Deana Kiner on Discovering and Orchestrating Her Trans Identity

Mixed Asian Media - August 8, 2023

By Lauren Lola

Photos by Bianca Catbagan

*This interview was conducted before the decision for SAG-AFTRA to strike, in solidarity with the WGA.

Please note that Deana Kiner is not a member of SAG-AFTRA.

Deana Kiner makes up one half of the Kiner siblings — the duo (along with their father, composer Kevin Kiner) has scored for several series such as Doom Patrol, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, Trese, and the upcoming Ahsoka limited series. 

Deana and her brother, Sean, were previously featured on Mixed Asian Media back in 2021. Since then, she has come out as a transgender woman, fluctuating between she/her and she/they pronouns.

Even though she’s now out, Deana said there’s still a lot to figure out. “There's lots of aspects of figuring out what I like about myself, and what I liked about my past self, because there [were] things that I engaged with before that I felt really comfortable with, to a degree,” she explained. “There's a kind of aesthetic that I knew I was going for that was somewhat gender-neutral and also somewhat masculine, but in a more lesbian kind of way, if that makes sense.”

Deana highlighted singer Julien Baker and composer Wendy Carlos as role models in her transitioning, both for their aesthetics and their musicality. She hailed Carlos as a pioneer.

“That is one thing that is so important for me, has been just realizing how much work other people have put in for me to be able to do and be,” Deana said. “I am incredibly lucky to be in the position that I am currently in. And I have gained so much from the work and effort that LGBT people have been putting in for decades at this point. I am actually really grateful to be, I think, a really positive story in this timeline, basically. There's a lot of aspects of my transition that feel like — I don't want to sound overconfident or anything, but I'm what people have been fighting for. Coming out to my parents, it was terrifying, for sure. I was really anxious about it and I couldn't do it for months, even though I wanted to. But they were really accepting.

“It's not perfect by any means, but I'm happy, I'm safe,” she said. “I'm loved by all of my friends. I feel very secure in my job, in how I get to engage with the world.”

On May 12, Deana came out publicly via an Instagram post, where she simultaneously announced an award that she, Sean, and Kevin won at the BMI Awards. She said combining the announcements helped a lot with the anxiety she felt leading up to coming out. She also liked that it indicated that being trans is a part of her life now, but not her whole life.

While Deana has never been happy with the gender she was originally assigned, the explicit idea that she could be trans came about toward the end of last year. She wasn’t sure whether her hesitation had to do with Catholic guilt, but she knew at the very least that she was bisexual, yet was never comfortable with saying it because of dating one gender more so than another. She felt that she would be imposing on spaces not meant for her.

“I've always been really apprehensive of taking up space that I didn't deserve or felt like I didn't deserve,” she explained. “And maybe it also could be part of being mixed race, where I never felt like I was white, so I never wanted to fully engage with that, or I never felt like I was fully Filipino, so I didn't want to be like, ‘Oh yeah, I'm Filipino,’ for a long time. I've definitely come around to it.”

Deana also has a long history of dressing in drag and used to feel incredible doing so. However, she stopped after she was harassed in college and was in a bad mental health state at the time.

It was when her wife, Alex, came out as bisexual last year that Deana started feeling comfortable enough to entertain the idea of wearing more women’s clothing around her, and possibly for a long period of time, if not forever. In conversation with Alex, Deana realized she might be transgender and immediately began to do research.

So many things clicked for her. “Just immediately I was like, ‘Oh, men don't think about being a woman and wanting that immediately.’” She added, “Exercises where it's like, ‘Oh, if you could just wake up a woman, would you do that?’ I was like, and just immediately, ‘Yes, of course. Wouldn't every person want to do that?’ And apparently not. Apparently, a lot of people don't think about this stuff really often.”

Deana had mentioned in the past how composing for the character of Larry Trainor on Doom Patrol came easily for her. While scoring the show, she never had the surface-level thought of the common ground she and the character occupy — as a defense mechanism, she now speculates.

Aside from her wife, Deana first came out to a small group of friends at a dinner party. While she mistakenly phrased it to sound like she and Alex were announcing a baby on the way, her friends were otherwise joyfully receptive to the news. Deana then came out to her siblings, and eventually, her parents.

While she was initially nervous about what they would think, especially not knowing what their opinion was of transgender people in general, it turned out to be a call for education. Until Deana came out, the only reference her parents had for transgender people was Caitlyn Jenner.

“So they just had a very different grasp, and it was really illuminating to realize, ‘Oh, I have a very online perspective of our community, and I shouldn't have that expectation for them,’” she said. “And so that's been really helpful to help parse our relationship, or my relationship with my parents. They're very accepting, but there's a lot of patience I need to practice, because the knowledge that I have about being transgender is so much more vast than anything that they have.”

Since coming out, the response has been mostly positive. Deana said that folks she regularly works with at Lucasfilm have been doing whatever they can to make sure she’s comfortable and safe. When she came out on Instagram, numerous fans of The Bad Batch responded in support — a sentiment Deana was very much touched by.

At the same time, Deana has also received some negative remarks. While the number has been comparatively small, she admittedly felt down whenever they came her way.

“I don't have thick skin yet. I'm hoping to grow one, and I think I will,” she said, “because yeah, I've been in therapy for a decade now. And honestly, this whole situation has been incredible, or transitioning has been incredible for my mental health. So I feel great. It just sucks when you see someone being shitty.”

As for Deana’s work as a composer, she said coming out has affected not so much her artistry, but her way of working. On one hand, she feels like she has a lot of new strengths, mainly in talking to people as herself. On the other hand, she has more fear than she ever had, largely of someone in power being transphobic.

“It's just anxiety. It hasn't been my reality, but nonetheless, it's still there,” she said. “But definitely, I feel so much better talking to people. There was definitely somewhat of an imposter syndrome happening for a lot of my life in work, where it would feel like, ‘Oh, I shouldn't speak up because I'm just going to do additional music. It's not my place,’ kind of thing.” She added, “I think I feel more comfortable in my own skin, to the point where I can have a conversation with somebody without worrying that I'm going to say something stupid or I'm going to ruin the job or things like that.”

Deana’s music can next be heard on Ahsoka, which is slated for release on Disney+ on August 23. While the show itself will be making history as the first Star Wars live-action series with a female lead, it’s also the first Star Wars series in general with a composer who’s openly LGBTQ, specifically trans.

Asked for her thoughts on that, Deana described it as complicated, mainly because she's often working with her dad on it and at times feels like she’s working for him. She was quick to mention how excited and generous he is with her and Sean and that all of their musical expressions are able to shine through. But as far as being the first out transgender composer of a Star Wars series, she said, it doesn’t feel like something she herself has earned.

Deana cannot deny her excitement for the work she’s putting into composing for Ahsoka. Having grown up watching The Clone Wars, she was able to lean into the nostalgia that a lot of fans have felt in seeing this much beloved animated character get her time to shine. Deana believes that this love for Ahsoka comes through in the music.

“People are really going to love it,” she said. “People who love these characters, it's them. They're there. And they're just on a new journey. And I think once people realize that they're in such a different place than they were in [Star Wars] Rebels or in The Clone Wars, it's like you have to think of that context for these people.”

Beyond Ahsoka, Deana is looking forward to tackling a number of creative pursuits now that she’s out. She’s looking to get into creating her own music, and she hopes to have the time now, with the Writers Guild of America strike going on.

Deana said she loves collaborating with other artists, which is something she doesn’t always get to do as a composer for TV. She’s currently both composing for and producing filmmaker Andrea Walter’s upcoming short film, im in love with edgar allan poe.

“I'm putting myself in a very different role that I'm very excited about, just to see how else I can work,” she said. “It's been really fun. I'm excited to get to the scoring part of it, too. But yeah, there's a lot of different things that I want to do with other people. I feel somewhat lonely at my job somehow. It's very strange, and I really miss working really hands-on with people. It takes so much more time to work like that.”

In that regard, Deana encourages folks who want to work with her to contact her via Instagram. Much like how she discovered that she’s trans, producing a film has already proven to be a learning experience for her, and she hopes to continue that work in between scoring for shows.

Lauren Lola is an author, freelance writer, playwright, and screenwriter from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of the novels, An Absolute Mind and A Moment’s Worth, as well as the upcoming graphic novel, Dasig. She has written plays that have been produced both virtually and in-person for theatre groups on the West Coast of the United States, and has penned the short films, “Breath of Writing” and “Interview with an Aswang.” Aside from Mixed Asian Media, Lauren has also had writing featured on The Nerds of Color, CAAMedia, PBS, YOMYOMF, and other outlets and publications.

You can find Lauren on Twitter and Instagram @akolaurenlola and on her website, www.lolabythebay.wordpress.com.