Changing Times

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ransgeneration, a devastating and great eight-episode series now running on the Sundance Channel, follows four college students in various stages of transitioning from the sex they were born with to the sex they feel is theirs. The show’s sensibility veers toward ABC’s After School Specials, as the noble students are presented to us as examples of the struggle to be oneself, the struggle of the poor to overcome daunting obstacles, the struggle to reconcile one’s most private longings with one’s family and religion (yes, religion!). Happiness is sublime; being true to one’s self takes bravery; cue Christopher Cross song. The difference is that this show ends up being truly inspiring.
    At the beginning of each episode, we meet the four students as helpful definitions pop up in the corner of the screen (e.g. FTM: female-to-male transsexual.) T.J., born Tamar, is a graduate student at Michigan State. He’s an activist (the room in which he does many of his interviews has a large poster reading “My Gender Cannot Be Put in a Box”), whose calls home to his Armenian family in Cyprus always result in tears.
    Oklahoma-born Lucas attends the all-female Smith College, where he started out as Leah. In the course of the first four episodes he gets his first hormone injections (an event marked by a party, complete with a cake decorated with an icing syringe). In interviews, his fascinating mother visibly pauses over the name Lucas, but says it so often that you can tell she has determinedly set her mind to get used to the idea. In a moving section of the fourth episode, Lucas agonizes over coming out to his dad in which his letter to his father overlaps with TJ’s letter to his mother in

Cyprus.
    Gabbie is a different story. Born Andrew and attending the University of Colorado at Boulder, she clutches teddy bears constantly (the director knowingly shows the ever-present bear rolling through the metal detector at the airport) and has a handmade paper chain hanging over her dorm bed with which she dreamily and impatiently awaits her transition. Her family is wealthy and supportive. Her grandfather is a former Presbyterian minister whom me meet in episode four. When Gabbie praises him for supporting her, he utters the shocking and yet lovely sentiment, “Well, that’s what religion is for!” They are concerned, though — and rightly so — given how sheltered she is. For example, she’s a virgin, and saving herself until post-op. Despite her obvious monetary and personal advantage over the other three, she’s clearly the most vulnerable.
    The strongest and most beleaguered of the lot, Raci (born Ron), is a stunningly attractive Filipina (and she knows it). She is also, try this on: poor, living in East Los Angeles, speech-impaired and almost deaf. Despite this, she’s earned a 3.9 GPA at Cal State, not that her family praises her for it. A particularly illuminating statement on class comes in episode three, when we cut from Gabbie talking about how money’s not really important to Raci wandering through East L.A. trying to score black-market hormones from a “Mexican lady who sells fruit.” All she wants is the money to go to school, to obtain her hormones, to move into the dorm, to be beautiful and have fun. Her mother is convinced, not unfairly, that she may get her throat slit if she keeps going out late at night to Hollywood clubs. But Raci keeps shaking it off and smiling. The lesson is this: Happiness is a thing of great and radical importance, which one must fight hard to achieve and maintain.
    Transgeneration could have been a collection of clichéd coming-of-age, coming-to-terms stories. Instead, it feels surprisingly fresh and unlabored. Besides overcoming cliché, the show suggests that accepting transsexuality isn’t just a matter of making room in the world for Lucas and Raci (a tall order, indeed, considering the implications for gender expectation, prescription drug coverage and disability services), but also a matter of accepting the right of a sheltered nineteen-year-old to make such a major physical and social choice.
    On TV, trannies usually supply easy laughs (think Kathleen Turner as Chandler’s transsexual father on Friends). In the Friends family, David Arquette’s drag-queen brother, Alexis, will soon star in a reality show about her sex change. Title? Alexis Are-Cut. Transgeneration, by contrast, is dead serious. Free of icky puns, laugh tracks and celebrities, it shows the complicated, fascinating, tear-jerking reality behind all the jokes whose punch line is “Dude Looks Like a Lady.”  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Neal Medlyn is a performer in New York City who sings songs, runs amok, and occasionally jumps off of things in his very own entertainment programs. He was Mr. Lower East Side in 2004 and is sometimes referred to as the Paris Hilton of Performance Art. His website is www.nealmedlyn.com