So Long, Thanks for All the Mammaries
I recently opened my own Netflix account because I love the way it learns my personal taste over time as well as the access to many obscure foreign films and documentaries. When I saw the description for Breasts: A Documentary in my suggested movies I pounced on it:
"22 women talk about the role breasts have played in their varied life experiences. Providing a nakedness in their responses that's difficult to deny, the film's subjects include a voluptuous transsexual, a stripper with implants, an 11-year-old on the cusp of puberty, a 420-pound comedienne and an 84-year-old grandmother."
I was excited to see what so many different women had to say about such a rich and generally taboo subject and was thrilled that a trans woman had been included. Then the opening line felt like a punch to the tit. "Before filming we circulated questionnaires asking women to tell us about their breasts...208 women and one man responded."
As soon as I heard it I knew they were referring to the transsexual woman as a "man" but I tried to reserve judgment until the end of the movie. A restaurant hostess is interviewed halfway through the show about her "breast enhancement". An enhanced stripper also talks about how "good" and "real" are not always synonymous, nor are "bad" and "fake". Conveniently, every negative descriptor is said right before the hostess is spliced back in to talk about her surgery. At the end of the segment the hostess shockingly reveals she was born transsexual and from that moment on we never hear from her again.
Why didn't they ask how the trans woman felt about breasts when she was young? Why didn't they ask her the effects breasts had on her personal life? Why didn't she get to talk about her own love-hate relationship with bras? Why did they only bother to show her during the segment on surgery? Because she's transsexual and apparently that's we're allowed to be "experts" on. Everything else is left up to the cissexuals.
Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive. For a movie that's nearly 15 years old having a trans woman is amazingly progressive and I'm still willing to believe the "man" they mentioned was not actually featured. But even if that's true, I'm still sick of seeing transsexuals used for nothing more than shock value. For years now our life experiences have been co-opted by cissexual artists and intellectuals looking for a cheap thrill. They don't bother to think about how the transsexual feels about cissexual assumptions. They don't ask how hard it must have been to fight society and your own body to be the woman you are. They don't know what it's like to have your gender called into question just because you're trusting enough to share your story. We're painted to be "artificial" so insecure cissexuals can feel "genuine".
We're presented as everything from pathetic losers to gorgeous deceivers and used as metaphors, punch lines and plot twists but rarely are we shown to be simple human beings with some personal baggage like everyone else. The day I see stories about transsexual women by transsexual women we'll finally be heading in the right direction. Until then, if you're going to feature a trans woman in a work of art here's a suggestion on how to really shake things up: treat her like any other woman. If the similarities between transsexuals and cissexuals make them squirm in their seats and scratch their heads you've done something right.
"22 women talk about the role breasts have played in their varied life experiences. Providing a nakedness in their responses that's difficult to deny, the film's subjects include a voluptuous transsexual, a stripper with implants, an 11-year-old on the cusp of puberty, a 420-pound comedienne and an 84-year-old grandmother."
I was excited to see what so many different women had to say about such a rich and generally taboo subject and was thrilled that a trans woman had been included. Then the opening line felt like a punch to the tit. "Before filming we circulated questionnaires asking women to tell us about their breasts...208 women and one man responded."
As soon as I heard it I knew they were referring to the transsexual woman as a "man" but I tried to reserve judgment until the end of the movie. A restaurant hostess is interviewed halfway through the show about her "breast enhancement". An enhanced stripper also talks about how "good" and "real" are not always synonymous, nor are "bad" and "fake". Conveniently, every negative descriptor is said right before the hostess is spliced back in to talk about her surgery. At the end of the segment the hostess shockingly reveals she was born transsexual and from that moment on we never hear from her again.
Why didn't they ask how the trans woman felt about breasts when she was young? Why didn't they ask her the effects breasts had on her personal life? Why didn't she get to talk about her own love-hate relationship with bras? Why did they only bother to show her during the segment on surgery? Because she's transsexual and apparently that's we're allowed to be "experts" on. Everything else is left up to the cissexuals.
Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive. For a movie that's nearly 15 years old having a trans woman is amazingly progressive and I'm still willing to believe the "man" they mentioned was not actually featured. But even if that's true, I'm still sick of seeing transsexuals used for nothing more than shock value. For years now our life experiences have been co-opted by cissexual artists and intellectuals looking for a cheap thrill. They don't bother to think about how the transsexual feels about cissexual assumptions. They don't ask how hard it must have been to fight society and your own body to be the woman you are. They don't know what it's like to have your gender called into question just because you're trusting enough to share your story. We're painted to be "artificial" so insecure cissexuals can feel "genuine".
We're presented as everything from pathetic losers to gorgeous deceivers and used as metaphors, punch lines and plot twists but rarely are we shown to be simple human beings with some personal baggage like everyone else. The day I see stories about transsexual women by transsexual women we'll finally be heading in the right direction. Until then, if you're going to feature a trans woman in a work of art here's a suggestion on how to really shake things up: treat her like any other woman. If the similarities between transsexuals and cissexuals make them squirm in their seats and scratch their heads you've done something right.