In the indie comedy “She’s the He,” which premiered at SXSW, high school seniors Alex and Ethan decide during the last week to pretend they’re trans so they can sneak into the women’s locker room.

The timely premise seems lifted out of MAGA-era attacks on trans rights.

First-time writer-director Siobhan McCarthy dreamed up the idea in February 2024, after discovering online the high school comedy that spoke to them as teenager: Amanda Bynes 2006 comedy She’s the Man.

With their friend, Will Geare (who co-edited “She’s the He” with McCarthy), about the kinds of trans stories they both wished they’d been able to see when they were younger.

“I made a joke about, what if we took that conservative fear of [trans people] going into the bathrooms and we really played that out?” McCarthy said, “What would that look like?”

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McCarthy finished the first draft of “She’s the He” a few days later, and by July, they were shooting the film with a cast and crew that was entirely made up of trans, nonbinary and queer people — including the background actors. McCarthy leaned heavily on the tiny network of trans professionals within the industry.

“It was incredibly difficult to not only find trans people to be in a film — and this many trans people, which is unprecedented — but to then find the right people for the roles we were trying to cast, which is the goal of any film,” McCarthy says.

After “She’s the He” opened to a standing ovation, McCarthy spoke about their inspirations for the movie, the “painful” experience of making it during the 2024 presidential election, and why they hope the film — which does not yet have distribution — will make it into movie theaters.