This interview with Dr. Mary Ann Saunders, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, offers a new interpretation of Julie Taymor’s 2010 film The Tempest. Bringing her life experience to bear on cisgender biases in non-trans artists’ works, Saunders proposes a new interpretation of Ariel, as performed by Ben Whishaw, as a trans woman who is “both beautiful and bittersweet.” Reading Shakespeare as a “trans archive” enables us to more effectively interrogate the long history of associating trans bodies with monstrosity and bodies in distress. • How might we read a Shakespeare play through transgender perspectives? Dr. Mary Ann S. Saunders, a writing and discourse studies scholar in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, offers enlightening answers at the crossroads of medicine, trans, and Shake-speare studies. She spoke to Alexa Alice Joubin about her reading of Ariel and Julie Taymor’s film The Tempest, bringing her life experience to bear on cisgender biases in non-trans artists’ works. ::: https://borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org/borrowers/article/view/351