Euphoria, Jules Vaughn, and what happens when a trans woman goes to therapy

(Welcome to the Wednesday newsletter! Each week, I’m publishing a new pop culture essay from a freelancer. Remember: Your subscription fee helps me pay these freelancers for their efforts! This week: Cameron Grace Wolff on how the recent Euphoria special finally did right by the show's trans feminine character Jules.)

I’ve fallen in love with trans teenager Jules Vaughn, the effervescent, energetic, and exasperating character near the heart of HBO’s Euphoria.

Magnetically portrayed by Hunter Schafer, Jules gives Euphoria a massive shot in the arm, even when I hate what writer/director/creator Sam Levinson does to her. I started watching the show at the very beginning of my gender transition, so I couldn’t help but project my own feelings and experiences as a trans woman onto Jules’s narrative. I feel a kinship with Jules, but I don't see a lot of my own experiences in her. In Levinson’s hands, Jules too often becomes dull, a stock trans woman side-character whose only purpose is to experience abuse at the hands of manipulative men.

However, we might be seeing more of Schafer's voice peek into the narrative. Euphoria’s recent special, co-written by Schafer and cheekily titled “Fuck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob,” avoids falling into this trap entirely. The special finally let me feel like I understood who Jules Vaughn is. She doesn’t embody my experiences exactly, by any means, but she lives her own specifically trans experiences. Both as an actor and co-writer, Schafer manages to place viewers in Jules's headspace, experiencing the pains that come with self-exploration, the frustrating lows and soaring highs that come with discovering who you are. As someone who was once a teenager questioning her gender identity, and who is recently out as a trans woman, this episode felt painful but true.

I knew from the outset that "Sea Blob" would be an excruciating viewing experience for me. The episode, framed by a difficult therapy session for Jules, hit particularly close to home for me, a 22-year-old who has been in therapy since high school. I’ve explored a gamut of personal issues during my years in therapy, from gender dysphoria to anxiety, from depression to forming my own identity as a trans woman.

For me, therapy is an emotionally fraught process driven by self-disclosure and difficult inquiries into the most internal of thoughts and feelings, a purposeful excavation of every feeling that has brought me shame over the years. As a trans woman, I’ve spent so much of my life navigating what I keep hidden and what I share with those around me, dancing around questions of how I actually see myself and how I truly feel inside. I’ve lied to family, friends, and therapists about my mental health and my identity. It doesn’t help that my trans-specific medical needs are directly tied into how my therapists view and interpret my words and actions. In my experience, therapy feels like a transactional relationship, except I’m doing most of the giving in the hopes of gaining a morsel of insight to help me live my life. I know the majority of gender-specializing therapists absolutely want to help their trans patients, my own included, but it is difficult to ignore the power dynamics driving any patient-practitioner interaction.

In many ways, "Sea Blob" is a continuation of the Jules flashback sequences Euphoria’s first season. In those sequences, Jules’s trans identity was completely sidestepped in favor of standard parental drama. The show opted to cast a vaguely androgynous cisgender boy to play the pre-adolescent Jules, literally eliminating a feminine identity from Jules’s past. Sam Levinson does not possess a firsthand understanding of trans identity, and he often avoids the topic entirely. “Fuck Any One Who’s Not a Sea Blob” manages to rewrite these flashback sequences with Schafer’s guidance of the script, exploring Jules’s complicated feelings surrounding puberty and regret.

Throughout Euphoria’s first season, we saw Jules routinely abused and manipulated by the men in her life. These men often disregarded her identity as a woman, instead viewing her as a fetishistic object on which to project their own desires. She responds to online calls for sex seeking out “twinks and femboys,” and she calls a man who sexually manipulated her a homophobic slur. Jules is self-assured in her identity as a woman, so her degradation at the hands of these men doesn’t feel like a deliberately written character flaw. Instead, it feels like another voice, that of the writer's, being placed over the voice of the character herself. This is what the writer wants Jules to want, therefore it must be what Jules wants.

The special episode spins these flaws into the very fabric of Jules’s self-identity. Confiding in her therapist, Jules explains how she never truly explored who she is personally, instead fashioning herself into the kind of woman men will want, a fantasy at odds with her own sense of feminine identity. Jules’s confessions land pretty squarely with my own experiences. I am always keenly aware of the gendered expectations that dictate the lives of women, whether I want to follow them or not. I'm quite feminine in my presentation, but I still find myself doing things that aren’t exactly by my own choice. I find myself unconsciously altering my voice, doing my makeup even when I don’t really want to, dressing in a way that will make people read me as a woman, because the alternative is too painful. Seeing Jules confess to playing into this trap of feminine expectation dictated by misogyny and transphobia reminded me of how I am still very much finding my own identity.

A standout plot from the first season of Euphoria is the relationship between Zendaya’s Rue Bennett and Schafer’s Jules. The two performers share a natural chemistry, and the possibility of seeing a trans woman experiencing a loving romantic relationship with a cis woman feels radical. Even today, most media depictions of trans women pair us with cisgender men, seemingly in an effort to “normalize” us, conforming to standard definitions of how a woman must live. The Rue-Jules romance is new in a lot of ways, exciting in its genuine chemistry. Euphoria flirts with the concept of queer sexuality without pursuing a deeper exploration of queer attraction, instead issuing a standard will-they-won’t-they storyline between Rue and Jules.

Unlike the first season of Euphoria, the special explores Jules’s side of the flirtation, depicting the rush of initial infatuation and the terrifying promise of a new relationship. Rue is Jules’s first real-life relationship. Instead of being a relationship explored over the internet through the lens of transphobic objectification, Rue and Jules have a relationship formed through genuine infatuation. Jules’s sexuality is complex and ever-evolving, a characteristic effectively explored in the special. Sexuality is one of many aspects driving Jules' identity and motivations, another aspect of Jules that remained only partially explored before this special.

“Fuck Any One Who’s Not a Sea Blob” depicts therapy as I’ve experienced it: difficult, messy, and entangled in painful memories and terrifying possibilities. To the credit of the acting and writing talent of Hunter Schafer, the psychological explorations featured in this episode feel distinctly trans, deepening what came before and offering a tantalizing glimpse at what Euphoria could become if Sam Levinson opened up his creative process. Jules Vaughn has always felt like a queer character in an ostensibly straight show, but with this episode, viewers finally see Jules develop a distinct voice of her own, full of doubt and wonder at the possibilities of her malleable identity.

And here, the episode captures my experience of being a young trans woman in therapy. Therapy for me is never easy, and it resists immediate gratification. Rather, it’s a long and difficult process of emotional excavation. While Euphoria very well may return to its shallow portrayal of transfeminine experience and identity in season two, I’m grateful for this singular episode that allowed me to reflect on my own experiences with therapy and my identity, while also affording Jules Vaughn the psychological nuance and deeper motivations she deserves.

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