More than two decades later, Ace Ventura comes across as blatantly transmisogynist (a term the author Julia Serano coined to specify the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that trans women too often deal with). Lois ceases to be a full-fledged human being as soon as she’s revealed to be trans, so she can be subjected to such cruelties as having her body forcibly exposed for public display without consequence. Lois’s humiliation itself is the butt of the joke — and the men’s disgust centers the movie’s attempt at ick-factor body humor.

On the surface, there isn’t much comparison between Ace Ventura’s explicit transphobia and the in-bad-taste but certainly tamer jokes in two comedies that opened recently: Zoolander 2 and Deadpool. In a reprise of their roles as preening male supermodel Derek Zoolander and his sidekick Hansel, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson have been supplanted as the most popular models on the planet by the nonbinary, agender model All (Benedict Cumberbatch). In Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds plays the pansexual title character prone to bawdy jokes about queer people.

But threading a line from comedies of the early '90s to those that feature transgender themes today reveals that even though there has been steady progress in humanizing trans characters, harmful stereotypes still plague trans women and gender-nonconforming characters. Transfeminine people are nearly always presented as villains and objects of derision or disgust, especially in comparison to conventionally attractive cisgender love interests.

The last 25 years of evolving transgender themes in mainstream comedy also demonstrate the projections and fears of the cisgender men both behind and in front of the camera. Trans characters — particularly trans women — are often inserted into a comedy’s narrative to fulfill a gross-out shock factor (“Lol! I can’t believe a ‘normal’ man got tricked into sleeping with a disgusting, ‘abnormal’ she-male!” is the audience reaction these filmmakers are going for). The audience is also supposed to laugh because a man has been “deceived” by these women, and straight male viewers can take comfort since the humiliation is not their own. The way trans characters are used and abused exemplifies the lengths heterosexual cisgender men will go to demonize trans women in order to deny them womanhood, as well as reaffirm their own desperately fragile masculinity.

The '90s, When Trans Women Were Disgusting Villains

If Ace Ventura marked the full-fledged incorporation of transphobia into movie comedies, then Soapdish (1991) was an essential precursor. In that movie, a scheming Montana Moorehead (Cathy Moriarty) tries to topple Celeste Talbert (Sally Field), as the star of the soap opera The Sun Also Sets, by seducing producer David Seton Barnes (Robert Downey Jr.). After a series of twists and turns involving David and Montana conniving to give Celeste more and more absurd and unsympathetic scenes to act out so the show’s fans would reject her, it’s brought to light that Montana used to be Milton Moorehead; cast and crew react in horror and wonderment, while Montana runs from the set in shame.

Though the transgender-woman-as-villain trope in American movie comedies did not originate with Soapdish — that dubious honor arguably belongs to the roundly panned film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge (1970) — the '90s comedy demonstrated the trope's effectiveness as a modern plot device. Montana’s “transgender reveal” is a shocking and absurd twist that elucidates her deceitful nature; if she lied about being trans, then she’s a liar at heart. David, who’d slept with her, attempts to control his retching reaction, as he excuses himself from the set to presumably vomit.

By the time Ace Ventura and Jim Carrey’s over-the-top antics rolled around in 1994, the forced exposure of a character’s trans status was amplified by using the outlines of her genitals. In between Soapdish and Ace Ventura was the much-talked-about drama The Crying Game (1992), which became a cause célèbre when, during what feels like a gritty drama involving the love affair between a man and a woman, the woman is shown to have a penis and the man pukes in the bathroom.