Scooby Doo (2002) & Daphne’s Red Ascot
My first memory of ‘body swapping’ media was in 2009, sitting across from my pink PlayStation 2, gleefully watching the first live-action Scooby Doo (2002) movie on an archaic Panasonic TV. For those (un)lucky enough to be uninitiated, 54 minutes into the movie — following some quintessential children’s cinema nonsense — Fred body swaps into Daphne. This wasn’t a revolutionary moment for me. Nor was the titular transformation in Mrs Doubtfire (1993). Nor Viola’s covert manoeuvring in She’s the Man (2006). Because body swapping and cross-dressing in this era of mainstream 2000s Western media wasn’t made to be about gender exploration. It was made out to be comedy.
Purely based on the age of the average 2025 University of Sydney undergraduate, most people reading this would have been born between 2000 and 2008. This then meaning, many of you probably grew up on similarly clunky media. Better yet, with the above anecdote in hand, you may already have a handful of deeply nostalgic films in mind. You will quickly realise how many men in dresses were used as comedic characters. I also grew up in that era. Whether it was watching Mulan (1998) during a rained out high school P.E. lesson, or viewing a rerun of M*A*S*H (1972) with my dad, my exposure to queerness — before I even had a name for it — was trivialised by that cultural climate.
There is, however, a dissonance here. These films and TV shows can be dismissive and openly harmful — our Scooby Doo case for one. But on multiple occasions, I’ve been blessed to have a queer man fondly explain the campness of The Birdcage (1996), or the charm of Mrs Doubtfire (1993). It’s not just Robin Williams; beyond some exceptions like I Saw the TV Glow (2024), it’s incredibly rare in my circles for a piece of modern queer media to reach this kind of cult-classic status. Whilst there are several factors at play here, I would like to make the following argument.
When Western media treated gender fluidity as a vehicle for jokes, it clearly fueled homophobic and transphobic discourse. However, the perceived apoliticalness and frequency of cross-dressing under this toxic environment meant that such representations became common, making gender fluidity more uniformly visible in the mainstream than before. Cross-dressing was an act not just for the queer, but for everyone. Talk show hosts and celebrities could frock up, act, put the dress back on the hook, and hide behind the role as cis as the day they were before. You could see casual queerness on the news, in comedy, or on children’s TV. While it was certainly portrayed in a toxic manner, the queerness was accepted as a normal part of the role.
What speaks to me about this clunky 1980-2010 gender swapping isn’t the nostalgia, it’s the indifference. In these films, I saw myself and my queerness, paraded by other cis men. I dearly hope that one day Hollywood will reclaim that uniform ease of presence around gender fluidity, matched with the accuracy, acceptance, and compassion that contemporary media has been carving out for it.
If you know me in real life, you'll be in one of two camps. Either you will have seen me in a black mesh top and dreadfully smudged eyeliner, screaming at Birdcage, or you will have seen me with a crew cut and an AFL jersey, about to take to the field. Compartmentalised by design. If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that many of the people I meet in my life are also a lot more fluid than they appear.
Queerness is more broadly, accurately, and healthily covered now as compared to the 1990s and early 2000s, but a part of me misses seeing gender fluidity unabashedly touted by everyone in the Hollywood mainstream. Whilst the death of gender as a laughing stock is certainly healthier and better than Daphne in a red ascot, I will always be delighted by Bugs Bunny playing a woman flight attendant.
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