Thackery Binx is not Trans Masc, Sorry, and Neither is Rufio, or the Concept of Jonathan Taylor Thomas
Happy Halloween!
Seth and I live in Salem, Massachusetts, the setting of the iconic 1993 movie Hocus Pocus, which up until this week he had never seen. One of the most reassuring things about Seth is that, because he didn’t grow up with this movie (or most movies), he evaluated it on a straight-forward scale of Salem realism (mixed bag) and then had the bravery of those who know not what they ask, and wanted to know, “What is even the point of Binx?”
I gasped and then laughed, or, I pretended to gasp and then pretended to laugh, or some combination of those, because it was like, “first of all, how dare you” and also “yeah, true.”
One of the most simultaneously sympathetic, fun, annoying, and unnerving tendencies of a certain subset of media poisoned trans mascs (loosely defined) of a certain age (loosely defined) is their (our) increasingly tedious fixation on deciding tween boy characters from popular films of the 90s (loosely defined) were/are “trans boys” by which we kind of mean us, trans men in our 20s and 30s (loosely defined).
Don’t get me wrong, we also do this with characters and actors who were adult men at the time, too, which this is more hilarious and accurate.
But with the middle-school-locker-heart-throb set, I think it just gets weirder with the years, because these are always boy characters who aren’t so much going through trans-related feelings or experiences in any way whatsoever as they are mythical beings meant to appeal as adventurous role models and/or romantic ideals to grade school children, hard stop. They are He/They Unicorns and nothing more and, guys, it’s true that the normative models of masculinity really suck and also that Softboy Gets Top Surgery neither avoids nor resolves having to grapple with patriarchy.
See also:
Anyway, think about the hard facts of the “text” of Hocus Pocus with me for, like, five or ten more minutes. It’s not really a story about three witches, as the witches exist in this parallel but separate dimension of the movie that mostly serves to present a decent example of cis women as drag queens. That whole part is, like, fine and fun, and the songs are catchy, even the brief “Sarah’s Theme” that Sarah Jessica Parker, whose character is also named Sarah, sings or maybe lip-syncs to hypnotize children, and in retrospect sounds like some composer’s rough draft for “Once Upon a December” from the 1997 animated Anastasia.
Meanwhile, the narrative film part of Hocus Pocus is completely book-ended by Thackery Binx and his dippy little sister Emily and her inexplicable 90s bangs, and even the perspective character Max and his sassy empowered daughter-of-a-90s-woman little sister Dani only exist to echo and catalyze a resolution to the Binx Siblings’ story. While in some ways it’s hard to say who the main character of Hocus Pocus is, because it doesn’t land as an ensemble film either, if it’s anyone, it’s Binx.
Let’s take a closer look at this Active Central Character, whose primary on-screen actions and choices are:
waking up in a passionate sweat with naught on his mind but his young sister (who sleeps right next to him, even though it’s 1693 and that’s probably accurate in so many words, yet the parents don’t appear to have a bed in this house or else let their children sleep in instead of putting them immediately to chores at dawn, and I have a lot of questions about the Binx family dynamic that I don’t really want answers to);
not wearing shoes;
wearing open-collared shirt that gets torn and falls off only just slightly, foppishly;
running into the woods in bare feet and a billowing shirt (see above), inevitably tripping in said woods at the edge of a hill and totally beefing it on the way down;
being turned into a cat that can talk to humans, yet for reasons that are never explained, only making normal cat noises at his father for attention, which obviously fails as a tactic because he dad is like “begone, beast!” and maybe has allergies or just hates cats (which, according to some tumblr strains of nightblog feminism, is a form of misogyny); and yeah, again, I have some questions about the Binx family’s deal in general that I will continue to leave for someone else to examine;
guarding a house for 300 years but failing to stop Max from fulfilling the curse because he jumps and bites too early and then gets flung away by a boy with zero muscles so, once again, beefs it;
getting hit by a bus, seemingly on purpose or at least passively, maybe willingly (seems to either enjoy getting hurt or seeking failure);
and finally, beefing it one last time, The Final Beef, otherwise accomplishing nothing in the process because the witches do not die due to the actions of the characters so much as the fact of sunrise, and it had not been established at all until then that their death would mean Binx, too, could die and be with his “family” (sister). To clarify, the good guys win by stalling, if anything, and Binx is freed from his curse by sheer accident. In fact, what is made very clear by the movie is that Binx doesn’t know how his own curse works, because he thinks the witches are dead earlier in the film and settles down to live forever as Dani’s combination pet, surrogate brother, and boyfriend.
Thus we discover the real story of Hocus Pocus:
Despite being a huge loser, Binx seems ideal in a certain light because at first he is an actual teen, and then a cursed teen, and then a dead teen, never to be any older than he was on the day he woke up in a passionate sweat thinking selflessly of others. They only want you when you’re seventeen, when you’re twenty-one, you’re no fun— and all that.
What Binx represents to someone who loved Hocus Pocus as a child and is now a certain sort of adult trans masc still obsessed with him is the double fantasy of an easy and noble boyhood that stalled perfectly and virtuously on the cusp of actual manhood and its attendant difficulties, while still being just “filled out” enough to suggest that some kind of à la carte approach to secondary sexual characteristics is available.
Plus, of course:
Based on what made it into otherwise censoriousness and watered-down, all-ages mass media of the era, who doesn’t now want to easily enjoy romance by finally being ones own protective magic cat-brother-boyfriend? That’s kind of like empowerment, right? Agency? Equality? I don’t know (and I wouldn’t, I guess, since being allergic to cats means I am a misogynist, see item 5 on the Binx List above).
And then there’s Rufio. Since Hook came out first in 1991, Binx, who in the end is nothing and no one of substance, might have been cribbing from Rufio or the general vibe that was responsible for Rufio. Regardless, Rufio is otherwise exactly the same character but performing a child’s idea of badass and cool instead of a child’s idea of noble and loyal. You’d think those traits being set up as opposites would mean Rufio and Binx were different characters, but no, they absolutely are not, and my proof is that the same general set of trans mascs who I am addressing and describing here are equally, if not more, fixated on Rufio in the same manner, beat for beat, even though the Lost Boys are the most boring characters in that movie and the queer obsession with the world of Peter Pan goes well beyond Hook, and unfortunately Rufio just made this worse.
This character is a type, is all, which is fine. I’m not even going to say a “type of guy” because he’s not a guy, because a guy is an adult even if he isn’t quite a man. Maybe a dude, since dude sounds kind of youthful but still vague. He is a boy.
Jonathan Taylor Thomas played so many of this type of boy in the 90s that it is pointless to reduce him to any one role besides The Concept of Jonathan Taylor Thomas who emerged as a result, and lives on as his own character. Did you know that Jonathan Taylor Thomas is alive and became an adult? No, you did not, and you still don’t, because The Concept of Jonathan Taylor Thomas persists, stalled perfectly on the cusp of— etcetera.
The closest that this type ever got to successfully interesting and plausibly trans is maybe, maybe Jack in 1997’s Titanic, at least in so far as audience appeal goes, because he combines Rufio’s edge and Binx’s tenderness and there’s a joke in the dialogue about him “passing as a gentleman” that is fairly straightforward for projection and he is just old enough to actually fuck, which he does. This was a very smart way to resolve this type of boy in the later 90s: letting him start to grow up right before freezing him in time forever, and in poor Jack’s case, literally freezing him to a perfectly mundane death instead of put on hold by a magical or reversible one.
I am not going to say this type of boy is extinct in the 2000s, because he is not, but he has changed by having now fucked or thought about fucking shortly before freezing in time forever, so I guess maybe he next manifested as Edward Cullen from Twilight and now something else, something about The Great Himbo Renaissance, and so on and so forth. I can’t say much more about the Post-Cullen versions because I don’t really care about Edward Cullen, because I’m too old, and trans men my age work through their Cullen-esque baggage with uncomfortably sympathetic fanfiction about Diary Tom Riddle. Or so I’ve heard. I don’t know anything about that, actually. Forget it.
My real point here is that we should be more honest with ourselves in our media analysis and, in conclusion, collectively appreciate the two characters in Hocus Pocus who, with depth and nuance and continued relevance, rank the highest for That Character Is Trans Because I Just Know It by an absolute landslide: Ice and his supportive best friend, Still-Closeted Maria From the Novel Nevada by Imogen Binnie.
Happy Halloween.
Love,
Julian