The Times It's Not About A-Changin'

The online edition of The New Republic has a story today that wonders why the mainstream media has ignored WOW's Sundance documentary series, TransGeneration, especially now that there are more television shows about sexual and lifestyle issues than ever before. Because TNR is a subscription site, we've reproduced the piece for you here, hassle-free:

Trans Mission
by Lee Siegel

Only at TNR Online | Post date 11.15.05

"Transgeneration"
Sundance Channel, reruns through December

The response to "Transgeneration"--a documentary that follows four transgender college students through one year at their four respective schools--has been extraordinary. There's been no response.

Not a single major news publication has reviewed the series, which has just concluded on the Sundance Channel but will air in reruns through December. The mighty New York Times has neither run a review of the eight-part series nor a feature article about it. You might think the lack of interest means that the media has gotten tired of covering lifestyle stuff, and sex stuff, and what it regards as the cutting-edge convergence of the two, except for the fact that there are more shows about sexual and lifestyle "issues" than ever before. Just the other day, the Times published a long article about someone who's been a college student for twelve years and is getting book, movie, and television offers because his thrilling life-story seems to involve lots of sex, drinking, and drugs. The tenured undergraduacy hardly deserved 1,400 words in the paper of record, and the commercial response to the story was blandly predictable. But the Times's editors must have caught wind of the item and thought, along with all the other media: Here comes the 18-34 demographic! Its long-lasting blindness to Judith Miller's unforgivable venality and dishonesty isn't the only scandal at the Times. The paper is trampling its own standards in undignified pursuit of young readers.

Maybe the embarrassing drivel would all be worth it if a new stream of revenue surged in to strengthen the paper. But the truth is that fewer and fewer young people read at all. And those who do aren't interested in reading articles, non-fiction books, or novels that are merely about young people. They're not about to be condescended to and suckered. Which distinguishes them from the older editors, and publishers, and television and film producers who are getting suckered by the clueless marketing people--and maybe by their receding hairlines--every (business) day.

But here is a show about young, college-age people, and no one even turns his head to see whether it's the real thing or just another sexually exploitative curiosity. And it is the real thing. Approaching it, you're ready for the usual cloying, sensationalizing camera, amateur editing, and self-centered, self-promoting subjects. Instead you encounter an ongoing drama that has the framework of tragedy, with some rich comic moments.

As in tragedy, these four kids--Gabbie and Raci are boys who have become girls; Lucas and T.J. girls who have become boys--have found their desire for happiness running up against the brick wall of a limiting condition. They are genetically destined to live as the opposite sex, just as other people are biologically fated to be what they are born as. It's incredible that in this cultural moment, when so much is being written about genetics, and about sociobiology's possible applications to various dimensions of life, no one has taken up this show as a new kind of drama. Not Sophoclean or Shakespearean, but Chromosomal tragedy. "To have the organ there," says Gabbie with distaste, the only one of the four to have a sex-change operation, graphically portrayed in the film. "To have no emotional attachment to it, to just want to get rid of it."

The scope of their alienation is staggering. They're not even necessarily gay; they are not sure who they are attracted to, or who to make attracted to them. The person they most desire is who they really are, beneath their antithetical biology--and yet, strangely, they are no more narcissistic than anyone else, maybe even less so. Perhaps they are so focused on growing into themselves by becoming wholly other that they've been spared the contemporary disease of self-involution. They exist in a limbo of identity, and yet that is their identity, to straddle the highly exclusive spectrum--only two members--of sexual gender.

In their rare transmigration, they recall Diane Arbus's remark, that whereas we all live in fear of some traumatizing event, "freaks" are born with their trauma, live in it and through it. Arbus, perhaps with distasteful condescension, said this made them "aristocrats." (But she proved her sincerity when she took her own life.) The experience of living in one gender and then another confers on these four students--they are students to the nth degree, in the grip of an ultimate lesson about identity and society--the status (if not the gift) of prophets, or seers.

Though it might seem newsily contemporary, the subject of transgendering (it's about to surface again in a feature film about a boy and his transgender mother) is a hallowed old phenomenon. One of the most interesting aspects of this fascinating documentary is that it shows the four kids researching sex-change operations, hormonal treatments and the like, but you never see any of them reading up on transgenderism in history and myth. They might have felt empowered by reading the story of Tiresias, or by knowing that in various ancient cultures shamans were men who dressed and acted like women, eventually marrying other men. But this is America, and their journeys are strictly foregrounded in the medical technologies of surgery, drugs, and counseling, which has the effect of both normalizing their fate and turning it into an illness that can be cured, or repaired.

Sometimes their stories really do rise to the level of myth or fairy tale. Raci is a beautiful Philippino boy who is now a beautiful Philippino woman. So delicate and ultra-feminine was she as a boy that she would have had as hard a time with certain gay men as with certain straight men. As the show points out, no form of sexuality is as much the object of violent rage as being transgender.

Besides having to become a girl, Raci is also poor and almost deaf. There is a dark comedy to her ordeal. ("Don't flirt," an older transgender friend warns her before she goes out one night, which Raci mishears as the definitely unhelpful "Don't fear.") In this episode, Raci has to buy her hormones illegally, from street dealers, because she can't afford them otherwise. But when she is unable to find her connection, time starts to run out. Her voice deepens, her alluring looks begin to sink back into their original mistaken form. If you could tell that story as a tale about a person and not a category, you would have a great American novel.

In the end, these kids are misfits. They are drawn to misfits, and misfits are drawn to them. Their parents themselves, mostly understanding--at least in front of the cameras--become misfits by virtue of wanting to love their misfit children. (The most exquisite moments of comic pathos are the almost running joke of Lucas's father declaring, over and over, how he has come to be proud of his son, and to love his son, and to know that his son is a rare, fine, wonderful human being and then, after each time that he says this, breaking down and sobbing.) In college, the four construct a sheltered world of misfits, all of them struggling to negotiate between who they really are, what they have been given instead, and what society will allow them to accomplish and to have. They face very difficult lives. They deserve the utmost attention.

Lee Siegel is TNR's television critic.

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