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A Trans Reading of: The Shape of Water

So The Shape of Water as a trans narrative. Where the hell does that come from? Well, first off we gotta start with some subtle details that I connected on my most recent viewing that I never before put together. Spoilers ahead of course, and so as not to waste space explaining the whole movie I'll assume you've seen it. If you haven't... seriously go see it. It's a best picture winning Sci-Fi/Fantasy movie. There are only like 3 of those in all of film history. It really does alot of special things. After the opening credits, we see Elisa Espositio, the nonverbal protagonist of the film, go about her daily routine. It's a fairly normal routine, but for 2 odd details the movie takes time to emphasize: firstly, Elisa's gill shaped neck scars, and secondly, that she pleasures her self while soaking in the bathtub. Neither of things things are especially extraodinary, but unusal. Further on in the film, when the movie's psychotic antagonist, Richard Strickland, meets Elisa after she finds his severed fingers. We learn that she was an orphan; found near a river already with those scars on her neck. It's assumed by the characters to be the reason she cannot speak. This is a pretty extraodinary backstory, and quite a compelling mystery that, at first glance, never gets resolved. There is, however, one more detail that relates to this puzzle: the ending. Elisa, mortally wounded, is taken by the Amphibous Man to the ocean where he heals her wounds, and, heres the critical bit, turns her scars into gills. Each of these details, in isolation, don't have to mean anything.

The scars can just be scars.
Pleasuring oneself in the bathtub can just be a normal habit.
People can just be orphans.
And it's established that the Amphibious Man has some supernatural abilites when he heals Giles's wounds and reverses his hairloss; growing new gills seems reasonably in line with that ability.

If you take those details together as a whole, it starts to paint an interesting picture: that Elisa is a supernatural creature, like the Amphibious Man.

The scars might have once been gills that atrophied and closed up or were surgically closed.
She might pleasure herself in water because, as a water borne creature, she might feel most comfortable while floating in water.
She might not have human parents, or even parents at all.

So what we have with The Shape of Water, is a protagonist who feels alienated from the world around her, because of expectations the world places on her physiology that she is unable to meet. That makes her feel broken and incomplete. Then, she meets another person who is like her, and is able to see her as the person she really is. They fall in love, and she learns that she was born an entirely different kind of thing than people have told her she is. She is then reborn and is physically transformed into what she always was: what the world around her prevented her from being. This resonated with me as a particularly trans narrative. A person who was born one thing, grew up being told she was an entirely different thing, was forced to fit that mold and, later in life, discovered or rediscovered who she really was this whole time.

In writing this out, however, it occurs to me that this is a rather interesting bit of psychological slight-of-hand on the part of my brain. Let's assume the viewer is a gay cis person, or a person born with a disability, or a neurodivergent person, or a person of color, or even a cis-het-person who just doesnt quite conform to the very narrow expectations the world places on people. Would this not resonate just as effectively for them? Granted, I can point out how Elisa's sexuality being strongly associated with her identity through the symbol of water speaks to my trans experiance as gender and sexuality are interlinked and influence each other. However, I imagine that a person born with a disability can point out how the very explicit representation of Elisa and the Amphibian Man's shared nonverbality speaks to their own experiance. A gay person can point out how the parallels the movie draws between Elisa's alienation and Giles's alienation as a gay man speaks to their experiance. A person of color can point out how the movie's depiction of racial and class solidarity between Elisa and her coworker Zelda in the face of prejudice speaks to their experiance, and so on with many other marginalized people.

The long and the short of it is that The Shape of Water very thoroughly, and effectively explores the perspectives and experiances of the marginalized. This "fairy tale for troubled times" (as the movie's opening narration lables itself) manages to pull together both the shared and unique feelings of people who feel ignored or attacked by power into a single narrative that can speak to a very broad audience. This really was key to its success as an award winning hit with both critics and audiences. Its universality enables the movie to generate so much empathy within its audience that the average filmgoer can accept or even believe in Elisa's romantic and sexual relationship with the literal Creature from the Black Lagoon. While The Shape of Water is a trans narrative, it's also a gay narrative, a race and class narrative and so on ad-infinitum.