[The new series, Y: The Last Man, airing on Hulu, is trying to
make the very 2002 premise of the comic it’s based on work in 2021.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE TRICKY TRANS POLITICS OF FX’S Y: THE LAST MAN  
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Emily VanDerWerff
September 27, 2021
Vox
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_ The new series, Y: The Last Man, airing on Hulu, is trying to make
the very 2002 premise of the comic it’s based on work in 2021. _

Agent 355 and Yorick (the titular last man) go in search of a
geneticist who can provide the answers they seek in Y: The Last Man. ,
FX

 

I put off watching _Y: The Last Man_
[[link removed]],
the new sci-fi dystopian series about a world where everybody with a Y
chromosome dies except for one cis man and one monkey, as long as I
possibly could. (The FX series is releasing new episodes on Hulu every
Monday through November 1.) It is by far the new fall TV show that
I’ve received the most questions about.

_Y: The Last Man_ is an adaptation of an extremely popular comics
series [[link removed]] that was
written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Pia Guerra and
published between 2002 and 2008. It has a big, catchy
premise, highlighted in the trailer
[[link removed]] by a shot of the
fictional president dying of a mysterious, bloody disease, one that
also fells all of the other men in the room. (The actual episode goes
even further in depicting several bloody deaths. It’s a lot!)

But the main reason the show has raised so many questions is that the
source comic’s premise, as it stood, left little room for trans
people. Trans men are briefly mentioned as existing in said comic, and
trans women are assumed to have all died, because we bore Y
chromosomes that led to our (fictional) deaths. Nonbinary people are
not mentioned at all, and the comic doesn’t include any trans people
as major characters. We just sort of exist off to the side somewhere.
So: As America’s foremost trans television critic, I’ve
encountered a lot of people wanting to know if, uh, _Y: The Last
Man_ would be horribly transphobic and gender essentialist.

A quick definition: “Gender essentialism” is when we insist that
the gender someone is assigned at birth on some level determines their
destiny. So the fact that I presumably have a Y chromosome (I’ve
never undergone a chromosome testing panel, so we can’t know
for_ _sure) means I can never escape that biological fact, and
according to gender essentialist logic, will always be “a man” in
some sense. It’s pretty gross, and it props up a lot of terrible
ideas.

Chromosomes are not destiny, and both gender and sex are incredibly
complicated things that we know a lot more about in 2021 than we did
in 2002, when _Y: The Last Man_ was first published. The new TV
adaptation has clearly thought a lot about the complicated nature of
gender, and by at least having done a lot of research, it’s doing
about the best job it possibly can with a premise that is nevertheless
essentialist by default.

The tension between doing the work and being trapped by the story’s
core premise is one I find interesting and even compelling here and
there. I like _Y: The Last Man_ far more than I don’t. (The cast,
especially, is amazing.) Still, I have never stopped feeling uneasy
about the series’ attempts to incorporate our current, more fluid
understanding of gender into a premise with a hard-and-fast gender
binary at its very core.

How _Y: The Last Man_ updated its view of gender for the 2020s

[Agent 355 and Dr. Mann have a frank conversation in front of a
fireplace. They are silhouetted.]

Agent 355 and Dr. Mann discuss several nuances of gender in front of a
roaring fire. As you do.

 FX

First, a disclosure: Charlie Jane Anders, who wrote on _Y: The Last
Man_, is a good friend of mine, and Aydin Olsen-Kennedy, my former
gender therapist, consulted on the show. I am probably predisposed to
cut the show some slack.

_Y: The Last Man_’s approach to trans characters creeps in slowly
through the show’s first six episodes (which are all I have seen;
there will be 10 in total). In episode four, its most prominent trans
guy character — Sam, played by Elliot Fletcher — is granted more
time in the spotlight. In episode five, a geneticist named Dr. Mann
explains in great detail that not only men perished in the global
die-off of everything with a Y chromosome. (The TV series has yet to
offer an explanation for what happened; the comics featured several
different explanations. Vaughan has said that one of those
explanations from the comics is the “correct” one, but he has not
specified which one.)

Certainly, cis men died during “the event” (this is what
showrunner Eliza Clark calls it, so I’m going to call it that too).
So did trans women, and so did nonbinary people, and so did several
cis women who had a Y chromosome due to Swyer syndrome
[[link removed]], and so did many
intersex people. Then there are all of the people who died because
they just happened to be on a plane flown by a man or riding in a car
driven by a man when the event occurred.

So lots of people died during the event, Dr. Mann clarifies. Most of
them were men, but saying that _only_ men died does a disservice to
the actual scale of the calamity. Most of the information presented in
this scene won’t surprise many trans people, who think about the
nature of gender a lot, but I’ve found that many cis people have
never even thought about it, so I hope somebody somewhere learns
something new from _Y: The Last Man_.

The point is, the TV version of _Y: The Last Man _understands that
implying that chromosomes are destiny creates an impression of a
gender binary that doesn’t exist. Human DNA is messy and
complicated, and therefore, so is whatever we call “gender.”

“Human beings are meaning makers. That’s why we tell stories, and
that’s why we create art. But it’s also why we create reductive
labels for people and why we create binaries and why we stick with
people who look and sound and agree with us,” Clark told me. “I
felt like it was interesting to take a premise [centered on] that idea
but then to illustrate how that’s not actually true. And it’s not
the most interesting version [of this story], either imaginatively or
scientifically.”

_Y: The Last Man_ also takes pains to bridge the gap between the
gender essentialism inherent to its high-concept premise and the
scenes where it complicates that gender essentialism. It mostly does
this by making the event really fucking sad.

In the comic, what happens is presented as horrific, but it’s mostly
expressed via a woman who dies by suicide because “all the men”
are gone. Then time almost immediately skips forward to a point when
it’s safe for the story’s “last man” cis guy protagonist to go
on semi-snarky adventures through a United States in the process of
rebuilding. That choice fits the comic’s loose, rambling picaresque,
where getting too serious too often would harsh what’s compelling
about the story, which is a group of characters bonding during the end
of the world.

On the TV show, we have to watch as a whole bunch of people die. We
watch mothers discover dead sons, wives discover dead husbands. We
watch workplaces collapse and cities fall apart. We watch planes crash
and chaos reign. The White House burns to the ground. It’s
depressing and dark and dour, and the show’s first few episodes
refuse to let you look away. There’s a time jump here, too, but it
takes us a while to get there.

As someone who enjoyed the comic, this adaptation choice initially
struck me as slightly perverse — it’s so dour — but I grew to
admire it as the show began to introduce the comic’s semi-snarky
tone. It also let the show play sleight-of-hand with the fact that the
death of “all men” (as most characters refer to the event across
the first few episodes) wasn’t actually a death exclusively of men
or of “all” men. If _Y: The Last Man_ leans into the horrible
gravity of what happened, it avoids the “haha all the men are gone,
amirite ladies?!” winking tone that any story set in a world
“without men” can so easily fall into.

“A lot of the reviews of the first couple of episodes are like,
‘It’s dour or sad.’ And to me the event is devastating. The show
gets fun and funnier, but I wasn’t setting out to make something
that was like, ‘The world’s better off without men,’ because
it’s not men who died. It’s people with a Y chromosome,” Clark
says. “I feel like, in fact, the world is far worse off. And the
point of the show is that we need all of us. I set out to make a show
that was disrupting the idea of binary thinking generally, not just
about gender, and to really talk about the ways that our identities
intersect, and how anyone can uphold systems of oppression.”

I admire this line of thinking, and I like _Y: The Last Man_, and I
think the show is making a sincere effort not to exclude trans people
from its narrative. I’m going to keep watching, if only for the
chemistry that has developed between Ashley Romans as the
ultra-capable Agent 355 and Ben Schnetzer as Yorick (the last cis man
of the title).

But.

Why are we still so drawn to stories about the gender binary?

[Sam, in an orange stocking hat, listens while somebody off-camera
talks.]

Trans actor Elliot Fletcher plays the show’s main trans guy
character, Sam.

 FX

There are lots
[[link removed](novel)] and lots
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where men are either not present or where women have power over men.
There are also a few stories where the opposite is true
[[link removed]]. Usually, these stories
take one of two tacks in imagining an eventual outcome: Women are more
peaceful than men, and they come up with a utopian society fairly
quickly; or women are also complicated humans, and they replicate many
of the systems of oppression that exist right now in the name of power
or greed or what have you.

We do not live in a world where “all the men” died (whatever that
means), nor does such a circumstance seem likely ever to happen. So we
can’t exactly test either of those hypotheses to determine whether a
world run by women would trend toward utopia or stay about the same.
Yet the appeal of this premise is hard to resist because the gender
binary most of us have drilled into our brains from birth also places
men above women in our power structures. Flipping that in a fictional
scenario is a fun, fascinating thought experiment, if nothing else.

The problem is that this premise, by its very nature, cannot account
for the existence of trans people. Once you start accounting for the
existence of trans people, you have to throw binary notions about
gender out the window. Despite its attempt to boil down the event to
“mammals with a Y chromosome died,” even the TV version of _Y:
The Last Man_ can’t entirely sidestep the binary because it is so
entrenched in our society, where “boy = blue” and “girl =
pink” remain all but intractable as gift-giving ideas for infants.
There’s a careful effort within the show to make sure that anyone
who says “all the men died” was among the people who were most
interested in propping up the patriarchy when “all the men” were
alive — but how many viewers will actually recognize that
distinction?

What so many “no more men” stories are fumbling toward, at least,
is the idea of the destruction of the patriarchy, and the easiest way
to get there as a thought experiment is to wipe out all of the cis men
and see what happens. _Y: The Last Man _is a sprawling show, with
storylines set around the world, and in many of its best arcs, the
series zeroes in on the fact that there are women who benefit from
patriarchy and would want to replicate it even in a world where cis
men no longer exist. (Amber Tamblyn’s character, the
arch-conservative daughter of the now-dead Republican president, best
exemplifies this point of view.)

For its central premise to work, _Y: The Last Man_ has to suggest
that the patriarchy is tied irrevocably to cis men (true!) but also
that a globe-spanning virus/plague/magical curse could easily define
what a “man” is (less true!). The “only mammals with a Y
chromosome die” detail is a workaround, but it’s only that_. _The
gender essentialism of the premise is inescapable, no matter how much
the series tries to push back on it.

The resulting strain is most evident in the scenes featuring Sam. Sam
is one of my favorite characters on the show so far, a trans dude in a
world where synthetic testosterone has become a much-squabbled-over
commodity. He’s funny, he’s a good friend to others, and he’s
perpetually baffled by a world in which his masculinity is suddenly
not in question.

In a story introduced in the show’s fourth episode, Sam ends up
staying with a cult of women who are obsessed with outlining all of
the ways men had previously wronged them. Thus, Sam’s place with
them is threatened more by his manhood than his transness.

As the writers’ room was breaking the story, Clark said, J.K.
Rowling’s descent into anti-trans martyrdom
[[link removed]] was
ongoing, and no one involved in _Y: The Last Man_ wanted to
inadvertently strengthen anti-trans rhetoric by having characters
espouse the same viewpoints on a series mostly written by cis people.
(That’s not even getting into how performing in scenes featuring
such rhetoric might affect Fletcher, a trans actor.)

But, like, would such a cult really exist? “Sam is threatened more
for his masculinity than his transness” is interesting conceptually,
but his mere existence in the world of _Y: The Last Man_ would
immediately and constantly mark him as trans. (In one of the show’s
better running gags, everybody assumes Yorick, the one remaining cis
man, is a trans guy.) The cultists know that Sam is trans and say
they’re okay with it, but no matter how artfully the show tells
Sam’s story, it remains true that Sam’s masculinity and his
transness are bound up in each other. One cannot exist without the
other, and if the cultists hate Sam’s masculinity, their professed
acceptance of him is anti-trans, simply because it suggests they
don’t see him as a “real” man. (I haven’t yet seen where this
story is headed, so grain of salt.)

“A trans man in a world where ‘all the men’ have died” is a
really compelling figure, but _Y: The Last Man_ has so far treated
Sam with kid gloves. The show wants you to know that trans men are
men, ergo Sam is a man. But it also doesn’t want to follow the
thought experiment of “trans men are pretty much the only men left
alive” to any logical conclusion. It wants to present a world where
Y chromosomes marked trans women for death, but also, everybody
suddenly seems psyched about the existence of trans men, when we know
how unlikely that would be.

To be clear, I’m not saying, “_Y: The Last Man_ must add
transphobia to be ‘realistic,’” because I really hope it
doesn’t do that. Instead, I’m saying that by ignoring the
transphobia of our current society entirely, the show is accidentally
underlining the gender essentialism of its premise.

The TV version of _Y: The Last Man_ wants to have the fun,
gender-essentialist cake of its source material but serve it up with a
side of “actually gender is really complicated” ice cream. And I
get it! That idea is a really interesting starting point for a story,
and it’s possible that the further the show gets from its
instigating event, the more its nuances around gender will become
apparent. By then, we’ll have had more time with Sam and Dr. Mann
the geneticist. The story will naturally trend in the “gender is
complicated” direction, even if the show doesn’t try to make it do
so.

“It is a fair criticism to ask, ‘Why make a show with a premise
like this in 2021?’” Clark says. “There’s no part of me that
would ever want to make a show that essentializes gender or that
equates chromosomes to gender. I understand I can’t control how the
world talks about it. But I do think that the show has an opportunity
to disrupt that notion.”

Still, _Y: The Last Man_ was originally written by a cis guy who did
not seem particularly interested in depicting trans people within his
narrative. I do like a lot of what the show is doing, and I intend to
keep watching no matter what. But I worry the narrative is
inextricably tied to a gender binary, no matter how hard it tap
dances.

What’s more, the longer the show runs, the more that disconnect
might grow, rather than contract. You can have a world where “every
mammal with a Y chromosome dies” or you can have a world where
gender is a complicated spectrum of different identities. I’m not
sure you can have both.

Y: The Last Man _airs new episodes on Hulu_
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Mondays through November 1._

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