Private School...for Girls and the Utterly Incriminating Paranoia of Transphobes

When I was fourteen years old I embraced movies as an invaluable, essential, damn near life-saving form of escape. Being a baby cinephile also gave me a sense of identity and a community of movie-loving weirdoes to call comrades. 

But I’m going to keep it real with y’all: because I was a fourteen year old boy, it was mostly about the boobs for me. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated that film could be a powerful form of self-expression and a vehicle to articulate profound truths about humanity and the human condition. 

But mostly I dug the fact that R-rated movies sometimes had naked boobs and butts that you could look at while masturbating furiously, as I did non-stop between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. 

It was in this capacity that I rented and watched the 1982 sex comedy Private School, AKA Private School…for Girls while living briefly with a foster family back in 1990.

If you are familiar with Private School…for Girls it’s probably because you also spent your teen years on an epic, insatiable hunt for naked cinematic breasts to aid in the act of feverish self-pleasuring. 

If you were, in fact, a prolific onanist in your youth with a weakness for teen sex comedies then it’s entirely possible that scenes from the film stick with you long after you’ve forgotten infinitely more important things. 

For reasons you can probably guess, one scene stands out in my mind in my particular. In it, a young Matthew Modine, a few years removed from starring in Full Metal Jacket, dresses in women’s clothing in order to sneak into the titular Private School for Girls in order to furtively visit girlfriend Phoebe Cates for the purpose of doing sex stuff. 

But before he can make sweet, passionate love to the girl of his dreams, the horny young man in drag is pulled into a room by a high school vixen played by Betsy Russell. The gorgeous young woman explains that she’s worried that her breasts aren’t attractive enough, so she angrily demands that a stranger that she assumes is a woman because of her garb look long and hard at her pert bosoms, and give them a good squeeze for good measure. 

Even as a horny 14 year old I understood that this was an unusually stupid, phony, fake scene in a movie that is idiotic and pandering even by the very lenient standards of lowbrow 1980s teen sex comedies. 

Judging by what can very flatteringly be deemed online discourse and more honestly dismissed as the bullshit idiots post on Facebook, a lot of Conservatives and TERFS looked at this sequence, and sequences like it, and determined they were not puerile lowbrow sex comedy at all but rather a harrowing look into the predatory practices of the trans community. 

A dispiriting number of folks labor under the delusion that coming out as a trans woman is largely a matter of dudes dressing in women’s clothes so they can gain access to locker rooms and bathrooms in order to look at naked boobs and butts. 

Alternately, they think that being trans is all about being able to cheat at sports. If it’s not about looking at boobs or cheating at amateur sports then bigots and hate-mongers think that the trans community exists because every time someone comes out as trans they get a million dollar check in the mail from George Soros, instantly gain a hundred thousand followers on Twitter and Instagram and lifetime backstage passes to Beyonce concerts after she records a concept album about them and their bravery. 

The idea that a trans identity might be sincere and genuine and at the very core of someone's being is inconceivable to these people. They can’t accept that it's honest and real so they assume that it’s nothing more than a cynical scheme to trick a public ostensibly obsessed with being open-minded and "woke" into giving them unfair advantages. 

That is utter bullshit. Coming out as trans is not something that people do lightly. It’s not a fad or a phase or a craze but something that people feel so deeply in their bones that they’re willing to endure tremendous expense and vicious public mockery for the sake of being their true selves and living authentic lives. 

These bigots can’t see beyond their own ugliness and pettiness. They can’t accept that people are genuinely different than them so they assume that it must all be an elaborate con. 

I wish that I could say that this will change with time but progress invariably leads to backlash and the backlash to trans progress has been as intense as it has been dispiritingly predictable. 

In conclusion, Private School…For Girls was a sex comedy, not a docudrama so if you’re obsessed with dark notions of what trans women might do in locker rooms or bathrooms that ultimately says a lot more about you than it does them. 

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