Trans Men/Mascs in Storytelling, Part One (2) From a Girl to a Monster

 

“If I got tough enough, no one would ever hurt me.” - Paul Millander, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Identity Crisis, aired 2002, written by Ann Donahue and Anthony E. Zuiker)

A long time ago, in the year 2000, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, created by Anthony E. Zuiker (he/him), first aired. The first returning killer, serial killer, and nemesis to Gil Grissom was a trans man named Paul Millander.

He is introduced in the pilot episode. Grissom traces a fingerprint from a crime scene back to him, he creates props and sculptures and shows Grissom a shelf full of hands that he sculpted, down to using his own fingerprints (later discovered to be his father’s). Grissom declares it a dead end and moves onto other evidence.

Millander is featured again in a later episode called Anonymous. In this episode Grissom is investigating a staged suicide that bears eerie similarities to the case in the pilot where he questions Millander. This leads Grissom to question Millander once more about who may have purchased his hand molds. Paul acts as a host, offering Grissom coffee, we see that he’s been working on a sculpture that he calls “Good vs. Evil”. The sculpture is of a man with half a human face, and half of a monster, implying something sinister hidden in plain sight. Paul is well mannered, polite, and has a stutter–and it is in this episode that it is revealed that he is the serial killer staging suicides.

I do not believe that he was originally intended to be written as trans. In Anonymous it is revealed that he witnessed his father’s death (at this point named John, later named Paul), and kills middle-aged men whose birthday falls on the day his father was murdered. He is shown to be toying with Grissom, the kind veneer covering something sinister, a monster in the form of something seemingly docile, yet somehow also tragic.

The episode Identity Crisis (not sure I love that name) in season two is where he returns. After another staged suicide Grissom begins hunting for Millander, only to find that Millander is now living under the name Douglas Mason, working as a judge and married with an adopted son. Millander continues to toy with Grissom, telling him that he isn’t Paul Millander, and that it must be the doppelganger effect. He goes so far as to invite Grissom over for supper to meet his family.

A hair found at the crime scene matches that of a Pauline Millander, They also, through some magic I’m sure, find out from this hair sample that Pauline is taking testosterone (I’m sure this is a very real thing that the writers researched and did not just make up). This leads Grissom to Millander’s childhood home, and this is how he finds out that Millander is trans. In the scene where Sara suggested that Pauline was taking testosterone for a sex change, Grissom reacted with pure shock and aghast, as though Millander being trans was written for a dramatic plot twist.

Millander’s childhood bedroom is decorated fully in pink, with a closet full of dresses, his baseball cards hidden away where his mother wouldn’t find them. His mother refers to him as her dead daughter, she is portrayed as a tragic figure, still undergoing the grief and loss of her daughter becoming a man.

A common sentiment transmasculine people face is people grieving the “girl they used to be”, as though we kill our past self and are something wholly different. A sentiment I myself have faced, but the light in the darkness is that not everyone feels this way. An ignorant family member will tell me that they needed to “grieve the loss of [redacted]” while I am standing right in front of them as Solomon, then another will tell me that “it doesn’t matter, because you’re still the same person.” The light does not erase the dark, and this episode symbolically portrays Millander as killing the girl he used to be, reinforcing his mother’s grief.

In the final act of Identity Crisis, Millander is arrested and reveals the truth of his story to Grissom. He talks about his childhood, about being raised as a girl while living as a boy when he could. His father’s death changed him, in his own words “a boy could have saved his father” and “if I got tough enough, no one would ever hurt me” in response to Grissom questioning why he identified with the aggressors. Millander expresses comfort in talking to Grissom about this, implying that no one else in his life would “hear it”. As he expresses comfort, eerie music plays, his comfort in talking about his transness is part of the horror.

He escapes his arrest, goes to his childhood home, kills his mother and then commits suicide in the way that he staged his victims’. His last words in his suicide note recording are “I just can’t do it anymore, I’ve lost hope [gunshot].” He killed his mother with a knife through the chest, symbolically breaking her heart twice, I suppose. That’s what trans men do, I suppose, we break our mothers’ hearts by killing their daughters.

From An Analysis of Paul Millander by Dan Ketchum, hosted on the blog Rack Focus (posted in 2014, I am unsure of Dan’s pronouns): “…Millander is highlighted as a murderer and a freak. The stark lighting and use of shadows, his menacing facial expressions and mannerisms, and the unsettling music constantly remind the viewer that he’s a lying psychopath. In this context, the line “identity is so fluid, ya know?” comes off as madness instead of an empathic breakdown of binaries. While it’s never directly stated that he kills because he’s transgender, a viewer could easily surmise that he did. His character explains so much psychological and emotional trauma that his gender identity and intersexism get lost in the mix. His line that he “went to the clinic to become a man” continues the episode’s problematic framing of gender identity as external, instead of internal. While the representation is murky, the show creators avoided completely humiliating Millander by using the correct pronouns, not asking about his genitals, and by allowing him to briefly tell his own story.” ( paul-millander.pdf ) This essay also notes extremely harmful depictions of transfeminine people in CSI.

CSI was a massive success, which I’m sure the average reader of this will know simply because everyone was talking about it, but numbers are important here. From 2000 to 2007 each season would rake in over 20 million views and consistently place in abcmedia’s top 10 ranking by views. Sourced from: https://web.archive.org/web/20120323004317/http://abcmedianet.com/web/dnr/dispDNR.aspx?id=053007_08 , https://web.archive.org/web/20120329105843/http://abcmedianet.com/web/dnr/dispDNR.aspx?id=053106_05 , https://web.archive.org/web/20120421023509/http://abcmedianet.com/web/dnr/dispDNR.aspx?id=060105_05 , https://web.archive.org/web/20070208132303/http://www.abcmedianet.com/pressrel/dispDNR.html?id=060204_11 , https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.tv/c/7oLAZAvK6wY?pli=1#82c78e0fe7710443 (Most of these are hosted in the wayback machine, one is the numbers recorded in a google group, the other link was no longer valid, unfortunately.) This is yet another example of an extremely popular piece of media with the power to influence how the average viewer would understand and view trans people.

According to data from the Trevor Project, 56% of trans men have attempted suicide ( https://www.axios.com/2023/05/02/lgbtq-youth-suicide-risk-survey-transgender ), while we can never take one survey at face value, a sample of 28, 524 queer participants from the ages of 13-24 in the USA is certainly enough to show that a highly disproportionate amount of transmasculine people face suicidal ideation and act on it.

So we have to ask, how does this depiction of a trans man stack up? Millander is both sinister and pitiful, he goes from a frightened girl to a dangerous man, as though he was always the monster hiding in something docile. He symbolically and then literally breaks his mother’s heart, and then takes his own life after losing hope. His dialogue lives in my head.

“If I got tough enough, no one would ever hurt me” from a man who hurts others to cope with his own trauma, transitioning into a violent predator, a wolf in the dark corners of the night, except that in the end he does die like his father, he takes his father’s name, and then his death.