Tamil Nadu’s progressive claims faced a simple test over the weekend. A film about gender identities and queer love was released, and two cis male actors kissed on screen. Many in the state went into overdrive, demanding boycotts and throwing around accusations of “sin”.
Before analysing what director Karthik Subbaraj has accomplished in Dorothy, take a moment to consider that reaction. Boycotts are meant to be a tool of political resistance.
From opposing racial apartheid in South Africa to the genocide in Palestine, boycotts have repeatedly functioned as statements of solidarity. But many in Tamil Nadu have sought instead to weaponise boycotts against a film on trans identities.
For all the virulent online attacks, Karthik has the social location to weather the storm.
But the intention is not only to harass him. It’s to ensure an environment too hostile for more Tamil films on queer identities, steal what joy Dorothy may have given, and to reinforce the dehumanisation of marginalised groups beyond debates on pop culture.
It is essential to understand the online backlash in that context. Maybe we should be asking, what really is Tamil Nadu’s dominant political philosophy? And when it comes to queer identities and caste, is the state truly as progressive as it declares?
Dorothy’s triumph
The film begins with two children, introduced as Subu and Karthi, growing up together in rural Madurai. As they grow older, Dorothy turns its attention to the gendered expectations placed on boys and to the violence that informs it.
What happens to the little soft-hearted boy who keeps being told, “Men don’t cry”? What happens to the child whose ‘boyish’ fascination with cinematic fights fades over the years into a distaste for blood?
Karthik shows how, in rural Tamil Nadu, many boys are taught only one lesson growing up: be violent without restraint. Dehumanise women. Murder for your imagined honour. Kill for your caste. Brutalise anyone who disagrees.
The film wants to lambast caste-supremacist masculinity. It unflinchingly argues that this is not separate from queerphobia. The foundation for both is a violently orthodox notion of manliness.
The ‘honour’ killings of inter-caste couples are commonplace to Karthi (Rishikanth) and his friend even as children. Police apathy is a foregone conclusion to them. It is in such an environment that the character first introduced to us as Subu comes out as a trans woman. She chooses the name Dorothy (Sananth).
Dorothy’s father, known only as ‘Whistle’ Ayya (Muthukumar), is the local loan shark and his community’s enforcer of endogamy. Dorothy’s social location offers protection as long as the expectations of family and caste are upheld. But an association with a woman from another community brings deadly threats, illustrating how the fundamental violence of caste is that it places everyone within a hierarchy of worth.
After Dorothy comes out as a trans woman, Whistle’s reflexive response is once again brutality. It is a credit to the film that it acknowledges how such violence, motivated by imagined honour, can extend beyond caste endogamy.
This is the point activists demanding state-level legislation against ‘honour’ killings have made for years: caste, class, sexuality, gender identity, religion, and other factors do shape such violence. A special law, therefore, should offer protection across all these factors.
Is this perhaps why even industry names such as director Mohan G, known for films that promote caste-supremacist politics and the demonisation of Dalits, have reacted so strongly to Dorothy? Mohan G claimed that India’s traditions are being “eroded” by discussions of queer rights and referred to unnamed NGOs that had already “spoilt” North America.
Actor, writer, and trans rights activist Negha says, “For someone who makes caste pride films, it’s no surprise that Dorothy has shaken him. The mindsets of Mohan G and characters like Whistle are the same. They share regressive ideas of caste and femininity. Anyone who is casteist will almost certainly be queerphobic too.”
But there are also moments when the film’s drive to critique caste and queerphobia leads it to draw too direct a parallel between the two. That simply isn’t true.
A Dalit trans person’s experience will never be the same as that of a dominant-caste trans person. Queerphobia in India is informed by caste, yes, but lowered-caste queerness remains segregated by caste hierarchies.
Man enough
The film’s treatment of masculinity is strongest when it stays with the two friends. Before she comes out as a trans woman, every time Dorothy tears up, Karthi snarls at her to stop “crying like a girl”.
He will fight to the death for his childhood friend. He is loyal to a fault. But a single tear can hold so much threat to his masculinity.
As children, they are very different from the people they eventually become. Karthi is the sweetly soft-hearted one. He cries unabashedly. His friend, a cheeky Bruce Lee fan, has no qualms about taking on anyone in a fight. Dorothy, as a child who is assigned male at birth (AMAB), simply parrots what is taught to her: men don’t cry, and vulnerability cancels out manliness.
They grow up with deeply internalised, unhelpful ideals. You feel called to mourn the loss of Karthi’s softness as he carries around his childhood lessons with him, becoming more and more small-mindedly violent. It isolates him and leaves him unreachable to Dorothy, the person he loves most.
Though they finally begin to unlearn those lessons, their antagonists refuse to. And this is precisely why the film makes so many viewers uncomfortable.
Its villains are too real. They have too much in common with the very people outraging online.
Muthukumar as Whistle offers a chilling performance, not through cinematic villainy but by being so depressingly recognisable. He could be anyone’s casteist family member. He could even be you.
Did you spend a portion of the film laughing at a queer character’s mannerisms, thinking you were in on a big joke? If so, you are the joke, the film says.
Whistle is not so different from Thaniga (also played by Muthukumar) in Pa Ranjith’s Sarpatta Parambarai (2021). Both characters seem to have been written with similar principles. And it is a credit to the actor and writers that we are given an unforgettable screen presence without allowing the characters to be idealised for their style or personality.
By comparison, as brilliant as Fahadh Faasil was as Rathnavel in Maamannan (2023), the film’s anti-caste politics was overshadowed by sections of fandom who saw him as a fashionable symbol of caste pride.
Caste-supremacist masculinity cannot exist without an ‘other’ to brutalise. It isn’t inert — something distasteful but ultimately passed off as just another opinion.
It’s power. It is actively, consciously, deliberately cruel. Violence sustains it; keeps it alive. It’s the scaffolding for South Asian patriarchy. It decides everything: whom you marry, what you eat, and who you treat with dignity.
To such a structure, identity is immutable. But feminism and queer rights teach you the opposite: identity can be chosen, not merely determined by doctrine or birth.
“When cis women fall in love outside of their caste, they often face violence. So do trans people after they come out. The scenes brought back my own experiences with my family,” Negha recalls.
Negha also points out that the events in the film are set in the 1990s, but similar stories written by trans women like her, showing how little has changed, remain largely unread and uncelebrated.
“In most Tamil films, trans women are comic relief, the villain, or a sentimental arc. Though Karthik has chosen a sentimental arc, I still like the film because it’s a love story.”
The fallout
For Karthik to release this film to a mainstream Kollywood audience and stand by it amid the attacks admittedly deserves recognition. The leads are not overpaid star actors by any stretch. The industry may even sideline them for their roles.
But Dorothy’s casting choice remains questionable.
Sananth is a cis man playing a trans woman. The choice is essentially a narrative one. It allows the film to depict the life of an AMAB person who identifies as a woman.
While that may be understandable as a cinematic choice, it contradicts the very point it calls others out on: trans identities are not a costume to be put on and shed at will.
Secondly, the film exists within the larger context that opportunities for trans actors are minimal to non-existent.
“Usually, I don’t support cis actors playing trans characters,” says Negha. She adds, “But right now, Kollywood only has space for trans women actors whose appearance fits the industry’s beauty standard. For instance, what The Umbrella Academy’s makers could do in their show isn’t possible here.”
In the Netflix series The Umbrella Academy, Elliot Page played a cis woman named Vanya for two seasons. He had been cast before he came out as a trans man. The third season reintroduced his character as Viktor. Like the actor, Viktor also came out in the series.
Negha adds, “In Kollywood, it’s impossible for a trans person to sustain themselves similarly in the industry both before and after gender-affirming surgery. So I can understand the challenge for this film. What I have been comforting myself with is the fact that the supporting trans characters have been played by trans actors.”
Here’s another fallout of Karthik’s decision to cast Sananth: some viewers only saw two cis men kissing on screen. It is certainly true that the idea of men being intimate with each other is radical for mainstream Kollywood, which has so far monetised homophobia.
The dehumanising vitriol against Dorothy has also been directed against gay men. But the film does little to explain, to someone willing to learn, the vast spectrum of queer identities.
It is not nitpicking to say this. When there is already so little representation, misinformation rushes in to fill the vacuum. That’s why it is essential to be precise when representing the marginalised.
As Lucy, a 31-year-old trans woman based in Bengaluru, points out, misrepresentation otherises.
“Doesn’t this say a lot about which trans people filmmakers and audiences want to see on our screens? They prefer trans women characters who, to them, looked like a cis man until recently.”
Lucy adds, “Many people who are supporting Dorothy do so because they see a gay romance. But can the film ever lead to a world where people think it is not ‘gay’ to love a trans woman?”
Negha asks, “Anyway, within the context of Dorothy, it’s a trans woman and a cis man who are kissing. How much worse would the reaction be if two gay men were really kissing in a movie?”
Combined with Karthik’s repeatedly poor representation of women characters, Lucy says, “The way Dorothy is written feels very much like a man in a role that no woman could have ever played in Karthik’s movies.”
She adds, “Any backstory can be made into a trans story, but to do it like this comes across as a cop out. A movie that refuses to let the women characters speak cannot pull a fast one and say the person speaking all along was a woman, actually.”
And then there is the spectacle that trauma is turned into.
Wave upon wave of violence is characteristic of Karthik’s films. But in Dorothy, oppression often becomes entertainment, however well-intentioned. Directors such as Vetrimaaran have similarly been questioned about why their cameras linger so much over suffering.
It is a hard line to walk between faithfully exposing the brutality of men like Whistle and turning trauma into popcorn fodder, but it is possible. How many shots and angles does it really take to establish the extent of violence inflicted on a woman’s body?
Dorothy also cannot seem to decide between mainstream ‘mass’ moments and simply making its point.
There is a particularly disturbing sequence involving sexual assault, which Lucy highlights, is part of a broader pattern of depicting humiliation and abuse, such as movies like Super Deluxe (2019).
Why even have such scenes? Is there no other way to tell audiences about the sexual violence trans women face without making a spectacle of it? Who benefits from that? Not the trans woman in the audience, certainly.
As Lucy emphasises, you cannot speak about self-determination and then put the violence and humiliation inflicted on trans women’s bodies on display simply to furnish proof of progressive politics.
And sexual violence, regardless of the survivor’s gender identity, should not be reduced to a plot device. How many times do filmmakers have to be told this?
A song for queer love
Dorothy has heart. It wants people to do better. It wants the state to be more inclusive and to think about systems of oppression and their interconnections. It is also flawed.
And it is doubtful whether genuine criticism will ever make it to the director amid the social media meltdowns and bigotry surrounding the film.
The fallout did not end with trolling Karthik. It extended to Ilaiyaraaja, Dorothy’s music director. Some online reactions treated his contribution to a film about queer love as tantamount to betrayal.
But for Negha, “Ilaiyaraaja’s music in Dorothy, with its peacock-feather touch, soothed the wounds left by songs like ‘Koodaiyila Karuvadu’ (Oru Thalai Ragam) and ‘Oororam Pulliyamaram’ (Paruthiveeran).”
To have a heroine intro track specifically celebrating a trans woman’s femininity, scored by Raaja himself, is exhilarating for her. Such scenes and songs are mostly only to be found for cis women.
For many, Raaja’s music truly has been inseparable from Tamil Nadu’s soul for over six decades. If that’s so easily forgotten, bigotry sure comes at a strange price for this state.