Films That Show the Reality of Trans People
This year’s Tribeca Film Festival featured two documentaries about the experience of being transgender in the United States right now. Their subjects are radically different: State of Firsts follows Delaware’s transgender congresswoman Sarah McBride as she runs for Congress. Meanwhile Just Kids tells the story of three trans children and their families as they grapple with life in states that vote to prohibit their medical care. Yet the films bear a great similarity in the approach they take to their subjects. And their methodology has much to offer the media and also Catholics and church leaders as they consider their stance toward trans people.
Directed by Chase Joynt, State of Firsts in many ways presents as a standard political documentary. We follow Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride and her team as they inch closer and closer to the possibility of her election to the U.S. Congress. Pretty quickly we learn that while the campaign appreciates the historic nature of their situation—McBride will be the first transgender member of Congress—they’re also invested in not allowing McBride to get pigeonholed by the press as simply a trans person advocate. She’s running to represent the people of her state and the issues that matter to them, she says repeatedly.
The impact that she has on people because she is trans is evident. After one event a young woman approaches her, moved to tears. “Thank you for all you do for my sibling,” she says. And McBride is wonderful with the trans people she meets. But we also see her talking about Palestine and spend time hearing about McBride’s husband Andrew who died of cancer, and the way it has informed her understanding of the need for better health care in the United States.
And along the way, Joynt steers clear of reporting on trans activists and their opponents. We never hear from the Republican running against McBride, or see him. Given that he refused to ever appear on stage with her, there’s a certain justice to this. But as the film goes on the lack of these sorts of voices becomes striking. By their absence, Joynt highlights how often the press turns to them in stories about trans people, how frequently those stories are about one or another debate rather than the actual trans people they’re supposedly covering. Even in stories that are supposedly about them, trans people are usually decentered, their lives and experiences at the service of the argument.
Because it refuses to go down that path, State of Firsts comes across as an unexpectedly quiet film. And yet, in refusing to indulge the noisemakers around McBride, noisemakers who want to drive the conversation, State of Firsts is able to actually paint an intimate portrait of her. When McBride, her family and her campaign team realize on election night that she has won the election, the moment is tender in a way you never see in political stories like this.
And that tenderness carries over in a different way as McBride finds her new Congressional colleagues shunning her from the women’s bathrooms at the Capitol and describing her as a menace. True to the wisdom of her campaign, McBride refuses to be drawn in, saying “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms, I’m here to fight for Delawareans.” But the cost is high. Trans people attack her. Members of Congress refer to her in meetings as “Mr.” and use her dead name. (In one of the film’s most upsetting and powerful moments, one of her fellow members of Congress publicly excoriates a committee chairman for repeatedly referring to McBride in this way.) She struggles with people’s lack of grace and understanding. But once again, it’s because Joynt has not spent the film bombarding us with the venom of anti-trans campaigners or the bigger debate that we get to feel in this moment its actual, personal impact upon McBride.
Like State of Firsts, Just Kids places itself in the midst of an incredibly charged situation, families confronting their states turning on them and refusing care to their trans children. Part of director Gianna Toboni’s work entails reporting on political developments in different states as they unfold. But she, too, keeps her focus tight on the children and their families. It’s their lives and their personal experiences that matter here. And those lives are varied: one family is very politically involved, as the parents speak before their state assembly and the father is a veteran and guns’ rights activist who notes his child’s right to make their own choices is part of the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that he proudly fought for.
Another family consists of a bubbly, creative trans girl and her brothers, and their story focuses on the brothers learning to support their sister after the passing of their mother. For the third family, mounting fears about their life in Texas see them struggling to find somewhere else to live while facing enormous economic obstacles.
Even when surprising things happen in Just Kids, like the unexpected death of a parent of one of the children, Toboni’s approach is tremendously muted. She refuses to mine her subjects’ lives for drama. Perhaps the most painful moment of the film ends up being a simple Zoom call between one of the parents and her trans child and their former doctor, who informs them that she can no longer even advise them. She’s had to leave the state because she’s afraid for herself and her family, and this is a consequence of that. It’s hard to watch this struggling mom and her child have to face this. But it has the impact that it does not because it’s big or on point or dramatically presented, but because it emerges organically out of their ongoing journeys. There is no sense in Just Kids of Toboni using these people’s experiences to make points or score points in some bigger debate. She’s just trying to give us a window into their lives.
In a sense that’s the real argument both State of Firsts and Just Kids are making: The stories of trans people should be stories of trans people. Trans people are not issues in these films. They are not social problems or causes. They are not one side of anything. They are people. And watching these films, the problems of so many other representations of trans people, including supposedly sympathetic ones, is abundantly clear. When the press—or churches, for that matter—begin from some other place, when their reports on trans people include also the opinions of those who oppose them; or their statements of supposed pastoral care for trans people include a list of doctrinal or moral statements attacking the veracity or legitimacy of their choices—they undermine trans people’s dignity and humanity. To respect trans people as human beings, one must allow them centrality and subjectivity in their own narratives.
In the case of the Catholic Church, that doesn’t mean that the church has to accept all of their choices, any more than it accepts all of the choices of any other Catholic. It is rather to remember that trans people like everyone else are spiritual people having spiritual experiences worthy of attention and support. The Holy Spirit moves in all of us, but if you want to hear it, you have to stop speaking first and actually listen.
