Jules Vaughn

Jules is introduced in Euphoria as the new girl in town with a complicated backstory. Shortly after moving she meets Rue, a drug addict with no intention of staying clean who becomes her best friend. Their relationship gets deeper and deeper as they start to rely on each other more, slowly evolving into something more than a friendship. The main series explores Jules’ character through their relationship but mostly focusing on Rue’s feelings towards her as she is battling with addiction and now trying to stay clean for Jules’ sake. Their relationship becomes even more complicated as Rue relies on Jules too much to stay sober, paralleling Jules' relationship with her mom who was also an addict. Both characters are flawed and are struggling with their own demons which play a part in the toxicity between them, they both help and harm each other. The final episode of the first season ends with Jules and Rue planning to leave town, however Rue backs out at the last moment and Jules leaves her to get on the train causing Rue to relapse.

Special Episode

Throughout the special episode she is seen talking to a therapist. Jules talks about the impacts of Rue’s addiction and their relationship on her own well-being as well as her gender identity and how she has started viewing it differently which will be discussed further in this article. The episode is a turning point for her character as it is the first representation of Jules’ side of their relationship since the entire main series focused on how badly addiction and Jules’ behavior affected Rue.

Throughout the story Jules has complicated sexual encounters with men who are way older and married while she is just an underage girl. Her friends describe her as being “slutty” but the clips showing these encounters never include her ever enjoying the sexual acts or being the initiator in them but rather just letting them happen. Jules’ harmful relationship with men and sex are deeply influenced by her gender identity and how she wants to present herself as a young trans woman.

Jules sees her encounters with men as a way for her to affirm her femininity and womanness as she believes that she can conquer femininity by conquering men as previously mentioned in episode 7. However, in the special episode this idea is countered as she delves into her feelings of wanting to detach herself from the ideas of what men want in a woman. She has internalized the ideas of what a man wants from an ideal woman and has embedded them within her identity and presentation which she now wants to separate from. Her growth as a character and as a woman can be seen by her admitting that she doesn’t have an interest in men or what men want anymore, therefore she doesn’t want her own womanhood and femininity to revolve around men. She is no longer obsessed with the idea of being feminine just to attract men and to use them as a way of affirming her womanhood. This can be seen as a means of taking her body back from the standards of womanhood that Jules once saw as necessary and being her own person. Her change in appearance can clearly be seen after the special episode in the second season as she starts to experiment with more gender neutral fashion and even starts to wear a binder, contrasting the first season where she was always presenting hyper-feminine with a lot of pink dresses and skirts.

The way she views her transition as a whole is compared to a game in the 7th episode where she compares putting on feminine clothing, make-up and taking hormones to leveling up as she conquers femininity in each step. In the special episode however, she proposes to go off her hormone blockers, to allow the changes in her body which would not be considered desirable for men. She talks about how she used to see puberty as a broadening or a thickening that would make her cross the line from woman to a full on man, making femininity and womanhood unreachable forever. Taking a step in the direction of this concrete change that she was once so afraid of, she explains her feelings with a metaphor.

The broadening no longer scares her as she compares her gender to the ocean, the ocean is broad but it’s also feminine and strong, it can be described as anything and that’s what being trans means to her. It’s something that is spiritual, something that breaks all boundaries, something that belongs to her and it never has to follow standards or rules. Being trans in this context is something so private and vulnerable and yet also incredibly public but in actuality all of it belongs to her and only her.