Please check out the trailer.
"It is a transgender moment," declares the New York Times, referring to the increase of in attention on, and acceptance of, transgender Americans that began even before Caitlyn Jenner went public. But amid the copious coverage, my wife's profound and beautiful film stands out. If you'd prefer a more impartial opinion, Variety says:
Leave it to “Frontline” to find the most thought-provoking angle to a story being given a heavy tilt toward celebrity treatment elsewhere. “Growing Up Trans” takes the sudden boom in coverage of the transgender community and filters it through a more complicated lens by focusing on children coming to grips with their own sexual nonconformity. The kids, remarkably open and honest, prove astonishingly good spokespeople.
My wife Miri Navasky made the film with longtime collaborator Karen O'Connor. They made six previous films, including the Emmy-winning The Undertaking and the New Asylums, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize Journalism Award. This subject of Growing Up Trans is a departure for them, but the film is characteristically attuned to the dignity of people struggling against powerful forces both internal and external. Says the
Baltimore Sun:
"Growing Up Trans" treats these children, adolescents and parents with such sensitivity and respect for their experiences and words that it feels like love from where I sit. The film seems more like a work of ethnography than the hyped-up, run-and-gun, high-concept, sound bite TV journalism of today.
The children's voices drive the film. With precocious self-awareness and thoughtfulness, they tell their own inspiring, and sometimes painful, stories. They reflect on their quests to align their physical selves with their emotional selves. Here's a clip
featuring 13-year old Ariel.
Ariel says it was more difficult for her -- she was teased more -- before she transitioned, when she was in the in-between "girly boy" stage, and watching the film, you see the harm done by American society's binary view of gender. Transgender people are challenging this view. At the same time, however, the increase in children transitioning at an early age, as opposed to existing longer in the murky middle, is probably partly a product of society's overly stringent view of gender. We effectively compel children to choose at an early age.
But biology also compels children to choose at an early age. For the children in the film, going through puberty in their assigned gender was/is a horrific prospect. New options give them the capacity to delay (puberty blockers) and prevent (hormone therapy) that outcome. These options, unavailable even a quarter-generation ago, offer adolescents a chance to feel whole as they grow into adults -- and to save themselves from misery.
But the long-term effects of the medical treatments are largely unknown, and in the film we see parents agonizing over whether to allow their children to take them. But for some parents, their children's suffering makes the decision a less complicated one. Says the mother of 13-year old Alex Singh, who wants to take testosterone:
"It is very hard to make the decision to allow your child to take a medication that has unknown side effects. But it becomes a lot easier when you have seen your child suffer and struggle as we have seen Alex struggle."
Kyle Catrambone, 13, twice came "very close" to killing himself: “I was just thinking, ‘I can’t do it anymore. I can’t live like this. I can’t live in this body. It’s not going to work.'” But thanks to his father's change of heart, Kyle begins to take medication, and you get the sense that it did nothing less than save his life. It's heartbreaking to see John Blanchard's father unable to make a similar turn. “I feel, in a sense, like something’s been robbed…," Burt Blanchard says. "My daughter’s gone, it seems, and is morphing into this other person.”
The film features two older teenagers who have medically transitioned -- part of the first wave of children to do so. At the tender age of 19, Isaac is a senior member of the Growing Up Trans generation. “I started realizing at around 16, 17 how complicated it really was, and kind of what a huge, huge decision I had made to embrace this masculine part of myself so deeply,” he says.
Says a doctor in the film:
“This generation of kids are really — they’re pioneers. They are going to be the ones to teach us."
The film is on tonight. Check your local listings, as they say.