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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: February 23, 2010 at 9:15 am by Eve Tushnet

2010-02-23T09:15:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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TRYING HARD TO BECOME WHATEVER THEY ARE: Over the weekend I watched “Transgeneration,” a Sundance Channel/LOGO documentary series following four transgendered college students (well, one is a grad student) over the course of a year. I’d been putting this off a) because I have an aversion to this exact kind of self-voyeurizing, reality-TV documentary (it’s related to my disapproval of biographies) and b) I thought it might be depressing. But in the event, the kids were so captivating that it was really easy to sit down and watch the whole thing all the way through. Here are a few scattered notes.

First, the cast of characters: a Filipina-American from a poorer background, a Smith College student from Oklahoma, an engineering-major geek from a well-off family, and an Armenian Cypriot graduate student. Plus lots of their friends and relations. I really liked both the diversity of backgrounds and the decision to include a lot of scenes with friends. You really get a sense that these students are creating communities of other transgendered people. There are a lot of contrasts and parallels here, watching which friendships break down and which gain strength over the course of the year. This isn’t a documentary about just four people; it’s also about the people on whom they rely, and who rely on them.

Second, holy cats these people are desperately undergraduate! (Well, the grad student is more grown-up, but he spends a lot of time with undergrads.) They’re variously self-absorbed, melodramatic, hyperpolitical, and judgmental. They’re alternately dizzy and diligent, they’re fumbling through first romances (you definitely get a sense of the ways in which being transgendered meant they didn’t have standard high-school experiences), they’re convinced they can change the world.

All of these ridiculously undergraduate characteristics do play out through their gender identities and transitions, but aren’t reducible to those identities–sort of like, I was 19 when I converted to Catholicism, and I think I lived out my conversion in a fairly self-absorbed and melodramatic way, but that doesn’t mean Catholicism promotes self-absorption and melodrama. Just that if you’re 19 at Yale, you may well live out your conversion in ways which reflect other aspects of the 19-year-old Yalien mindset.

Third, yeah, Americans are way too comfortable on camera. TJ, the Armenian Cypriot, seemed the least likely to film himself–am I misremembering that?–and in his segments back home there were moments when someone would bar the camera from pursuing, or wave the camera away so that real intimacy could be created. Raci, the Filipina-American, also had one relative who took her aside for an off-camera conversation. But the white, non-immigrant folks seemed ridiculously at ease being filmed and, again, frequently filmed themselves as well. I suppose as a Christian I can’t be too hardcore about the idea that privacy, being unwatched, is something to preserve and honor–I mean, God is always watching even when you take a smoke break!–but I just can’t imagine treating the camera with the nonchalance that these kids (and to a lesser extent their parents) do.

And finally, one thing I really wish the documentary had spent more–or really any–time on is the possibility of outside pressure toward transition. There were at least two people, a friend and a doctor, who seemed to me to be pushing students to resolve their ambiguities and hesitations into clear, final narratives of transsexuality. And I wonder if parents don’t also apply some of this pressure. There are ways in which “I was always already a man, and I’m taking all the possible medical steps RIGHT NOW to express that manhood physically” is easier to understand than “I’m really not sure what’s best for me right now, and I’m not totally sure where I’ll be in a year, and maybe I need to spend some more time in-between even though it’s astonishingly uncomfortable and I know I don’t want to stay here forever.” It’s totally impossible to tell how much outside pressure really mattered, because the highly edited nature of the documentary means we’re not seeing this year the way the students saw it. But I do wish the question had been addressed.

That said, I definitely recommend this series if you’re at all interested in the subject. It’s available on Netflix to order or to watch instantly on your computer. …The deleted scenes on the DVD didn’t add much, IMO.

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