we have always been here: documentaries about trans people

documentaries about trans people, starting in the year 1953. I don't speak to filmic quality or whether or not something is problematic, what matters here is simply the testimony and the stamp of existence (including in those where the subject matter is spoken about, rather than getting to speak for themselves)

(I haven't seen every one of these yet, so some of them have slightly shorter texts to go along with them)

while (as you'll see) most of these are US-based movies, they are from all over the world. I'd be curious about whether there are any focused specifically on the intersection of transness and disability, I don't personally know of any, although of many speak to issues with access to healthcare (for example southern comfort)

all the ones that have links connected to them are watchable for free

some of these can be watched for free on the archive, youtube, vimeo, many could do with a few coins thrown their way: many of the movies, for example the the aggressives can be rented on vimeo, transgender tuesdays is free on youtube but accepting donations for trans women of colour, lotus sports club is doing festivals currently and is accepting donations to support the team and the vulnerable trans (now men) who have had to leave it to find work, call her ganda is accepting donations to support the family's legal costs in bringing justice for their daughter

remember, finding the stories that have been graciously shared is one thing, supporting our community is the next step

had the opportunity and privilege to watch kokomo city yesterday, a documentary about black trans sex workers in America, directed by d. smith, who was working with some of the biggest names in the music industry, before (surprise surprise) losing employment and housing following her transition

if there's any chance to watch it, I really do recommend. there's so much love in the imagery and it's so vibrant, you can tell she's got a music background in the way the image beats move electrically with the soundtrack, and it adds to the ability to tell nuanced stories and let the women (and cis men who speak about their attractions to trans women) actually be funny/smart/sad/complicated

can read more about it here

I hope this spells a shift in her opportunities and in the platforming of this sort of work and documentation

FROM YOU DON’T KNOW DICK: COURAGEOUS HEARTS OF TRANSSEXUAL MEN (1997) - trans men discussing what it means to be trans and a man

Stephan: Being a transsexual man is different. It’s truly different. I didn’t grow up a boy. I can’t go to all the same places as those guys have been and will go. And yet turn it around and put me into a group of women, where I used to fit into that, and I don’t fit there anymore either.

Max: Some of us feel like we become man and then we kind of leave being transsexuals behind, because it’s a transition place. And I understand that, but I think what really happens, what I feel really happens, is more sort of a shifting of identity. You know, where man becomes more important at some point than transsexual. And it’s not so much that you give up the transsexual and you take on the man, it’s just that the man part of that compound becomes more important.

James: But I don’t like the term “genetic men” as opposed to transsexual men. Because I’m genetic too. And we don’t know where transsexuality comes from. It could be genetic, who knows.

Stephan: I think the transgendered community has to live with an ambivalence and ambiguity that most other people don’t have to live with. Maybe biracial people live with it in another way. And that’s where I live. I live in this ambiguous, ambivalent place.

Michael: I might be totally wrong about this, but it seems to me that transsexuals are the only ones that really know what’s happening on both ends of the [male and female] spectrum [of experiences].

Max: I don’t know at all what it is to be a woman, and in some ways I do know. Both things are true. That is the strange nature of this, and the power of this ultimately, I think, is that two things that simultaneously cancel each other out can be true at the same time, and are true.

Michael: Now I’m kind of accepting my history as a female, the female part of it. The part of my life that I lived as a female outwardly, and I kept the little boy inside – somehow I kept him alive, and he stayed alive until I could bring him out.

Isabella (Loren’s then-girlfriend), You Don’t Know Dick: Courageous Hearts of Transsexual Men, 1997

Jamison “James” Green (You Don’t Know Dick: Courageous Hearts of Transsexual Men, 1997)

so much of this documentary series is just a searing indictment against the british health system’s (and by extension britain’s) ways of approaching trans people -- the transphobia before her surgery of course, but also the bigotry against sex work (one of the biggest strikes against Julia Grant was that she had been a sex worker), the fatphobia over and over, the classism, and the violence after surgery when she was completely abandoned by the healthcare system and learned 14 years later that they had given her incorrect information about hormones that was affecting her bones and her weight

and then versus that the mainly glanced at mutual aid -- the conversation she has with a ftm transsexual in which they share ideas about what they want, and her comment that she’s talked with other trans women before, the description of her life after surgery in the queer scene, and the sex shop that catered to tvs and ts’ in terms of everything from clothes to trying to find alternate ways of assisting trans people to access care, although that care can only be expensive (just like today), and the conversations she has with trans people there -- and then more in the final episode where the bar she opens is queer

the lines drawn from 1979 to 1999 to 2022 in everything from cost to paternalistic pathologisation when trans people are yelling for informed consent to the overlapping violence against fat trans people, working class trans people, and generally trans people who aren’t considered “attractive” enough (which the documentary doesn’t go deeply into, but which we know also includes disabled trans people and trans people of colour)

and even before that, watching the interview from 1973 and seeing that there’s barely a difference from then to now either and the small changes that have been “allowed” aren’t just insufficient, but actively cover up all the ways its in some ways worse (gender affirming care partially falling under the NHS, but still being through the GICs and their ideas of how to “prove” someone is trans enough, the GRC which was barely sufficient when it was first created in 2004 and is all but useless now, more people being technically allowed to transition, but the system drowning in queues and it’s even more expensive now than it was then....) 

and knowing that there’s all these fantastic activists and thinkers and doers who have built these wonderful ways of being and living since forever, and yet we’re still bound by this post-war medicalised model (full of cis people who don’t even know what a GIC is, never mind the history of them, and certainly wouldn’t deign to read a text by trans people)

I’m really hurting over this documentary series produced between 1979-1999 about Julia Grant. 

The psychiatrist who had all the power in his hands to help or deny her clearly never cared about trans people, and it’s practically the same system now as it was then -- the patronising language, the pathologisation, the fucked up powertrip, the limitations of what a person can be that is created off the back of the same kind of language as when the GIC was first formed in 1966. Trans healthcare in the UK was a fucking mess then and is a fucking mess now

Also she argues for informed consent within the documentary and she is so right! She was right in 1980 and that was forty fucking years ago!

I know she did ok after some time, but the amount of respect I have for her allowing the conversations with that psychiatrist to be aired, with the amount that he dehumanised her (and we know he likely dehumanised other trans people who came to him for help)

have to watch a lot of 70s-80s trans rights in the UK documentaries and movies right now and they are stressful -- I will have to recover by reading some of the trans philosophies published during the same time, because watching these it can be easy to forget that trans people weren’t just constantly interacting with cis-expectations for what humanity was allowed to be, but were (are) developing whole new fantastic languages and ideas for living

and the things I’m watching right now are very middleclass to upper-class**, all trans women, all white, all able-bodied, for the most part thin, and they’re still having to fit themselves smaller and smaller, having to apologise, having to prove “normalcy”

(** the interesting there of course is that middleclass trans people will very quickly become poor)

[watches a kate bornstein interview to calm down]

EDIT: OOOOOOOOOOOOH MY FUCKING GOODNESS I GOOGLED WHO THE FUCK HER PSYCHIATRIST WAS AND IT WAS JOHN RANDELL WHO FUCKING!!!! STARTED THE GIC SYSTEM IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!!!!!

THIS MAN IS SINGLE-HANDEDLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE NOT GETTING CARE AND HE WAS ONE OF THE MAIN VOICES AT THE CORBETT V CORBETT CASE THAT RUINED THE RIGHTS FOR TRANS PEOPLE TO CHANGE THEIR GENDER ON THEIR BIRTH CERTIFICATES!

ASK ME AGAIN IF THIS SYSTEM WAS BROKEN FROM THE WORD GO!

(on the list of people we as a community should be wishing for a long time in Hell, this guy is up there)