Why Women Talking Sidelines Trans Inclusivity

Sarah Polley's 2022 film "Women Talking" won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and travelled the festival circuit with rare unanimous praise. Adapted from Miriam Toews's novel, it dramatises the collective response of women in a remote Mennonite colony to years of sexual violence. The film is a study in restraint, ensemble acting, and the patient work of women organising against the men who have hurt them.

Beneath the luminous cinematography and the careful pacing, the film sidesteps a question that contemporary feminism cannot avoid. "Women Talking" defines its subjects exclusively through biology and religious belonging, never pausing to ask how trans women fit within its vision of solidarity. The film trades on a stable idea of "woman" that requires no interrogation, and that stability is the point at which the analysis stalls.

For viewers in Australia, where debates about gender recognition and the rights of trans and gender-diverse people have shaped community and legislative life for years, that avoidance reads as deliberate. From the Australian Capital Territory's early recognition of same-sex partnerships to the state-level changes that allow self-nomination of gender, Australian feminism has spent decades arguing about who is included in its banner. A celebrated film about women's liberation that cannot find language for trans women lands as a choice, not an oversight.

A closed circle of womanhood

The film's central set piece, in which the women of the colony gather in a hayloft to decide whether to stay or leave, is structured around a simple vote. They debate, they pray, and they cast slips of paper. The scene is constructed to honour collective process, and Polley has spoken about wanting to create "a space where women's interior lives are taken seriously." That intention is visible in every frame.

The problem is that the "women" of "Women Talking" are never expanded beyond a category that reads as cisgender by default. There is no moment where a character questions what unites them beyond shared anatomy, no reckoning with the hierarchies of race, class, and gender identity that the term "woman" always contains. The Mennonite setting, deliberately remote and homogeneous, becomes a world in which these complications cannot appear. The film's portrait of sisterhood requires no interrogation of its own terms.

The Mennonite frame as limit

Polley chose the Mennonite colony for specific reasons. Its isolation explains both the violence and the women's eventual departure; its faith offers a vocabulary of forgiveness that the film respects without endorsing. These choices give "Women Talking" its texture and its gravity.

Specificity can also function as containment. The colony becomes a sealed container in which questions about gender, race, and sexuality that animate the wider world simply do not arise. There are no Black women, no Indigenous women, no queer women whose experiences might complicate the consensus. The film's ethics remain bound to the terms its setting allows, and those terms deliberately exclude the very conversations that trans women and gender-diverse people have been asking feminism to have for years.

Australian receptions and local stakes

When "Women Talking" opened across Australian cinemas in early 2023, it arrived in a cultural environment shaped by ongoing debates about trans inclusion. Australian feminist media, from long-running publications to current podcasts, has spent years exploring how anti-violence organising can centre trans women without abandoning the analysis of patriarchal harm that the film stages so carefully.

Local realities that shape these conversations include:

• The Australian Human Rights Commission's ongoing work on gender identity protections across workplaces and services
• Victoria's 2016 changes to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act, which allowed self-nomination of gender
• Federal consultations in 2023 on legislative definitions of sex and gender that drew national attention
• Strong trans-led organising in inner-city Sydney and Melbourne alongside more cautious regional communities

When viewers arrive already engaged with questions about who counts as a woman in policy, healthcare, and public life, the film's refusal to engage that question registers as a political choice. Even sympathetic reviewers in Adelaide and Brisbane wrote about the comfort of the film's frame in ways that hinted at what was missing.

The Oscar calculus

The film's path through awards season followed a familiar pattern. The Academy has long rewarded films that centre cisgender women's suffering without unsettling its own demographic foundations, and "Women Talking" fit that pattern with unusual precision. Its prestige rested on the visibility of women's pain and the comfort of a conclusion that did not ask viewers to rethink their categories.

This pattern is neither accidental nor new. The site has previously examined the failure of OscarSoWhite to include gender justice in its demands, tracing how campaigns for racial inclusion in the Academy have repeatedly refused to make common cause with trans and gender-diverse workers in the industry. "Women Talking" emerged from that same ecosystem of selective inclusion. For a film released in the aftermath of provincial anti-trans legislation across North America and similar restrictions in parts of Australia, that silence carried real political weight.

The studio calculus

Hollywood's reluctance to engage trans inclusivity reflects a calculation of commercial safety, a high-stakes gamble in which studios treat representation as a manageable risk. Distributors want films that can travel to conservative markets, that can be marketed without triggering boycotts, and that can win awards without alienating sponsors. A film that centres trans women, even briefly, risks those calculations.

"Women Talking" navigated that terrain by making its setting so specific that the question could not arise. The Mennonite colony is real enough to give the film texture and remote enough to defuse contemporary political anxiety. The film can be taught in university courses and screened in suburban multiplexes without provoking the controversies that works like "Rafiki" or "A Fantastic Woman" have triggered in different jurisdictions.

What trans-inclusive framing could have offered

The film's limits do not require a rewrite of its plot, but they do ask viewers to imagine a slightly different frame. Contemporary feminist traditions have been developing trans-inclusive approaches for decades, and any of them could have given the film's existing scenes additional resonance.

Approaches the screenplay could have engaged include:

• Centring the ways that gender-diverse people are disproportionately targeted by religious patriarchal violence
• Naming the coalition politics that already characterise anti-violence work, including trans women's organising against carceral systems
• Distinguishing between the biological essentialism of the colony's understanding of womanhood and a feminist politics based on shared vulnerability
• Drawing on the work of trans writers and organisers, including those within faith communities, who have long existed within apparently closed worlds

The film's evasion is a measure of how much work remains. Australian readers, who live with these debates daily and have watched their own legislative and community struggles play out across newspapers and parliaments, are particularly well placed to name the gap. Read the work of trans feminist organisers in your own city, support the films and books that take inclusion seriously, and demand that the next celebrated film about women's liberation actually mean women.