Through letters written to herself at several different pivotal points during her life, Maya Heinecke tells the narrative of her life, and looks ahead at what's next for her.
Julia is a young transgender woman who left her home country of Lithuania. Now living in Germany, she walks the streets of Berlin, working as a prostitute to survive. This documentary revisits Julia over a ten-year period of her life.
An exploration of the Samoan faafafine, boys who are raised as girls, who fulfill a traditional role in Samoan culture. In the past they have shared women's traditional work but today are becoming more westernized and look more like drag queens. Several anthropologists comment on the phenomenon examining issues of culture and gender and the complexities of sexual identity.
Kyle Dean was a misfit in her North Carolina school. She was called "Creature" because she was a boy who knew she was a girl in part of the country where such things were not understood or tolerated. As soon as she could she left North Carolina for Hollywood where she felt that she'd stand more of a chance of becoming who she wanted to be. Now as Stacey she's going back to visit with with Mom and Pop.
My Transparent Life chronicles the journey of one trans man, one trans woman and a trans couple as transition from the sex they were born with to the sex they identify with.
The documentary by Mari Soppela focuses on glass ceilings, a metaphor for the invisible borders between men and women in work life. Talk about glass ceilings is usually associated with women’s opportunities to advance to well paid managerial positions, but the documentary connects itself more broadly to the structural problems of work life from women’s perspective. Glass ceilings are long trials about equal pay, having to continually prove one’s skills, and 85-cent euros. The topic cannot be handled without intersectional crossings: what are invisible glass ceilings for some, are solid concrete for others.
Fred Martinez was a Navajo youth slain at the age of 16 by a man who bragged to his friends that he 'bug-smashed a fag'. But Fred was part of an honored Navajo tradition - the 'nadleeh', or 'two-spirit', who possesses a balance of masculine and feminine traits.
Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.
Pidgeon Pagonis, a lead activist and educator from the intersex community, crusades for body autonomy and the freedom to choose one’s own path.
People who knew R. perceived her as a happy woman. A woman from Brno in her thirties who moved to Sweden together with her Slovak husband, psychiatrist Ivan. In their new home country, the young couple bought a house and had two children. It seemed that R.’s life would continue in a predictable way. As a distraction from the routine, she chose an unusual hobby. She created a male alter-ego and started writing novels for LGBTQ+ audiences. R. was happy but felt empty on the inside. She could only fill it by living out her true self. Things started speeding up and R. began changing. R. is now Marvin. And Marvin is a man.
Before South Africa’s apartheid government in the 1970’s destroyed District Six, being gay, or “moffie,” was an accepted part of this racially and religiously diverse community in Cape Town. Kewpie's hairdressing salon was the epicenter of this culture, a meeting place where the “girls” organized drag balls and cabaret performances, all of which are captured through her amazing collection of snapshots.
Repping best view to date into the world of the Indian eunuch, “Between the Lines: India’s Third Gender” may not answer all the questions it poses, but helmer Thomas Wartmann provides an intimate glimpse at a community whose members are considered pariahs and conduits of supernatural force. Following shutterbug Anita Khemka in her quest to discover why these castrated men fascinate and repel, docu concentrates on three personalities and uses them as guides to their highly stratified world. Under its nautch skirts, film has strong enough legs to step out into international arthouses.
The true story of the students of Brigham Young University's queer underground, as they lit the school's iconic "Y" in rainbow colors. But, A Long Way From Heaven does a lot more than tell the story of the Rainbow Y. It outlines the history of queer treatment at BYU - the good (where it exists), the bad, and the very, very ugly. The film combines new, original footage with a huge variety of historical images, videos, newspaper articles, and other mixed media from every conceivable source to tell the story of BYU's queer students, and the bravery and risks they constantly take to make their voices heard.
In Man Made, Sunny tries to find out what society's ideas regarding masculinity entails. Does testosteron define your masculinity? Can men be victims? And do men suffer under these ideas? In the twentieth century, feminists have fought for the freedom of women and subsequently their emancipation. Is now the time for the emancipation of men, are they next to be set free?
For decades, performance artist and writer Kate Bornstein has been exploding binaries and deconstructing gender. And, her own identity. Trans-dyke. Reluctant polyamorist. Sadomasochist. Recovering Scientologist. Pioneering Gender Outlaw. Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, joins her on her latest tour capturing rollicking public performances and painful personal revelations as it bears witness to Kate as a trailblazing artist theorist activist who inhabits a space between male and female with wit, style, and astonishing candor. By turns meditative and playful, the film invites us on a thought provoking journey through Kate's world to seek answers to some of life's biggest questions.
Lies can kill. Transgender Nuclear Suicide Sojourner is an exploration of propaganda, lies, and the overwhelming urge to end it all.
Katia Tapety became the first trans woman elected as a politician in Brazil - councilwoman for three times and one time for vice-mayor. This film is the result of a 20-day-living period with her in her small town testifyng some of her experience and the impressions of those around her.
The #MeToo movement has shined much-needed light on the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and abuse and created unprecedented demand for gender violence prevention models that actually work. THE BYSTANDER MOMENT tells the story of one of the most prominent and proven of these models - the innovative bystander approach developed by pioneering scholar and activist Jackson Katz and his colleagues at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society in the 1990s.
The collective of antipatriarchal men is a political organization that, since 2010, organizes spaces of group self-reflection to problematize the role of masculinity for those who identify as and/or are read as men. This documentary was filmed around one of their yearly regional forums.
Five transgender women share their prison experiences. Interviews with attorneys, doctors, and other experts are also included.