I don’t know how anyone can watch it and not see the transness of it, but apparently some people do.

That would be me. I have a problem where anything I experience I just take for granted, and thus all the gender fuckery is just a normal part of Coming Of Age, right??? (/s)

I mean, looking back it's hard not to see the transness, but it whooshed me when watching.

spoilers

And I’m pretty sure the ending means she never went back.

According to Schoenbrun, it's more about a realistic look at the pace of change, not about guving a definitive resolution to Owen's story:

I Saw The TV Glow spoilers

To get Owen to a place of true self-love and self-acceptance would take at least another movie. I knew that I wanted it to be really honest to the fact that just because you've now finally seen yourself clearly doesn’t mean that the half a lifetime of damage that repression has instilled in you is going to go away. I don’t view it as a cautionary tale or a definitively sad ending; I just think it’s truthful to the fact that if you’ve been taught your whole life to think of yourself as an impostor or apologize for being yourself like many trans people are, that instinct doesn’t go away overnight.

In that same interview, they also said they left an alternate ending "on the cutting room floor" with a little more catharsis and optimism

I Saw the TV Glow spoilers

The script always ended with “I’m sorry.” There was a really cool laser-tag arena in the arcade, and we did this scene of Justice running through it. But the catharsis never felt right; it felt unearned. Owen is just at a point when he’s ready to start thinking about the hard thing, not make it through the hard thing.

One of the major points of the story is how hard it is to come to terms with these feelings, how little there is to go by, how easy "the beaten path" is to fall into, how fantastical and unreal and unattainable any other mode of existence seems looking in from the outside, how messy and uncertain it all is. It makes sense that the ending wouldn't wrap everything up neatly with a Happily Ever After, but that shouldn't be taken as a message that there is no hope.

Regarding the TV screens: in both this and We're All Going to the World's Fair, Schoenbrun uses mass media as the catalyst that sparks the plot and the characters unfolding, but the narratives never seem to cast aspersions on the medium itself. I love this, because it shows media as the mirror in which we see ourselves, and not some external force of evil.

It also enables this beautiful and aesthetic style of filmmaking, where references to media that makes me feel nostalgic are now given the spotlight. At times it almost feels like the movies are less about the characters and what's happening to them, and more about the media from my adolescence and this kind of oneiric reimagination of it.

These stories earnestly show the characters and how they're influenced by media, but not in the sense that it's Corrupting The Youth. They're only seeing some element of themselves that was already there and they just didn't want to look at it. Like I said: a mirror, not a malevolence.