While well-intentioned, this approach elides the humanity of these characters-and of the community they represent. Yet showrunners and filmmakers still too often use transgender characters as empty rhetorical vehicles to make some broader point about injustice. But for now, their bond is gorgeous and, quietly, a step forward for transgender representation writ large. The show’s prevailing atmosphere of doom will come for them, too. But nothing about Euphoria suggests that this will be a fairy-tale romance in which Rue and Jules run away from their insular town and start a new life together. It’s clear that these characters love each other-or, at least, that they need each other in ways deeper than teenagers possesses the emotional maturity to express. “I hate everyone else in this world but you,” Jules tells Rue, forehead to forehead, right before one of Euphoria’s most gut-wrenching moments to date. (In an interview with W Magazine, Schafer said that she and Zendaya had formed “a really special bond-and it shows.) Zendaya and Schafer capture the beauty of this cis-trans, platonic-romantic bond with a chemistry that arguably hasn’t been seen on TV since the Emmy-nominated web series Her Story. Euphoria likes to take big swings, and it misses some of them, but the show always returns to this tender friendship between a cisgender young woman and her transgender BFF, who bond not just over shared histories of trauma but through bike rides and sleepovers and lunchroom banter. But Jules is most captivating to watch in her many richly-textured scenes with Rue, who develops a crush on Jules while struggling with drug addiction. Narratively, she has spent much of Euphoria so far being courted via text message by an anonymous boy who found her profile on a gay dating app. If you missed it, catch up.Īnd although Jules’s gender identity certainly plays a role in how the other characters treat her-be it sexual assault, verbal harassment, or erotic fetishization-Jules as a character is allowed to do so much more than endure violence and discrimination. Viewers who missed context clues might be surprised when Jules vocalizes that she’s trans in the third episode-in a conversation with Rue, who cuts her off, because it’s not new information-but Euphoria doesn’t treat the revelation like a rug to be pulled out from under the audience. Whereas that 1992 film revealed that a character was transgender as a plot twist, Euphoria is set in a high school where the Gen Z student body seems to already know, more or less, about Jules. But it does so without reducing the rich complexity that is Jules to her transgender status and-so far-without trotting out the same tired transgender tropes that have plagued Hollywood since the days of The Crying Game. It’s not that Euphoria refuses to acknowledge Jules’s gender identity or to use it as a plot point. She melts under attention, even when it’s coming from people who could prove dangerous. She spends way too much time on her phone. She likes to ride her bike through the orange groves, even at night. She is silly and has a strong sense of style. Indeed, Jules-like transgender people more generally-is so many things besides simply transgender. Whereas the (still-groundbreaking) Orange is the New Black seemed to go out of its way to announce that Laverne Cox’s character Sophia was transgender in every single scene, Euphoria trusts its audience to pick up on the hints and follow along. The context clues are all there: a few oblique references in the dialogue, a handful of visual cues. The fact that Jules is transgender isn’t exactly a secret in the episodes that HBO has aired thus far. A character like her is hard to dream up, harder to portray, and harder still for a creator to handle with care. But years from now, long after the hot takes have cooled and the show itself has been reduced to a blur of sex scenes in our collective cultural consciousness, we will still remember Jules. Jules is brought to life by transgender model Hunter Schafer, acting the hell out of her debut role opposite Zendaya, who plays Jules’s best friend Rue.Įuphoria is a series that clearly wants a reaction, regularly touching hot buttons like 9/11, the opioid crisis, and sexting-and a reaction Euphoria will get. The show is Euphoria, HBO’s controversy-courting teen drama, and the character is Jules, a charismatic young transgender girl with Rapinoe-pink hair and a heart that looks for love in all the wrong places. The most interesting transgender character on television doesn’t utter the words “I’m trans” until three episodes into her show.
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