Editor’s note:
This essay explores how television has used allegory to represent transness, and how those metaphors shaped both cultural understanding and personal self-questioning. It reflects one queer perspective on growing up with limited language, uneven representation, and stories that often blurred identity and desire. It is not intended to define trans experiences, but to examine how media narratives can both obscure and illuminate them.

Television has never known quite what to do with transness. For decades, it reached for allegory instead: monsters, shapeshifters, “gender-bending” experiments. Sometimes allegory was the only way queerness could get onscreen. Sometimes it was a mask for mockery. And only recently have we started to see trans characters move from metaphor to actual people with lives worth following.

In the 1990s, shows like The X-Files loved “gender-bender” episodes. One week it was a mutant who could change sex to seduce victims. Another week it was a serial killer who wore women’s clothing as disguise. Transness wasn’t represented — it was coded as horror.

These episodes weren’t subtle. They drew straight from a cultural playbook that equated transness with deception, danger, and violence. The fear wasn’t just difference; it was the fear of being fooled. The trans body became a threat to be exposed and policed. Audiences were invited to shiver, not empathise.

When I caught reruns of these episodes as a teenager, I felt uneasy but couldn’t articulate why. Something in the monster felt closer to me than the FBI agents did. The show treated that closeness like a danger signal.

The thing about allegory is that it can cut both ways. For some viewers, the shapeshifter is a transphobic trope. For others, it’s a metaphor they can steal back. To be able to change, to cross boundaries, to live between categories — that’s not monstrous, that’s survival.

This double-edged allegory kept turning up. Star Trek used alien species who changed sex or had no gender. Buffy had demons who “wore” human bodies. Science fiction leaned on metaphor to ask questions it was too scared to attach to actual people.

But allegory has a cost. Historically, it protected writers, networks, and audiences from having to engage with real trans lives. When transness is always coded as alien, monstrous, or symbolic, it sends a quiet message: you’re an idea, not a human.

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By the 2000s, TV started inching closer. Crime procedurals like CSI and Law & Order featured trans characters, but usually as victims. Their stories revolved around medicalisation — hormones, surgeries, bodies as evidence. Transness was presented as something to be scrutinised under fluorescent light.

Progress? Maybe. At least trans people were portrayed by characters rather than creatures. But these portrayals centred institutional authority over lived experience. Trans bodies were examined, categorised, and debated by doctors and detectives, rarely allowed interiority of their own. They weren’t people with inner lives, just files to be interpreted.

Then came Transparent in 2014. For all its flaws, and there were many, especially around casting a cis man as a trans woman, it marked a shift. Suddenly, transness was central to a prestige story. It wasn’t allegory, it was identity.

The show was messy and often self-indulgent, but it cracked something open. Awards attention and cultural legitimacy forced networks to acknowledge that audiences could handle trans characters with depth, humour, and family mess. It made transness something executives had to reckon with, not sidestep.

At the same time, transness kept flickering back into allegory. Sense8 gave us Nomi Marks, a trans woman played by a trans actress, while also weaving transness into a larger metaphor about psychic connection and shared bodies.

What mattered was that Nomi wasn’t symbolic first and trans second. She was a hacker, a girlfriend, an activist, someone stubborn and politically inconvenient. Her transness existed in the world of the show, but it didn’t need justification. It sat alongside her estrangement from her family and her deep, lived-in love with Amanita.

The allegory worked because it never swallowed her. When institutions threatened her body, when doctors tried to override her autonomy, the stakes were recognisably real. The sci-fi metaphor echoed trans experiences of control and recognition without flattening her into a lesson. Allegory and humanity coexisted, without one cancelling the other out.

Which brings us to Euphoria. Jules, played by Hunter Schafer, feels like a turning point. She’s trans, but the show doesn’t treat her as a metaphor or a medical case. She’s a teenager: messy, searching, luminous, sometimes self-destructive.

Her transness shapes her world but doesn’t reduce her to allegory. She’s allowed to be a person first. The symbolism appears in her dreams and self-conceptions — dissolving into the ocean, assembling femininity from anime archetypes — but it belongs to her. She owns the metaphor, not the other way around.

For trans viewers, Jules wasn’t an explanation. She was recognition. Watching her, I felt relief. No coded monster. No Very Special lecture. Just a girl whose contradictions felt familiar.

Even now, allegory hasn’t disappeared. Sci-fi still uses shapeshifters. Fantasy still plays with transformation. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Allegory can stretch language, give shape to experiences that resist realism.

But allegory has to be in the hands of the people it’s about. The difference between X-Files monsters and Jules’ dream sequences is authorship. One was written to provoke fear. The other was written from inside the experience.

Growing up queer, I didn’t just borrow allegories. I used them to ask questions I couldn’t yet name. For a long time, I wondered if my attraction to men meant I was a gay man, or if it meant something else entirely. Was I drawn to masculinity from the outside, or was I misreading a desire to be on the other side of the equation? Was I attracted to men, or was I trans and oriented toward what I was told was the opposite sex?

Television didn’t help me separate those questions. Allegory blurred them. Shapeshifters, witches, vampires, bodies that transformed under moonlight or magic — they all suggested that desire and identity were unstable, open to revision. That was comforting, but it was also disorienting. When everything is metaphor, it’s hard to tell which parts are about who you love and which parts are about who you are.

I didn’t have the language to say, I’m a boy who loves boys, and that’s not the same question as gender. I only knew that something about embodiment felt unresolved, and that stories kept offering transformation as the answer. Change your body. Cross over. Become something else. Allegory made that feel possible, even inevitable.

What I needed, and didn’t yet have, were characters who showed that desire doesn’t automatically imply misalignment, and that questioning gender doesn’t require a narrative of escape. I needed people, not symbols. I needed to see that you could be queer without needing to become someone else in order to make sense.

That’s why it matters when trans characters are written as human first. Not just for trans audiences, but for anyone growing up in that foggy space where attraction, identification, and imagination overlap. When transness is always a metaphor, it can make every question feel like a riddle you’re supposed to solve by transforming.

When trans people get to write their own stories, something quieter happens. The metaphor loosens. The panic recedes. The question stops being “what are you really?” and becomes “who are you, today?”

That shift doesn’t erase allegory. It gives it context. It lets metaphor sit alongside reality rather than replacing it. And for those of us who grew up wondering which story we were meant to be in, that difference can feel like finally being allowed to stay.