Understanding Anora as an accidental trans girl romantic tragicomedy

Emerging Queer Voices is a monthly LGBTQ arts and culture column that features different up-and-coming LGBTQ writers. You can read more about the series and find all published editions here.

Right before I saw Sean Baker's film Anora, I ran into a fellow trans filmmaker who'd just seen it. When I pressed her for her first impressions, she said, "People laughed, and I sat there going, 'Oh no, this is me and every man I've tried to date.'" Sure enough, I too was soon confronted with the dreadful familiarity of the film's dynamics and of the intimacy of conditional womanhood.

Anora's titular character, Ani (played by Mikey Madison in an Oscar-nominated performance), is a sex worker who elopes with her client, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch. 

While Ani is cisgender, the historical ties between transgender people and sex work are well-documented to the point of stereotype. It's true that since time immemorial, many of us have relied on sex work to survive structural violence — a legitimate recourse, unfairly stigmatized. 

What binds me as a trans woman to Ani's ordeal, however, is not this association, but the way our identities inform our access to love.

In a 2015 study of Australian sex workers, 78 per cent said their profession had a negative impact on their romantic lives. Per one respondent, "There is a gap between the nature of my job and the public perception." A 2024 paper, meanwhile, reports an identical percentage of difficulty in finding a partner among transgender respondents. In my experience, this is a consequence of that same disparity between perception of us and our reality. This, it should be said, is also what drives many of us to swear off dating cis people entirely.

The literature draws the same conclusions for both demographics: a disproportionate degree of ostracization and intimate partner violence as a product of stigma and fetishization. To be either is to have an asterisk next to your womanhood and always fighting against your perceived "less than"-ness, especially with cishet men. This phenomenon is what Anora depicts, with striking accuracy, to its bitter end.

From the start, Ani and Vanya's romance is hardly idyllic. As their relationship traverses the continuum from client/worker to husband/wife, a transactional streak persists. Vanya remains concerned with his pleasure alone, abandoning Ani to play video games mere seconds after sex, dismissing her doe-eyed bids for emotional intimacy.

Ani, for her part, utilizes the relationship to hoist herself from poverty, at once put off and charmed by Vanya's boyish immaturity, as men-loving women often are. Marriage here remains, in the words of Amy March, an economic proposition. 

But Madison's performance captures that desperate hope that this one might be the one to love more than his power over her. As poet Jamie Hood wrote in her landmark essay F--king Like a Housewife, "Maybe I could have convinced myself … that what he [saw in me] is the kind of girl who coheres, the kind of girl whom men love, and not just another rest stop on the way to their actual wives, their actual lives."

Alas, the world of the film, much as our own, is not engineered for this. When word of their marriage reaches Vanya's parents and their enforcers, a violent plan is carried out to annul it. Instead of defending Ani, Vanya flees, going on a bender rather than facing up to the consequences of her marginalization.

This, too, is a hallmark of relationships between trans women and cishet men: when they become public, even the best-intentioned of partners are prone to panic over the reactions of their family and friends. To share in the discrimination that we endure 24/7 feels impossible. Better we remain clandestine, the dirty secret, than be openly loved as whole women, worthy as any other.

Ani's visible dread around this eventuality is realized in the film's third act, after she concedes to the annulment. On the steps of a private jet, Vanya tells her, "Thank you for making my last trip to America so fun." Heartbroken, she snaps back, "Oh, you had fun?" 

Of course, she could only ever be "fun" to him. How foolish to be lulled in by the prospect of stability, however blood-stained, of intimacy beyond transaction. Hood again: "Did I love him or did I want only that he would love me?" I recognize the confusion in Madison's eyes as countless other trans girls would.

Still, there is catharsis to be found in Baker's presentation of this truth, particularly when Ani weaponizes others' hatred against them — a common survival tactic among marginalized people. After all, if the world has made a monster of you, what better recourse than giving it too much monster to handle. 

The film's mic drop comes when, upon signing the annulment, Vanya's mother calls Ani a "disgusting hooker." Ani retaliates with "And your son hates you so much, he married one just to piss you off." Been there, sister!

As Anora careens toward its hotly contested ending, leaving the viewer hamstrung somewhere between a marriage proposal and a murder, it touches on themes of poverty, geopolitics and loneliness. I remain most taken with the idea of the doomed relationship as the engine for these ideas though.

I would not be alone in admitting I've endured my share of Vanyas — men and women alike — who have made me no less susceptible to the hope of this one loving me as a woman who coheres, and no less cynical about the prospect. But as Ani learns, judgment is not enough to inoculate you against human need. But who could blame her for trying?

In honing in on the specificities, the microexpressions conveying whole oceans, of what it means to love as the less-women of the world, Madison and Baker have captured a rarely articulated yearning at the core of our survival, one that transcends marginalization. I see it in myself, in so many dolls, as plainly as I see it in this film — that impossible dream of being cared for as an equal, not despite what you are, but because of it.