Roberta Muldoon and the Politics of Costume
The first transgender woman I ever met was not a person at all. She was a character.
Her name was Roberta Muldoon, introduced in John Irving’s The World According to Garp in 1979 and brought to screen in 1982 by John Lithgow. I encountered Roberta and the Garp world just a few years before Harry Potter, about a decade after the book was published and the movie was made. For many of us, Roberta was the first trans woman we saw in mainstream literature or film. Critics praised Lithgow for courage and tenderness. Audiences called it progress. But Roberta was not progress. She was pretending.
American cinema had been preparing audiences for this kind of pretending for decades. In the 1940s, Jack Benny dressed as an aunt in Charley’s Aunt (1941). A year later, To Be or Not to Be (1942) used drag as comic disguise in a wartime plot. By 1959, Some Like It Hot had cemented the formula: Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon put on dresses to escape mobsters, with every laugh built on exaggerated femininity. Through the 1960s, television sitcoms repeated the gag. Men were transformed into women for a scene, punished by lipstick, wigs, and frilly clothes. The joke was always the same. Gender was not lived, it was performed.
Roberta carried this lineage forward. Irving introduces her through her past identity, not her present reality: “In the ring Roberta had been known as Robert Muldoon, a professional football player. But in her life as a woman she was still struggling to feel at home.” Her womanhood is presented as incomplete, something she must practice rather than something she lives. Later she is described in caricature: “She was a large woman, and her hands were like baseball mitts. But she spoke gently, and she was infinitely motherly.” When the movie came out, it used the same introductory style.
Her character is built on contradiction, masculine size paired with exaggerated maternal gentleness. She is portrayed less as a woman with her own story and more as a collection of opposites meant to amuse, intrigue, or reassure cisgender readers. She is not allowed to be complicated or ordinary. She must be a spectacle. She must always remind the reader of what she supposedly once was, while performing what the author thinks a woman should be.
This is why Roberta was never written as a full human being. She was written as an act for others to consume. And that act was carefully constructed for the comfort of cisgender audiences. They could feel entertained, even moved, without ever having to confront the complexity of trans lives. They could tell themselves they had witnessed compassion when what they were really consuming was display.
That framing made it easy for a cisgender actor to step into the role, exaggerate those contradictions, and be celebrated for “empathy” that cost him nothing. Lithgow was praised for being brave, for making Roberta seem real. But the reality he offered was not trans womanhood. It was a cisgender man playing dress-up, embodying stereotypes that reassured the audience they understood something they did not.
Janet Mock puts it plainly: “If a trans woman who knows herself and operates in the world as a woman is seen, perceived, treated, and viewed as a woman, isn't she just being herself? She isn't passing; she is merely being.” Roberta was never allowed to simply be. She was written as contradiction, played as impersonation, and celebrated as portrayal. And as a portrayal her authenticity was absent. Which means only the act was applauded, not real identities, not real people.
For Lithgow, Roberta was a character. For trans women, it was their lives. And the applause never honored them. It only comforted the audiences who wanted to feel progressive for watching a man “become” a woman. Roberta Muldoon became propaganda for the idea that trans womanhood is a costume, a role to be acted rather than a reality to be lived. The character did not open doors for trans actors or invite trans voices into the conversation. It reinforced the belief that trans women could be imitated, but never trusted to represent themselves.
What Costume Erases: Real Trans Kinship
The truth was far more expansive. While Hollywood congratulated itself for putting a cis man in a dress, real trans women were doing what they had always done: creating family where none was offered, building community in the face of hostility, and claiming life on their own terms.
In 1950s New York, long before Stonewall, trans women gathered in bars and apartments to create their own circles of kinship. The women who moved through spaces like Club 82 or the drag balls of Harlem and Greenwich Village were not playing at gender. They were inventing new possibilities of family, often pooling money for rent, sharing clothes, and protecting each other from police raids and street violence. Oral histories tell us of women who “mothered” younger girls just arriving in the city, teaching them how to navigate hormone access, nightlife, and survival jobs. Their community was fragile, always under threat, but it was real in a way Roberta Muldoon never was and Irving’s ignorance could never imagine.
This was not unique to New York or to the United States. Trans women and gender-expansive people have created chosen families and sacred circles across the world. In South Asia, hijra communities have lived for centuries in households led by gurus who cared for their chelas (disciples), creating both kinship and ritual authority. In Samoa, fa’afafine built networks of care rooted in family and community, not exclusion. In Hawai‘i, māhū held respected roles as teachers and healers, passing knowledge across generations. Across Turtle Island, Two-Spirit women and femmes have always gathered for mutual care, even when colonial law and church violence tried to erase them.
In San Francisco, Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966 revealed what such kinship looked like in action. Trans women, many of them working-class and sex workers, resisted a police raid by fighting back and protecting one another, then returned to their daily work of sheltering each other and holding community together. In the 1970s, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), opening a house for unhoused queer and trans youth. They fed people, clothed people, and called them family.
These stories show what Roberta Muldoon was never allowed to represent. Real trans women were never costumes, caricatures, or contradictions. They were builders of kinship, makers of possibility, and keepers of survival. While Hollywood turned womanhood into performance, trans women made it life.
Not Comedy, But Just as Problematic
Roberta was not used for slapstick laughs like earlier drag comedies. She was not the butt of the joke. Yet her presence served a similar function. In a story filled with despair, violence, loss, and tragedy, Roberta became relief. She was the gentle comic presence, the comforting incongruity, the moment that allowed the audience to breathe. Her body and her gender were the release valve in a story otherwise saturated with death and harm. Even written sympathetically, she was still reduced to a device. She was the laugh in a tragedy, the soft smile in a world of despair, and her trans-ness was the reason she could be used that way.
And Lithgow was only the beginning. Hollywood continued to reward cisgender actors for treating trans lives as roles to put on. Hilary Swank won an Oscar for portraying Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry. Jared Leto won an Oscar for playing Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club. Eddie Redmayne was nominated for his role in The Danish Girl. Each of these performances was hailed as brave, transformative, groundbreaking. Each of them shut out trans actors who could have played the roles, and in that shut out, reassured audiences that being transgender was something one could pretend to be for art and then set aside in daily life.
Treating identity as a costume is never neutral. It is profoundly harmful.
When a story frames gender or sexuality as something you can put on or take off, it denies the reality of those who live that truth every day. It tells the audience that identity is only performance, not being, and that the right portrayal is enough to stand in for lived experience. It makes trans lives consumable. A cis actor can dress up, exaggerate, and be praised for bravery. A cis author can create caricatures or stereotypes and be praised for creativity. But when the performance is over, they step out of the costume. They return to safety, privilege, and recognition. Transgender, nonbinary, Two-Spirit, intersex, and other people across the gender spectrum do not have that option.
This double standard is deadly. It licenses cis people to be rewarded for imitation while trans people are punished for authenticity. It reassures audiences that they understand something they have never truly listened to. And it preserves patriarchy by keeping identity under the control of those who already hold power.
Postlude
It seems almost too fitting that John Lithgow, the actor once praised for “humanizing” Roberta Muldoon by playing womanhood as a costume, is now poised to lend his voice to the world of J. K. Rowling. The circle closes. An actor rewarded for imitation now anchors the universe of an author who insists womanhood must be locked in place. Both performances are celebrated, both mask harm, and both invite audiences to look away from the lives at stake.
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