by Christine Benvenuto
Once upon a time I misunderstood transsexuality as symptomatic of psychic damage. That is, that unhappy families might be unhappy in their own ways but gender identity disorders are all produced by them. I’ve come to understand that transsexuals are not necessarily people who were damaged by their childhoods. Not necessarily people brought up in homes in which something weird or extreme was going on about gender roles. Okay, I get it. But does Hollywood get it? Mainstream screen portrayals of trans people themselves have evolved a lot in recent years, grown more nuanced and sympathetic, and finally left behind the pathetic and dangerous psychos of the past, typified by the serial killer of Silence of the Lambs. Screen transsexuals no longer have to be nuts. Their families, however, are still up for grabs.
At some point before my ex-husband moved out of our home to begin a new life as a woman, during a period in which we were no longer “man” and wife but still living together in acute discomfort, I suggested, to my ex’s surprise, that we rent the 2005 film Transamerica, the first – and still only – mainstream Hollywood exploration of a gender transition, and watch it together. In contrast with the past, when we might talk about a film for hours, we didn’t discuss this one afterward. By then it was excruciating to say anything about anything.
Transamerica’s Bree is a male-to-female eagerly approaching the surgeon’s knife when her path is temporarily impeded by the discovery that she fathered a son some eighteen years ago. She is strong-armed by her therapist into helping the boy, now a gay prostitute. A ludicrous road trip ensues. The plot is beside the film’s point, which is the laudable project of normalizing transgender people for the general audience. To this end, the filmmakers chose to cast a “biological” woman in the lead role. Actress Felicity Huffman was rightly praised for her matryoshka-doll turn as the woman inside a man inside a woman. With her distorted voice, her impossibly stiff posture (you can almost see the book on top of her head) and her prudishness she captured the male-to-female desperate to pass. She also removed any potential for Some Like it Hot, Tootsie, et al. style camp from the movie’s trans portrait. It’s easy to accept a character as a woman when she is played by one.
The film, written and directed by Duncan Tucker, shows us Bree in extreme isolation. She has no friends, partner, coworkers, or even neighbors. Her only personal contact is her therapist, whose job is to shepherd her successfully over to the pink side. The discovery of sudden fatherhood is so contrived, not to mention so late in Bree’s process, no real examination of the effects of a trans person’s actions on offspring is needed. Indeed, how Bree’s decision affects others is no part of the equation. The filmmakers are disinclined to take a real look at what an adult transsexual owes his or her family, yet they seem unable to simply sidestep the issue altogether. On her way across America they force Bree into a stop at her parental home, though not because they want to seriously examine the character in the context of her family. The parents are loony, played for broad laughs. If they are less than understanding and enthusiastic about their son’s gender change it’s because they are absurd people with absurd concerns.
Bree’s mother, in particular, is an extreme caricature of her gender. With her white hair-sprayed ‘do and white eye shadow to match, she looks and speaks like a child beauty queen grown old not up. Her femininity is hard, phony and brittle: a good role model for a transsexual? Bree pithily suggests it, slapping down her mother’s objections to her transformation by telling her that they are two-of-a-kind, both swallowing their womanhood from a hormone pill bottle. The film seems to say that Bree and her mother are equally fake, one no more or less valid than the other and takes the retro (ageist, misogynist) view that a woman loses her claim on womanhood by aging. Femininity is nothing but a construct and Bree’s mother reveals her vacuity by chasing it. What about Bree?
While it wastes no compassion on her family, Transamerica handles the fragile Bree with grace and kindness. Near the film’s end the camera watches a post-operative Bree, reclining in the bath, do a quick, appreciative check on her new genitals, making sure they’re still there. For me this was the most affecting image in the film. Bree feels good in her body. It’s a sensation she doesn’t take for granted.
Oh, I thought. This is what it’s all about. There we sat, my husband and I, side by side in the screen-lit semi-dark of what was still, fleetingly, “our” home. No longer comfortable with words or even glances. I thought – the idea so painful that although I tried, I couldn’t speak the words aloud – I want this for you.
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Since Transamerica, stories about actual transgendered people from Chaz Bono to Chelsea Manning have inundated the American press. Transgendered characters have begun turning up in television shows with increasing frequency, and a documentary or two has attempted to tell their stories. But they haven’t been the subject of Hollywood enterprises. Viewing Transamerica during the shake-up and transformation of my own family, I couldn’t help but pay particular attention to the film’s colorfully crude and unsympathetic family portrait and wonder when – and how – others would navigate this terrain.
The French-language Tomboy (2011), written and directed by Céline Sciamma, is a small, quiet film, far off the Hollywood beaten path. Made with minimal budget, cast ,and plot, and not much dialogue, it is an intimate gaze into a childhood summer.
When her family moves into a housing complex, ten-year-old Laure introduces herself to the other children as Mikael and is presumed male, playing soccer with the neighborhood boys and attracting the romantic interest of a girl. Trying out the new identity, she examines her crotch in the bottom half of a swim suit (suspiciously flat) and her naked chest (just flat enough). The camera, a perfect vehicle for this anxious narcissism, studies Laure studying Laure, giving us a glimpse of her naked body to dispel any doubt that it is female. Is Laure an athletic girl of undetermined sexuality chafing against the conventions of femininity and reveling in the play of boys? A budding lesbian? Or a person who will, in adulthood, reject the body and gender identity she was born with? Laure isn’t saying, and neither is the film. How you view the film will likely be the result of what you bring to it. I bring an attention to how the families of gender variant protagonists are handled, admittedly a special interest.
The family in Tomboy is refreshingly loving and kind. Gentle goodwill infuses the relationships between parents and children, between Laure and her younger sister. Awaiting the birth of her third child, Laure’s mother spends the majority of her days napping. This leaves Laure and her sister, Jeanne, to amuse themselves. Although warmth pervades Laure’s interactions with her mother, there’s a sense of greater rapport with her father – maybe a temporary product of her mother’s pregnancy, maybe not. Two fleeting moments suggest the mother’s worries about her child: early on she expresses pleasure that Laure has made a female friend, Lisa, evidently an unusual occurrence; later, she compliments Laure when the child comes home with makeup on her face, the result of a game with Lisa, who believed she was amusing herself by making up her boyfriend. When the mother discovers that their new neighbors believe she has a son named Mikael, she is shocked. She yells at Laure and slaps her. The next day she orders Laure to put on a dress and to accompany her to her friends’ apartments to clear up the ruse. Between visits she is affectionate with Laure, telling her that she is not angry but that she simply doesn’t know what else they can do.
The film doesn’t demonize the mother or blame her for Laure’s discomfort with femininity, yet the feeling lingers that Laure’s father is more in sympathy with his child. He tells Laure not to worry and gazes at her with compassion, doing nothing. His wife does the only thing that occurs to her, recognizing the demands community will impose: the anonymity of summer is coming to an end, and if they don’t reveal Laure’s secret now, the new school she is about to enter will do it for them. In this tranquil home, the father’s inaction connotes sensitivity, the mother’s action violence. Neither parent discusses Laure’s feelings; no one talks about why she did what she did. Such a conversation seems inappropriate, potentially shattering.
The evidence suggested by a spate of recent articles in the American press indicates that if Laure was growing up stateside, white, and affluent, her situation would be handled quite differently. Her parents might register her at school as Mikael and insist that the gender on her records be altered and that she be welcomed into the boy’s bathroom, locker room, and sports teams. They might take her to doctors for hormone blockers to prevent the female adolescence that lurks around the next bend, and possibly testosterone and a double mastectomy not long after. Perhaps the family making these choices will be the focus of a film someday. Tomboy’s childhood landscape is likely the wave of the trans future. Most feature film gender crossers have been adult and male (Boys Don’t Cry, 1999, is an obvious exception). With public gender transformation beginning at earlier and earlier ages, at least in the U.S., the adult male in transition may go the way of the dinosaur, film portrayals with him.
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A movie currently in the works takes an historic look at this subject. The film will be based upon The Danish Girl, a novel published in 2000 by David Ebershoff, which is based upon the life of painter Einar Wegener, the first man known to undergo gender reassignment surgery and to die of it. Wegener, who might have been inter-sexed, became Lili Elbe and died in 1931, just shy of 50, as a result of a fifth operation, this one intended to make her able to bear children. As in Transamerica, the male-to-female protagonist will be played by an attractive Hollywood actress, Nicole Kidman, which will make it easy for audiences to accept the character’s feminine transformation. This casting entirely sidesteps the male-to-female issue, since no transformation is necessary to make Kidman a woman.
The novel opens with Wegener’s wife and fellow painter Greta asking Einar to put on women’s stockings and shoes and pose for her, to help her complete a portrait in the absence of its subject. Initiating this cross dressing, Greta soon understands that she has set her husband off on a path whose end she doesn’t know and can’t control. Einar’s transformation has fantastical elements: donning female clothing, he becomes a young girl even friends don’t recognize, shedding years along with masculinity. In contrast to the same-person-different-package party line that many transsexuals, and the wives who stay with husbands after transition, subscribe to, Einar speaks of Lili as a separate person, while Lili insists that she is not Einar.
Greta facilitates Einar’s transformation even as she suffers for it, watching her husband and marriage slip away. When someone suggests to Greta that it must be hard for her, she is quick to say it is much harder for Einar. In fact, it doesn’t appear hard for Einar. He doesn’t grapple with doubt or even hesitation, never speaks a word of comfort or regret to Greta, never acknowledges her extraordinary support. While Einar/Lili may not lose much sleep over Greta, the novelist treats her with compassion, noting changing emotions I find all too familiar: confusion, fear that she is or will be accused of somehow being to blame, grief over all that she’s lost. After Einar has permanently become Lili, Greta is readily granted a divorce, but what she really wants is that Einar be declared dead. This is her truth. Her husband has died. She is a transwidow: at least, that’s the word I used to express the nature of the loss I had experienced. The novel doesn’t stint on Lili’s refusal to take responsibility for the effects of her actions on Greta, although it offers one moment of internal recognition that a relationship once existed between them. Greta tells her:
“There are still times when I see you, and I think to myself, not so long ago we were married. You and me, we were married and we lived in that small dark space between two people where a marriage exists.”
“It was you and Einar.”
“I know it was Einar. But really, it was you and me.”
Lili understood. She could remember what it felt like to fall in love with Greta.
What the filmmakers will do with this material remains to be seen.
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I can’t help but wonder, Why do people make these films? By which I mean, why would anyone visit this territory if he or she could stay away? But I understand. The camera is voracious for sweet material, and gender change is candy. I’ve had occasion to observe (alas, many occasions to observe) that gender variance is a subject of fascination, titillation to others. Beyond that, filmmaking is a perfect tool for documenting transformation, not only changes afforded by the donning of a wig, a dress, a smear of lipstick, but also modulations of voice, gesture, movement. The families of trans people, needless to say, provide no thrills, visual, sexual, or otherwise. They might be clueless buffoons unable to understand gender variance, or sadists who actually cause it. A third possibility – that they are just people baffled by circumstances over which they have no control – is not sexy.
The 2003 made-for-television Normal offers an unsexy portrait of a family that includes both the sadist and the ordinary Joe. “The first half of the film is your life,” a friend who counsels trans people in transition told me once. “The second half is not.” I knew Normal existed long before I could bring myself to sit down in front of it. Finally I saw it alone, after my marriage had ended. The oldest of the film portrayals I’m considering here, it offers the most serious, fully-formed consideration of the effects of gender transformation on the spouse of the transgender character that I’ve discovered.
The film gives us Roy, a Middle American blue-collar worker who socks his wife, Irma, on their 25th anniversary with the news that he is going to become a woman. He proposes to begin hormone treatment at once and to undergo surgical sexual reassignment as soon as possible. Never having breathed a word about his gender identity problem before, he has little to say now. He’s all hunched defensiveness, accenting his taciturnity with angry outbursts. Actor Tom Wilkinson gives Roy pathos and a kind of fierce dignity. While clearly sympathetic to Roy’s project of becoming Ruth, the filmmakers make him believable, but not a saint. His narcissistic obsession with his transformation, his blithe assumption that everyone, Irma in particular, will go along for the ride, and his dreadful fashion sense were all too familiar to me.
In many respects Normal, written and directed by Jane Anderson, is an inverse Transamerica, with its palette of bubblegum colors in Bree’s and her mother’s wardrobes and its “See America First” views of her road trip. Normal is gritty and dark-hued. Its desolate rural landscape is buried in snow, its interiors – farmhouses, a pastor’s office, a factory – are bleakly realistic. The man who would be woman is played by a man, a big, masculine-looking middle aged man, and the film does not glamorize or soft pedal his potential – nil – to achieve the appearance of a woman who wouldn’t inspire the wrong kind of second glance.
While Transamerica takes its disconnected characters on a long car ride, Normal’s stay put in the place they were born and have lived all their lives, dug in to their environment. Again there are absurd and ignorant objections to switching gender, but this time the preposterous lines come only from the mouth of a would-be helpful minister whom Roy impatiently brushes off. Much harder to ignore is his sadistic father. All Roy’s life his father has suspected him of being less than manly and has violently hated him for it. Again, it’s hard not to wonder if the filmmakers realize that portraying a transgender person as the product of a dysfunctional, gender-stratified family cuts against the notion that a transgender person is born, not made. Is Roy’s rejection of masculinity supposed to be a psychological reaction to his father? The film’s treatment of Roy’s children is also facile. A dad in skirts doesn’t give his teenage daughter a moment’s pause, while his young adult son quickly gets over his objections. But unlike Bree, Roy has a wife.
The film’s greatest strength is its unflinching look at Irma. Actress Jessica Lange imbues Irma with a lovely, natural femininity and a wealth of inner strength. Like Bree’s mother, Irma is a conventional woman with a life of conventional limitations. But there the similarity ends. The film doesn’t despise Irma because Irma loves Roy. She is shattered by his revelation. His physical alteration. The destruction of their life together as husband and wife. She grapples with the changes in a darkness devoid of meaningful support. Even Roy himself can’t help her, preoccupied as he is with his own process. In the first half of the movie Irma refuses to accept Roy’s plan, prompting Roy to move out of the couple’s home. But when she finds him holding a gun to his head after one of his father’s vicious attacks, Irma takes Roy back. Over the second half of the movie she makes what can only be called an extremely uneasy peace with a stunted life. It appears that she and Roy, now Ruth, will live together like a pair of aging, cantankerous sisters. The film’s final image encompasses Irma’s loss and her grief. On the eve of his surgery she takes one last look at the body of the man she loves. It is a gesture of resignation. Relinquishing her erotic, romantic life. Relinquishing Roy.
The movie wasn’t easy to watch. Irma made me feel guilty. The kind of guilt I felt when I read about trans families in which the non-trans partner stayed put, no matter how miserably, keeping the family together. As my friend had warned, the second half of the story wasn’t mine. Irma gives up on herself as a sexual woman when she makes the choice to stay in her marriage. The choice I couldn’t make.
“She stays with him,” I complained to my friend. “But she isn’t happy.”
“Women who stay with trans husbands generally aren’t happy. It’s not about happiness,” she replied. “It’s about keeping their families together. Sometimes it’s about deciding he’s the same person inside.” The same-person-different-package party line that I often heard but never experienced in my family.
The next time my ex came to see the children after I saw Normal I couldn’t resist bringing it up. “Have you seen it?” I asked.
No. “From what I understand of the movie I thought it would be too painful.”
I guessed that my ex had heard this was a movie with a happy ending. After all, the family stays together.
“That’s right,” I advised. “Keep away from it.”
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In the decade since Normal, screen portrayals of transgender people haven’t been much concerned with the experiences of their families. The trans sideline in the Netflix prison series Orange is the New Black arrived as an unexpected and welcome exception.
Created by Jenji Kohan and based on the book by Piper Kerman, the 2013 series introduces a minor transgender character, Sophia, a prison hairdresser who describes herself as having paid in big bucks and her freedom for the surgically constructed genitalia she sports. Sophia doesn’t mention the price paid by her wife and young son but, to its credit, Orange does.
In flashback, we see Sophia’s wife, Crystal, guiding Sophia toward a girlishness that doesn’t scream prostitute. Crystal’s remarks and smiles, her offers of clothes and fashion advice are upbeat and accepting. But when she looks up at the big, burly Sophia (played, most realistically of all these portrayals, by a trans actress, Laverne Cox), the pain and confusion that flit across her face tell a complex story. It’s easy to imagine that Crystal is searching for glimpses of the man she loved in her husband’s shifting form. “I married a man named Marcus,” she reminds her husband, and us. In exchange for her acceptance, Crystal begs, “Just please keep your penis.” Sophia refuses to comply, reminding Crystal that she can leave if she wants to. Sophia’s priority is Sophia. Crystal’s is her marriage, maintaining an intact family for her son, Michael. “Where would I go?” she asks sadly. It’s a squeamish moment. It’s always a squeamish moment when a woman – in this case, a tough, intelligent, beautiful woman – says she has no option but to hang on to a guy who is telling her that she and their family simply aren’t first on his list. But Marcus doesn’t just want to be Sophia. Marcus wants to be Sophia at any price. And Crystal has her limits.
Sophia is behind bars for stealing credit cards to fund her new body and new life. She’s left Crystal to work two jobs and raise their young son on her own, ostracized by her mother, unable to go to her church, fighting the seizure of their home. When Crystal refers to these things during a visit – to the price she and Michael are paying for Sophia’s new genitals – I hear echoes of the wives who have written to me about husbands breaking the family bank over wigs and electrolysis. I hear my ex telling me that our home should be sold to finance the great transformation. There were appropriate “sub-standard apartments” (my ex’s phrase) available for poor single-parent families like the one my children and I had become.
Sophia, though, has nothing to say about her family’s economic hardship. There’s something much more pressing on her mind. She’s showing signs of liver damage, and is therefore being denied the daily dose of estrogen her womanhood will depend upon for the rest of her life. She’s tried all inside means to get her hands on the drug. Now she reaches outside. In a scene of breath-taking selfishness, she asks Crystal, who has already given up everything for her, to sneak estrogen into the prison. To break the law and risk a prison sentence of her own. To risk leaving Michael bereft of both his parents. Indicating her female appearance, she whines that if it’s taken from her, “this will all have been for nothing.” The moment suggests that Crystal is addicted to her new body, and like any addict, both self-destructive and heedless of who she brings down with her. In the silence that follows, the obvious answer, never spoken, reverberates between them: it was for nothing.
I’ve been told (and told, and told) by trans supporters that a man who throws over a wife and children to express inner womanhood is a hero, or rather heroine. In my memoir I described hearing this from acquaintances in my own neck of the woods who view themselves as politically correct, and I’ve heard it much more stridently expressed by trans activists since the book’s publication: the destroyed family is acceptable collateral damage. Orange dares to take a different view. It doesn’t soft pedal Sophia’s singular self-absorption. Although its first season devotes just a few minutes to Sophia and Crystal’s plotline, it goes new places in considering the price, in every sense of the word, of gender transition for the spouse and children of the transgender person. While Normal took an unwavering look at the deep pain inherent in such a loss, it was unable to imagine Irma growing beyond the pain, beyond her marriage. Crystal is of a different fictional generation from Irma. Confronted with Sophia’s callous narcissism she is freed from the losing proposition her marriage has become. She’s ready to move on. And that’s progress.
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Christine Benvenuto is the author of SEX CHANGES: A Memoir of Marriage, Gender, and Moving On (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) and SHIKSA: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World (St. Martin’s Press, 2004). Her fiction and essays have appeared in many publications.
