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Is Jules Transgender on Euphoria?

Hunter Shafer Praises Euphoria For Letting Her Character Be Trans "While Dealing With Other Issues"

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Euphoria may have given transgender actress and model Hunter Schafer her first major role, but we guarantee this won't be the last you see of her. In the raunchy series, Schafer plays Jules, who is also transgender, and a new girl in town with whom Rue (who's played by Zendaya) quickly develops a bond. Just like her character, Schafer is also a transgender woman, though up until episode three of the first series, it wasn't clear to viewers whether Jules was a cis or trans woman (save for her penchant for using a gay dating app to meet men, as well as a blink-and-you-miss-it scene in the pilot episode where Jules was seen injecting hormones into her thigh). When Rue muses, "I'd never known anyone like Jules before," it has greater meaning than you think, and a conversation between Jules and Rue in the that same episode cleared up the question of Jules's gender identity for once and for all.

In the scene in question, Jules and Rue argued about whether it's safe for Jules to meet up with Shyguy118, the guy she had fallen for online (though, little did she know, that guy was actually violent jock Nate, the son of "DominantDaddy" Cal). Rue tried to convince Jules to meet up with her online lover in a public place, but Jules retorted that she didn't have the luxury of flaunting her relationships in public like Rue — a cisgender woman — has. "I'm trans," Jules explained, and though this didn't seem to be a revelation for Rue, it was somewhat of a revelation for the audience, who at that point, had yet to hear Jules's gender identity acknowledged via dialogue.

Just as Schafer is proud to be transgender and doesn't wish to be confused as a cisgender woman, Jules is confident in who she is, and rather than struggling with her gender identity, her struggles are just like those of the cisgender teens around her. "There need to be more roles where trans people aren't just dealing with being trans; they're being trans while dealing with other issues," Schafer told Variety. "We're so much more complex than just one identity."

In Netflix's new series Trinkets, non-binary and gender-nonconforming actor Quintessa Swindell plays Tabitha Foster — a "cisgender young femme" — but for Schafer, neither she nor her character present themselves as cisgender. Rather than telling the story of Jules's journey to becoming comfortable with her trans identity, Euphoria allows Jules to live as a trans woman already comfortable in her identity and dealing with other typical teen issues instead. " . . . I think if it was about Jules, like, finding herself as a young trans woman, you can only get so much out of her with that," Schafer explained to Entertainment Weekly. For Schafer (and for Jules), the real story is allowing a transgender teen to simply live a typical teen life (if you can call anything that happens in Euphoria typical that is).

Image Source: HBO
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