* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Hollywood hits have drawn attention to the scores of transgender people who killed annually
Corrects "his" to "her" in paragraph 7
In the opening scene of Boys Don’t Cry (1999), a young man is looking excitedly at his face in the mirror. “Shorter, shorter here,” he tells the guy who is cutting his hair.
The camera zooms out and frames Brandon, a strong-jawed skinny boy in a cowboy shirt.
The audience later learns that Brandon’s real name is Teena Brandon, a transgender boy from Lincoln, Nebraska, whose story inspired this Oscar-winning movie.
Teena Brandon was 21 when she was murdered on December 31, 1993, in Humboldt, Nebraska - an unknown town in the ultra-conservative American Midwest in which lesbians are still called dykes and homosexuality is often regarded as a sin.
The success of the movie helped draw attention to the scores of transgender people who are killed every year because of their gender identity, and who are commemorated on Nov. 20 during the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance.
By becoming a Hollywood hit, “Boys Don’t Cry” sparked an interest in the general public which allowed transgender-themed movies to reach a mainstream audience.
Six years after “Boys Don’t Cry”, Transamerica (2005) proved to be another Hollywood hit, with former “Desperate Housewives” actress Felicity Huffman playing a middle-aged transsexual about to fulfill her lifetime dream and get sex-reassignment surgery.
Huffman’s powerful performance won her a Golden Globe award and shed light on the anxiety, the desires, and the everyday struggle of the transgender person.
“Jesus made me this way so I could suffer and be reborn the way he wanted me!” says Bree Osbourne – Huffman’s character in the movie.
The sense of incompleteness and the feeling of being trapped in the wrong body is something that most, if not all, transsexuals say they are familiar with. It often is what makes their lives unbearable, and surgery a life-saving decision.
Cinema has the power to influence society in a way no other art medium can.
“Boys Don’t Cry” and “Transamerica” are good movies not only because they offer great performances by great actors or because they are technically well executed. They are important because they have exposed transsexuality to the world in a way a book or a good social campaign could never have done.
Over the past two decades, a number of films and TV series have focused on transgender people.
The semi-comic journey of three drag queens travelling across Australia in a tour bus became the international cult movie (now a smash-hit musical) The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994), and the transition of Max, a female to male transgender, was a poignant theme in the hit U.S. drama series “The L Word” (2004-2009).
For some film directors, transgenderism constitutes a mild obsession. Just think of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s work in which transsexuals characters are almost ubiquitous (Bad Education, 2004; All About My Mother, 1999).
Why these movies were made, what the creators wanted to communicate or achieve through them, isn’t necessarily of great importance.
What is important is that they helped us understand - or they tried to - what transgenderism is by letting us familiarise with their characters.
We may find them repulsive, intriguing or plainly weird, but at least they provoke us. And provocation usually makes us think.
Who wouldn’t agree that this alone is quite an achievement?
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
