We watched Bit last night! It's a vampire movie with a trans lead!

It's so... shocking? To see subtle and purely transfeminine concerns played out as the central conflicts and metaphors of a feature length film???

It seems like most critics missed... everything, unsurprisingly

Cis-dominated feminist spaces ARE a vampire coven to trans women: your safety depends on being ~chosen~ to join them (in Laurel's case, 100% on the basis of desirability), and even once you're accepted, they hold the power to ostracize and destroy you over your head.

And cis-feminist spaces put trans women under profound pressure to forsake and denounce the men who held us in safety and love during the worst parts of our lives. This coven maintains familial relationships, but vampirizing men is forbidden, setting up Laurel's heroic conflict.

[Spoilers from here forwards]

It's... kind of amazing to me that this movie was written by a cis man? How did Brad Michael Elmore DO it?

(Looking at an interview: He read six books by trans women and then ran the script past sensitivity readers. APPARENTLY IT'S THAT EASY.)

I spent the whole first act of the movie living in the queasy uncertainty of whether Duke, the vampiric boss of LA, was going to turn out to be a T*RF-- whether she and her minions had actually accepted Laurel, or she was skating towards inevitable violence.

(This is the question on every trans woman's mind every time we enter a new space for queer women: What happens when they realize I'm trans?)

Duke is certainly a r*dfem. She was turned in the 70's (second wave feminism), suffered terribly at the hands of her vampire master, and while she targets perpetrators of male violence for feeding, she's lackadaisical about killing innocent men and/or women to preserve her power.

When explaining the No Men rule, Duke says that power *always* corrupts men, and

This conversation reveals that she's not a T*RF: Laurel asks, "Well, what about... me?" and Duke replies, "It never crossed my mind."

(I'm glad that Elmore decided not to turn this into a movie about a hate group victimizing Laurel. It opens the window to WAY deeper questions, and as he states in an interview, that's not his story to tell. I'm deeply impressed with his navigation of this fraught space, OK?)

We're relieved by Duke's answer-- unquestioning acceptance!-- but should we be?

Duke's coven is trans-inclusive by sheer lack of consideration. It's not WELCOMING to or SUPPORTIVE of trans women. Laurel is dragged there by a sexual partner and then included as an afterthought.

The fact that Duke "hadn't even considered" whether her men-can't-be-vampires ideology makes sense in a world with trans people is a huge problem.

She's not a T*RF, but she sees gender as deterministic, so her ideology is cissexist. Accepting Laurel is superficial, paradoxical.

Duke is also a white girl with corn rows and braids. In the feminist circle she's created, she literally hoards the power left behind by her defeated patriarch from her minions Frog and Izzy, both vampires of color (who REALLY could have used more dialog ).

Duke is not an intersectional feminist. She frames all systems of power as being about men and women. She monologues fervently about how women are cast as monsters in otherized bodies, without even a drip of awareness that this is ten thousand times truer for Laurel than for her.

Laurel's new vampire friends are flashy, dangerous, aesthetically queer; by contrast, the men in Laurel's life (her brother, her gay bestie) are dull and gawping and demanding in their care. She begins drifting away from them the moment she's accepted by the other women.

Offered access to a space where women are centered and she's accepted, Laurel is seriously seduced by radvamp ideology.

When Duke asks, "Can you tell me any man wouldn't [abuse vampiric powers]?" she replies, "I don't know that I can."

But she refuses to kill anyone to feed.

Laurel's brother and high school bestie are increasingly concerned for her as she ignores, ignores, ignores them in favor of a group of women who hazed her with violence and show no compunction about ostracizing & killing her if she doesn't agree to their rules. (How familiar.)

Like any "vampire refuses to feed" story, when Laurel does finally crack and lash out, it's against her older brother, in the middle of a fight that underlines how he has *always* been her first and last defender, advocate and caretaker. She bites and infects him.

This is really the crux of the movie: She has to kill her entire past-- her brother, and their shared assigned gender-- to satisfy her new friends. If she can't give up this part of her humanity, her new friends WILL ostracize and destroy her.

(It's worth remembering that, earlier in the movie, Izzy says she still has a strong relationship with her brother.

This is fully a double-standard. Trans women are asked to give up all connection to the masculine world in exchange for acceptance in a way cis women never are.)

In the end, Laurel is unable to convince Duke to spare her brother-- and on the metaphorical level, accept the history of her body. And she's also unwilling to betray them.

In desperation, she cuts loose her own blood to revive The First Bride, takes her brother and runs.

The First Bride is the first character we saw in the movie-- she tries to turn her male partner & is imprisoned by Duke. "She just made a mistake, and needs to learn."

(In queer, feminist spaces, attraction to cis men is often regarded as a flaw, creating a biphobic atmosphere.)

The First Bride immediately frees The Master, a stand-in for all men under patriarchy, having lived hundreds of years and dozens of lives, which he points out, in his villain speech, have been fair and beautiful as well as abusive and cruel.

He's... bad.

The Master points out that, despite her rule against mind controlling other vampires, Duke has been using his heart to control the others. They're aghast; he overwhelms them and prepares to destroy Duke by burning her heart.

This is... cheesy? But if The Master's heart is kyriarchy, that's exactly what cis white leadership in feminist spaces does.

Duke is constantly representing the Master as *patriarchy*, not kyriarchy, because grappling with her own privileges would mean stepping out of power.

Laurel returns to save the day, and she and the other vampires imprison Duke in the pit where she kept the first bride. One of the final shots of the movie is Laurel, Izzy and Frog each taking a bite of The Master's heart, democratizing his powers along intersectional lines.

Her brother re-voices the question of the movie: The question of whether, now a vampire, Duke was right, and he'll become an abusive monster. (Heartbreaking, given the empathy and sensitivity required to stand up for your younger sibling against your parents and the world.)

Laurel gives him a big fat MAYBE, saying that he needs to be careful, that they'll wait and see, but in fact, being a man is NOT an excuse to behave monstrously.

Anyway, on one level Bit is a goofy schlocky vampire movie, but I absolutely love it. I don't think I've ever seen this level of nuance and intersectional critique of 2nd-wave feminism on a screen before?

And obviously it's a revelation to see the trans lens centered this way.

It's WILD that every internet review is like "this is man-hating garbage." Like, my dudes, this is the fairest shake you're gonna get. Did you even see the movie? (You did, but you saw yourselves in the van helsing incel internet trolls, not in Laurel's brother, huh.)