not simply attractive; he is manufactured to be attractive. His body exists because Frank wanted it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That immediately deepens the problem of Frank\u2019s power. Rocky is not an equal partner entering a relationship with him. He is created, displayed and assigned a sexual purpose before he has any meaningful opportunity to define himself. The film can play this for camp and eroticism, but the underlying structure is profoundly unequal: Frank is creator, possessor and sexual partner at once. Rocky therefore becomes another example of the film confusing sexual transgression with liberation. The body may be beautiful and the relationship unconventional, but neither fact makes the arrangement ethical, autonomous or benign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rocky\u2019s real importance is therefore not as a fully developed character but as evidence against Frank. His existence shows that Frank does not merely reject conventional rules; he constructs other people around his desires. By the time Frank manipulates Brad and Janet, kills Eddie, restrains Rocky and ultimately turns the entire household into an extension of his own fantasy, the pattern is clear. Rocky is the first unmistakable sign that Frank\u2019s liberation depends heavily on other people having less freedom than he does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By this point, Frank is no longer simply the glamorous centre of the film, he is also its organising danger. That is what makes him so interesting: he is charismatic, funny, dominant, sexually confident, aesthetically bold and completely unwilling to apologise for himself. It is easy to understand why generations of queer viewers found that thrilling. In a culture that had treated homosexuality, cross-dressing, bisexuality and gender nonconformity as shameful, Frank offered almost the opposite proposition: do not hide, do not apologise, do not make yourself smaller. But the more the film unfolds, the harder it becomes to separate Frank’s liberation from his domination of everyone around him. His world is not simply one in which conventional rules have been abandoned. It is a world organised around his<\/em> desires. He creates Rocky for sexual use, manipulates Brad and Janet, kills Eddie, controls Columbia and the household, immobilises people and ultimately remakes others according to his own aesthetic. This complicates the idea that Frank represents uncomplicated queer emancipation. He certainly challenges conventional masculinity, but he does not abandon hierarchy. He commands, possesses, punishes and controls. The visual codes of patriarchy are destabilised, but its power relations remain intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That contradiction is especially visible in the floor-show sequence. \u201cDon’t dream it, be it\u201d has become an enduring slogan of self-expression and liberation, and it is easy to understand why. Yet within the actual scene, the characters have not simply chosen to discover new versions of themselves. Frank has immobilised them, dressed them, sexualised them and incorporated them into his fantasy. The lyric announces autonomy while the dramatic action depicts control. Frank exposes the film’s flawed central thesis: it treats the removal of inhibition as though it were the same thing as emancipation. For a transitioned woman in 2026, that structure is difficult to view innocently. Contemporary hostility toward transitioned women repeatedly invokes the language of protection: women must be protected, children must be protected, spaces must be protected, society must be protected from the supposedly male person whose femininity conceals a dangerous truth. Rocky Horror did not create that narrative, and it would be historically unsustainable to claim that it did. But it participates in a cultural grammar in which visible male sex, occupied femininity, deception, sexual threat and danger sit extremely close together. This matters particularly in the bedroom scenes with Brad and Janet. For a transitioned woman watching in 2026, that has an additional significance. Frank has already been saturated with transvestite and transsexual language and imagery. The film then makes this same gender-variant figure someone who gains sexual access through deception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later, Frank becomes both the persecuted outsider, and evidence offered for why outsiders like him should be feared. That tension culminates in his final vulnerability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey didn’t like me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey never liked me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a moment, the performance collapses. The dominant, glamorous, sexually omnipotent figure becomes someone who is hurt, rejected and longing for home. That moment reveals something the film has otherwise struggled to articulate: the desire to belong, but even here Frank remains trapped inside the contradictions the film has built around him. He wants acceptance, but he has harmed people. He is excluded, but he has also exercised extraordinary control over others. He is victim and perpetrator at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That ambiguity may be dramatically rich, but it creates a particularly cruel representational problem when Frank has already absorbed the language of transsexuality. A transsexual woman wanting nothing more radical than dignity, treatment, recognition, love, safety and ordinary belonging never appears. Julia Serano articulates this exact dynamic in Whipping Girl<\/em>, arguing that transsexual women are not merely punished for crossing gender boundaries; their femininity is also sexualised, trivialised and treated as suspect. Particularly relevant here is her criticism of representations that make trans women culturally fascinating through an imagined combination of male and female characteristics while paying far less attention to their own accounts of themselves as women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such a distinction speaks directly to Frank\u2019s presentation. His femininity is spectacular partly because the audience is invited to perceive the male body beneath it: corset, lipstick, heels and pearls coexist deliberately with visible maleness. The contradiction is central to the camp. My body, however, is not a male truth beneath feminine decoration. The coexistence of visible maleness and femininity was not an exhilarating contradiction to inhabit indefinitely; it was the source of profound distress. Simply reclaiming the \u201cqueer monster\u201d was never on the agenda. This is why Frank feels so different to me from the way he might appear within a purely celebratory queer reading. I can see the liberation in him. I can enjoy the theatricality. I can understand why refusing shame mattered, but there is also a cost of making him the cultural vessel into which so many ideas about sex transition were poured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frank is not an inaccurate transsexual woman, he is what can happen when transsexuality is separated from actual transsexual women and made available for everybody else to define and consume. If there is one character in Rocky Horror who can even tentatively be placed nearest to the idea of a transsexual woman, it is not Frank at all. It is Magenta. The film never tells us that Magenta transitioned, she is an alien woman from Transsexual, but symbolically she is still the closest female figure the film gives us to the place whose name has been used so insistently throughout its mythology, which makes the contrast with Frank extraordinary. While Frank takes the language of Transsexual and turns it into spectacle, Magenta, meanwhile, is actually from Transsexual and spends most of the film in domestic service. The gender politics of that are difficult to miss. The man gets the stage; the woman gets the housework. Magenta cooks, serves, observes and waits while Frank occupies the laboratory, directs the household and turns Transsexuality into his personal aesthetic universe. She is present throughout, but her presence is structurally quiet. Like Columbia, she is highly visible without being given equivalent narrative authority. Yet unlike Columbia, Magenta ultimately turns out to belong to something larger than Frank himself. At the end of the film, the hierarchy reverses: Frank, apparently the master, becomes the condemned subject. Riff Raff and Magenta emerge not merely as servants but as representatives of the world to which Frank ultimately belongs. They judge him, reclaim control and return the castle to Transsexual: Riff Raff being the one with the gun, well, of course he is. In the end, Frank was never the authoritative expression of Transsexuality at all; he was its rogue representative. This mirrors the larger cultural phenomenon surrounding transsexual women. The people with the greatest symbolic visibility are not always the people with the greatest legitimacy to define the experience being symbolised. Transitioned women in the UK today are medically discussed, sexually imagined, politically accused and theoretically interpreted while maintaining remarkably little genuine representation. Magenta is not a perfect hidden representation of a transitioned woman. The film does not give us enough to make that claim, but she does reveal the strange asymmetry at the heart of Rocky Horror: the character most culturally associated with \u201cTranssexual\u201d is Frank, while the woman actually from Transsexual is marginalised into service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is also something in Magenta\u2019s relationship to order. She is not simply the passive opposite of Frank\u2019s excess; she is part of the force that ultimately ends it. If Frank represents the appropriation of Transsexuality into personal spectacle, Magenta can be read, cautiously, as part of the world reclaiming itself from him. That possibility becomes especially interesting when placed alongside the different kinds of legitimacy available to people now gathered under the broad category of \u201ctransgender\u201d. Transitioned women were beginning to acquire a form of social legitimacy by the later twentieth century, a process that in Britain eventually culminated in formal legal recognition through the Gender Recognition Act 2004. I make this observation not as a neutral historian, but from the position of someone who lives as a transitioned woman. In queer and therapeutic spaces, I repeatedly encounter non-binary, genderqueer and gender-fluid people wrestling with labels, legitimacy and belonging. My own experience is almost the reverse: I do not generally need to explain or continuously negotiate my category. I simply belong, until somebody decides to eject me from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seen from that position, Magenta\u2019s relationship to Transsexual becomes unexpectedly suggestive. She belongs to a world from which Frank merely borrows his spectacle. A transitioned woman may, in practice, stand closer to social normativity than someone whose relationship to gender remains deliberately or necessarily unresolved. Frank\u2019s transgression has no endpoint. Mine did. It reminds me of the feeling I had when leaving the show for the first time: the woman standing nearest to the category itself was pushed to the edge of the frame, quietly shouldering the burden of shame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Only after making my viewing notes did I begin placing my response alongside some of the academic literature. What surprised me was not that scholars had already noticed many of Rocky Horror’s contradictions, but that they often approached those contradictions from a very different starting point. The same features of the film that felt frightening or alienating to me before transition have frequently been interpreted as sources of queer liberation: Frank’s refusal of shame, his destabilisation of masculinity and femininity, the collapse of Brad and Janet’s heterosexual certainty, and the castle’s rejection of respectable sexual convention. There are good historical reasons for that reading. Rocky Horror became much more than a film. Its screenings generated communities in which queer people could dress, perform, experiment and find others like themselves. Scholarly collections such as Reading Rocky Horror therefore treat Frank not simply as a character but as a cultural educator, with chapters devoted explicitly to his \u201cqueer pedagogy\u201d and to the film’s relationship with authentic queer experience. From this perspective, Frank’s importance lies precisely in his refusal to resolve himself into an intelligible conventional category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sullivan Hamilton’s 2021 thesis makes this argument especially clearly. Hamilton warns that later attempts to reinterpret Frank as a more legible trans woman risk erasing the character’s non-binary or genderqueer function. For Hamilton, Frank’s transgressive power lies in refusing the boundaries between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, masculine and feminine. But while I agree that Frank is not a transsexual woman, and attempting to retrospectively turn him into one would erase something important about the character, I disagree that Frank occupies both masculine and feminine in a way that is meaningful. For me, Frank occupies an overwhelmingly masculine relational position while displaying a limited repertoire of feminine signs. That is not necessarily the same thing as occupying a feminine position. Frank reduces femininity to clothing and lipstick, but also appropriates and erases trans womanhood almost entirely. Frank must not be rewritten as a transsexual woman because he does not represent transitioned women at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For me, in order to preserve his gender ambiguity, there must be more evidence of it than corsets and lipstick. Transitioned women bear the cost of being rewritten through Frank in order to preserve queer theory’s fascination with gender ambiguity. The instability that makes Frank liberating within one queer framework comes at a cost to another. Rocky Horror presents boundaries and transgression, and makes them glamorous. For Frank, transgression is the destination; for me, transition eventually meant that transgression could stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This creates an important tension between queer transgression and transsexual embodiment. Queer theory may reasonably ask why anyone should be confined by male and female categories. A transsexual woman may reasonably ask why she is not allowed simply to live inside the category to which she transitioned. Neither question invalidates the other. The difficulty arises when the first is allowed to interpret the second. In Rocky Horror, that interpretive displacement happens almost literally. Transsexuality supplies the language, imagery and imaginative geography through which other forms of sexual and gender rebellion become possible. Frank can explore male femininity. Brad can have his heterosexual certainty disrupted. Janet can discover sexual desire. Bisexuality, camp, cross-dressing and queer theatricality all acquire space to breathe, yet transitioned women are largely unavailable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viviane Namaste argues that transsexual and transgender people can become highly visible within theory and culture while simultaneously being erased as actual social subjects. Her criticism is particularly directed toward approaches that find transgender figures theoretically useful while neglecting the mundane realities that matter to people who transition: employment, healthcare, documents, violence, institutions and ordinary social existence. One of her chapter titles, \u201cTragic Misreadings: Queer Theory’s Erasure of Transgender Subjectivity\u201d, feels almost uncannily relevant here. The problem is not invisibility in the ordinary sense. Transsexuality is everywhere in Rocky Horror. The word is sung. It becomes geography. It becomes a joke, an erotic atmosphere and a cultural symbol. The problem is that the people to whom the word originally referred are missing while everybody else makes use of what the word can signify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is why I increasingly understand erasure not simply as being unseen, but as being constantly addressed while remaining conspicuously absent from the discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is another way in which the academic literature supports this reading. Betty Robbins and Roger Myrick argue that Rocky Horror, despite its apparent gender rebellion, remains grounded in a form of \u201csadistic masculinity\u201d and fails to sustain a genuinely radical alternative to traditional cinematic gender relations for women. Their analysis sits surprisingly close to what I felt while watching Columbia, Janet and Rocky. Frank may overturn the aesthetics of masculinity, but he retains an extraordinary amount of masculine power. He commands, possesses, creates, punishes and determines the terms upon which other people’s sexual freedom is exercised. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some queer readings of horror understandably reclaim monstrosity itself. If heterosexual society calls queer people unnatural, excessive or monstrous, then there can be considerable power in refusing the insult and embracing the monster. Rocky Horror is extremely good at this. Frank is not ashamed of being strange; he turns strangeness into glamour. But reclamation requires knowing that the accusation is false, and, through a contemporary lens, that accusation reads not as emancipation, but as continued oppression. My first encounter with Frank was not from the secure position of someone who understood herself and could laugh at society’s attempt to make her monstrous. I encountered him while wondering whether my own feelings meant that I actually was mentally ill, sexually abnormal or somehow grotesque. For someone in that position, \u201cthe monster is fabulous\u201d is not necessarily reassuring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more urgent message would have been:<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are not a monster at all.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A useful comparison can be made with Sean Baker\u2019s Tangerine<\/em> (2015). Like Rocky Horror<\/em>, it is loud, comic, sexual, unruly and deliberately outside conventional heterosexual respectability. It is also ridiculous, heightened and frequently outrageous, yet its emotional grammar is entirely different. That difference matters because Rocky Horror<\/em> does not merely fail to represent transitioned women. Its queer liberation is, in important respects, achieved through their marginalisation. Transsexuality becomes available as metaphor, spectacle and rebellion precisely because the transsexual woman herself is removed from the centre of meaning. Transsexual women are replaced by a spectacular gender-variant figure whose difference can be consumed as camp, erotic danger and theatrical rebellion. Frank is allowed enormous agency, but the woman whose life might actually involve transition is given none. Her body becomes symbolic material. Her emotional world disappears. Her love stories disappear. Her will disappears. Even her vulnerability is displaced onto somebody else. The culture of the film can reclaim gender variance as glamorous, excessive and liberating while the transitioned woman loses the things that would make her fully human on screen: vulnerability, interiority, relational depth, agency, love, fear, tenderness and an ordinary future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In that sense, the problem is not simply absence. It is substitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In contrast, Tangerine<\/em> demonstrates how unnecessary that trade-off is. Sin-Dee and Alexandra are no less queer because they are emotionally legible. Their transness is not softened or apologised for, and the film does not make them respectable in order to make them human. They are funny, sexual, angry, difficult, impulsive, wounded, loyal and capable of great tenderness. Their relationships are messy, but they are recognisably relationships. Love is complicated rather than absent. That is one of the most striking differences between the films. Tangerine<\/em> allows transness to exist inside an emotional world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rocky Horror<\/em> repeatedly makes gender variance culturally meaningful by stripping that emotional world away. Its cissexist inheritance therefore lies not only in crude stereotypes, but in the structure of what it allows transitioned women to be. The film associates sex-crossing imagery with a performative spectacle, deception, excess, danger and instability while giving us almost nothing of a transitioned woman\u2019s agency, attachments or ordinary subjecthood. She is denied the right to be someone who loves, chooses, fears, hopes, attaches, protects, is protected, and simply continues living. Tangerine<\/em>, by contrast, makes those things available. Its ending is especially revealing. After Sin-Dee is publicly humiliated, Alexandra helps her clean herself in a laundromat and gives her a wig. The moment is tender without becoming sentimental. It does not ask the audience to admire transgression. It asks the audience to recognise hurt, friendship and care. The scene is emotionally accessible across differences of geography, profession, class and experience because the women remain fully legible as people. The difference is therefore not that one film is queer and the other humane. Tangerine<\/em> is both. Its very existence demonstrates that queerness does not require the sacrifice of transitioned women\u2019s humanity. Rocky Horror<\/em> asks the audience to identify with transgression. Tangerine<\/em> allows the audience to identify with women. And in doing so, it exposes what Rocky Horror<\/em> took away: not merely accurate representation, but agency, vulnerability, love, will and the possibility of being recognised as fully human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking back over my own analysis, I am struck by how little of my reading ultimately depends upon clothing, cosmetics or visual gender codes. Again and again, I found myself returning instead to relationships: who loves whom, who is allowed vulnerability, who notices pain, who carries grief, who has power, who abuses it, who offers care, who is denied agency, and who is permitted an inner life. That may reveal something about the position from which I am reading the film. My own femininity is not located in heels, lipstick, corsetry or colour. Those things can be fun, but they remain superficial. What gives femininity depth for me is relational and ethical: intimacy, trust, tenderness, reciprocity, emotional attentiveness, justice and belonging. I do not mean by this that there is a single essence of femininity, nor that every woman experiences these things in the same way. Women differ enormously in temperament, culture, sexuality, class, age and experience. But there are still recurring patterns of female socialisation and female relational life that are recognisable across many women\u2019s accounts: attentiveness to relationships, sensitivity to vulnerability, the negotiation of safety, care, reciprocity, appearance, acceptance and belonging. These are not biological absolutes or compulsory traits. They are part of the social and emotional texture through which many women come to understand themselves and one another. There is therefore something almost colonial in the cultural treatment of transsexuality within Rocky Horror<\/em>. The territory of the transsexual is occupied by meanings generated largely by people who are not transsexual women themselves. Our bodies, terminology and social difference become raw material through which other people explore gender ambiguity, homosexuality, bisexuality, transvestism, camp and sexual liberation, while the women whose lives gave the category its human meaning are erased. Appropriation takes our symbols; colonisation goes further, claiming the authority to explain what those symbols mean. The result is not merely that transitioned women are misrepresented. They are dispossessed of interpretive authority over their own lives. Their femininity is explained by Frank, their sexuality is explained by Frank, their motives are converted into theory, and their transition is rewritten as perpetual transgression. Even their liberation is defined by somebody else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seen this way, my own reading reverses the direction of scrutiny. The transitioned woman ceases to be the specimen under examination and becomes the person doing the looking. I am not primarily asking what Frank symbolises; I am asking what happens to the people around him. Who is loved? Who is grieving? Who is manipulated? Who is safe? Who gets to exercise power, and what does that power cost everybody else? The problem with Rocky Horror<\/em> is ultimately larger than representation. It does not simply fail to depict transitioned women accurately. It removes from her the ordinary emotional architecture through which other people are permitted to become human. The exhilaration of being wanted, the vulnerability of wanting someone back, the domestic absurdities of intimacy, the quiet recognition of belonging beside each other, the safety of being held by a man who is gentle enough to deserve that trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Rocky Horror<\/em> reaches for the language of transsexual<\/em>ity, it replaces this emotional cadence with a grotesque caricature. Sex transition becomes attached to theatrical excess, sex<\/em>ual promiscuity, deception, domination, danger, madness and deviance. The transitioned woman does not receive a love story because she does not possess enough subjecthood to have one. She does not get to be vulnerable because vulnerability has been displaced by spectacle. She does not get ordinary agency because her condition has already been made useful as metaphor. That is why the cultural appropriation at the centre of the film matters so much. Transitioned women are not merely absent; the absence creates space into which other meanings are inserted. That substitution has consequences far beyond whether a character is “good representation”. It deprives transitioned women of access to the same emotional vocabulary through which everyone else is understood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is therefore easy to understand how some transitioned women became uncomfortable with the word ‘sex’ itself inside transsexual. The word had acquired an enormous cultural burden. What referred medically to changing phenotypic sex characteristics had become surrounded in popular imagination by sexuality, fetish, perversity and spectacle. For women trying to escape precisely that mythology and simply live as women, distancing themselves from its sexualised associations was an understandable act of self-protection. There is a parallel here with other frameworks that have interpreted transitioned women from the outside. Ray Blanchard’s typology, for example, differs radically from Rocky Horror<\/em> in method and purpose, yet both construct an explanatory “other” whose inner life is made secondary to the theory imposed upon us. In such accounts, desire becomes evidence, relationships become symptoms, femininity becomes a falsehood, and the woman herself loses agency over the meaning of her own life. Once the transitioned woman is converted into a theoretical object, ordinary human motives become strangely difficult to leave alone. They are reinterpreted, sexualised or made evidence of something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tangerine<\/em> demonstrates just how unnecessary that is. Its women are not respectable counter-images created merely to reassure a cisgender audience. They are outrageous, funny, angry, sex<\/em>ual, impulsive and complicated. The film is itself heightened and ridiculous. Yet Sin-Dee and Alexandra possess something almost entirely withheld from the image of transsexual women in Rocky Horror<\/em>: emotional sovereignty. There is depth not only to the way trans women are affected by minority status and the narratives imposed upon them, but to the way their partners are affected too. The taxi scene underlines the objectification of trans sex workers while exposing that their bodies are, indeed, desirable. The shaming of their lovers underlines that mere proximity to love with trans women can shift the burden of shame onto men. That is precisely what Rocky Horror<\/em> does not allow transsexual women to become. She is from another world, barely even human. Its queer liberation is therefore not cost-free. For many viewers, Frank offered an extraordinary escape from shame. His refusal of conventional gender, sex<\/em>uality and propriety created cultural breathing room for people who had been told that their desires and expression were grotesque. That history deserves to be respected. But liberation becomes ethically complicated when one minority’s symbolic freedom is built partly from another minority’s subjugation. Epistemic injustice occurs when one is allowed to explain the other.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Transitioned women have always been a minority even within the wider queer world. A group with little cultural power can become extraordinarily useful symbolically while possessing very little authority over what those symbols are made to mean. When transsexuality becomes a resource through which other people explore fluidity, camp, homosex<\/em>uality, bisexuality, drag or rebellion, the underlying distribution of cultural power becomes exposed. The film’s value to larger queer constituencies is obvious and culturally established; the representational cost paid by a much smaller population is easier not to notice. Richard O’Brien’s own later comments make that asymmetry particularly uncomfortable. His experience of feeling like he is occupying a space between male and female is his to describe, and there is no reason to deny him that experience. But when that experience is allowed to define transitioned women themselves, my experience and humanity become material to be consumed and discarded, much as Frank consumes and discards the people around him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What transitioned women needed was a cultural imagination large enough to understand that transition might eventually return them to the ordinary human world from which they had felt exiled. Watching Rocky Horror<\/em> again in 2026, I can now digest it without dissolving into shame. Had I transitioned before seeing it, I could have wanted Janet\u2019s attachment and Columbia\u2019s colour. I could have desired Eddie\u2019s masculinity while preferring tenderness to danger. I might even have enjoyed the spectacle, secure in the knowledge that I am, without a shadow of a doubt, absolutely nothing like Frank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What was missing from Rocky Horror<\/em> was not another theory of gender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was me.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Baker, S. (Director). (2015). Tangerine<\/em> [Film]. Magnolia Pictures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Benjamin, H. (1966). The transsexual phenomenon<\/em>. Julian Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I first encountered Rocky Horror before transition, when I did not fully understand myself, my needs, or indeed who, or what I actually was. Frank-N-Furter was not liberating to me then; he was terrifying. I feared he might somehow be an image of me, that I might be mentally ill, that if anybody discovered the nature of what was happening inside me I might lose my career, my standing, and perhaps control over my own life. And so I revisited it from a position of relative safety, and relative power. My transition was completed long ago; the dysphoria, distress, unbelonging and loneliness are things of the past (within the sociocultural limitations of the UK in 2026). I describe myself as a greedy bisexual – poly (ish) where both a transitioned woman and a cissexual man complete a complex, rich network of intimate loving relationships that sustain me. It is from this perspective that I reflect on it, carrying the diversity of my relationships, both towards myself and those I love. I bring my humanity, my existence and my truth while watching this cult classic again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Watching the film after transition gives me an analytical lens I had no access to before. It is from this perspective that Rocky Horror becomes particularly revealing. Rocky Horror can be a joyous queer artefact, but it can also be an extraordinarily revealing example of how transitioned women became culturally visible as symbols while being both rewritten and erased.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBrad and Janet<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
This is why Janet\u2019s response to Brad feels so psychologically thin to me. A richer form of emancipation would not require her to choose between herself and her relationship. She could recognise her own desire while still asking what happened to Brad, whether he had been deceived, and what obligations remained between them. Sexual agency and relational loyalty are not opposites.<\/p>\n\n\n\nColumbia<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Eddie<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Rocky<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Frank-N-Furter<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Frank’s great appeal lies in refusing to remain inside categories: he supposedly lives at the boundary and makes the boundary itself glamorous. Yet the particular figure through whom the film stages that ambiguity is sexually excessive, theatrical, dominant, unpredictable and increasingly violent. His \u201cfemininity\u201d is constructed in a very particular way. The audience is invited to admire the corset, makeup, pearls and heels while simultaneously being reminded of the male body underneath them. His femininity is exciting precisely because the contradiction remains visually legible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Frank is not a transitioned woman, and it would be analytically careless to pretend that he is. But that is precisely why the representational problem is so revealing. The film takes terminology associated with transsexuality and attaches it to a character whose defining traits include sexual excess, deception, domination and violence. It ties its perception of boundary crossing and femininity to lipstick, corsets and heels as if femininity, (or the merging of femininity and masculinity) is exactly that: something you can occupy, wear, and discard if you fancy a new look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The film’s use of the word transsexual is more than a piece of camp wordplay. Frank calls himself a \u201csweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania,\u201d and the line deliberately blurs distinctions between cross-dressing, sex transition, sexuality and theatrical gender performance. By 1975 those distinctions were not unknowable. Transsexual people had already been medically described as people seeking bodily transition through hormones and surgery. Yet transsexual people themselves become a location, a rhyme, a sexual atmosphere and a symbol of extreme otherness. They become the vehicle through which the audience can think about gay desire, bisexuality, male femininity, camp, sexual freedom and rebellion. That mechanism is central to his camp appeal; however, it is also almost the exact inverse of what gender incongruence and a successful, emancipated transition feels like to me. The film talks over transsexual women while appearing to talk about them. The queer spectacle says: look how thrilling it is when maleness and femininity remain visibly simultaneous, while this simultaneity, for me, was unbearable.
Frank’s violence makes the distinction more culturally consequential still. He kills Eddie. He sexually deceives Brad and Janet. He restrains Rocky. He controls his household and remakes people according to his desires. By the time Dr Scott says that \u201csociety must be protected,\u201d the film has created an extraordinary contradiction. The supposedly intolerant reaction is, within the narrative, not entirely irrational. Frank really is dangerous. That is a serious problem for any reading of his eventual destruction as a straightforward allegory of society persecuting the sexually different outsider. The film asks us to sympathise with the outsider while simultaneously making him coercive, deceptive and violent enough to justify fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Transition did not make me increasingly theatrical, sexually transgressive or socially alien. Neither did it make me powerful, controlling, dramatic or coercive. It allowed me to become recognisably myself. What followed transition was not an endless performance of gender but life: love, work, attachment, responsibility, family, intimacy, loyalty, ordinary femininity, shared goals, silly jokes, domesticity, desire, protecting people I love and the tenderness of their protection of me.
The question is not simply whether the film contains stereotypes that would now be considered offensive, it is a more difficult question: What happens when a culture enthusiastically uses the idea of the transsexual while excluding the transitioned woman herself?
As demonstrated in the personal reflection on \u201cBrad and Janet\u201d, Rocky Horror<\/em> inverts transitioned women\u2019s innermost and intimate experiences. Similarly, its treatment of transvestism could be problematic in that we are no further in our understanding of those innermost experiences. Cross-dressing may involve vulnerability, privacy, trust, aesthetic pleasure or temporary exploration, none of which requires sexualisation. It is entirely possible that Frank<\/em> offers some cross-dressers a language of freedom, visibility or pleasure that I do not share. It is equally possible that others experience its sexualisation, danger and theatrical excess as another distortion of something far more private, vulnerable or ordinary. That is not my experience to settle. What I can say is that the film gives those people remarkably little interiority too. People who cross-dress, identify as transvestites or are tentatively exploring gender are given remarkably little opportunity to explain what those experiences mean to them, just as transitioned women are not. Frank becomes the spectacle before anybody really gets to become a person. His freedom lies in inhabiting the boundary itself and making that ambiguity spectacular.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMagenta: the woman from Transsexual<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
One of Magenta\u2019s most appealing moments is also one of the smallest. During Janet\u2019s sexual awakening, Columbia sits painting Magenta\u2019s toenails. The surrounding sequence is heavily sexualised, but the interaction between the two women is unexpectedly gentle and familiar. It is playful, domestic and companionable: a tiny moment of women simply enjoying each other\u2019s company. I liked it. It felt cute rather than transgressive. This makes the contrast with Frank especially striking. Frank\u2019s femininity is spectacular and deliberately confrontational; Magenta\u2019s, in this moment, is relational. She is not performing femininity at the audience. She is sharing space with another woman. If Magenta is cautiously read as the closest thing the film gives us to a woman from \u201cTranssexual,\u201d this small background scene comes surprisingly close to the ordinary female belonging that the film otherwise struggles to imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Planet transsexual was not a utopia. Riff Raff and Magenta remain alien, strange and violent, and their own morality is hardly uncomplicated. But the ending does at least separate Frank from the category he has come to dominate symbolically. In the film\u2019s cultural afterlife, audiences remembered the \u201csweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania.\u201d They remembered the corset, the pearls, the lips, the swagger and the performative femininity. They did not generally remember Magenta as the woman from Transsexual whose presence might complicate the assumption that Frank somehow represented the whole of it. The film arguably contains a distinction between Frank and Transsexuality, while popular culture collapsed them back together.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPlacing the film within queer, feminist and transsexual scholarship<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
Rocky Horror<\/em> understands how femininity looks when viewed from the outside. It is far less interested in how femininity feels when lived from within. It recognises lipstick, heels, corsetry, colour, and glamour, but these are external signs, not an inner world. What is largely absent is female socialisation, female friendship, the need for safety and stability, the desire for harmony, affection and touch, the wish to feel pretty, the longing to be wanted without being used, the need to be accepted, cared for and emotionally understood. It understands femininity as something that can be displayed, exaggerated and performed. Without those things, everything else is decoration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
O\u2019Brien\u2019s reflections on his own life illuminate rather than undermine this reading. He has described himself as existing between male and female, as someone for whom gender ambiguity was a lifelong condition rather than a problem to be resolved through transition. Frank makes far more sense when read through that experience. The difficulty begins when that experience is allowed to define transsexual women as well. O\u2019Brien is authoritative about what it means to live between categories. I am authoritative about what it means to cross from one to another and live there<\/strong>. The two experiences may share shame, vulnerability and social exclusion, but they are not interchangeable.<\/p>\n\n\n\nReferences \/ Bibliography <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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