- Good evening.
It's been six years since a young GI stepped
onto the tarmac at Idlewild Airport
causing an international sensation,
just arrived from Copenhagen,
Christine Jorgensen was thought
to be the first American to have successfully changed sex.
You might be wondering where people go
when they are experiencing problems of a sexual nature.
- [Host] Just around the corner from our studios,
an experimental research team
at UCLA is interviewing dozens
of people about emerging problems of sex and gender.
One of their patients has presented a unique puzzle.
For two years, our first guest, Agnes, was interviewed
by doctors, Robert Stoller and Harold Garfinkel,
telling them she was born a boy
but began growing breasts at puberty.
Recently, she returned to tell a different story,
forcing doctors to retract years of published research.
We will talk to Agnes right after the break.
In our collaboration, we've been thinking together
about the legacy of Agnes's case for a long time.
Yeah, this is why we love having you in the project,
because to be able to talk to people who also know
that feeling of the archive, where you can't quit.
- How did you first encounter Agnes?
- [Narrator] I first encountered Agnes in graduate school.
I read a case study about a young trans girl
in the 1950s who lied her way
into the UCLA gender clinic to get access to surgery.
(gentle upbeat music)
Agnes is remembered in two ways,
either as a cautionary tale
about the untrustworthiness
of trans people or as an icon and folk hero
who navigated a system designed to exclude her.
In the years since I first read the case,
I've become obsessed with our attachment to the story
of Agnes as exceptional and I worry
about what and who else has been lost along the way.
- One of the weird things about Agnes is she pops up
over and over and over again in trans writing from,
you know, really the time at which she's, you know,
doing interviews with Garfinkel and Stoller,
all the way into the 80s and the 90s
and the 2000s and I always wanted to read more.
I always wanted to go to UCLA and find out more,
but I also have this sort of deep mistrust
of that whole endeavor from the real beginning
and it's been interesting over the years
to find out that I think a lot of people share that feeling.
- It used to be so simple:
you were either a boy or you were a girl.
Growing up in the 1940s,
Agnes always knew she was different.
- I was the youngest of four children.
My father was a machinist.
He died when I was quite young,
9 or 10 years old,
I suppose it was all sort of normal.
I mean, nothing out of the ordinary.
- Did you go to school?
- I dropped out at some point
because I figured it wouldn't be very useful
to have a high school diploma with a different name on it.
- I wanted to frame out what we're doing a little bit,
because the flip for me to the talk show is in part a nod
to the fact that I think from many people of our generation,
the talk show was the place where many
of us first encountered gender nonconforming subjects.
- Yeah. I mean, I feel like I grew up
in the golden age of talk shows.
I mean, they were just on continuously throughout the day.
So if you were sick and you know, stayed home from school,
it was very likely that you could just watch a string
of talk shows.
You know, there were some
that were clearly more progressive, you know, Joan Rivers.
- Today's show is all about sexually confusing stories.
- And then there was, you know,
more exploitative ones where,
you know, people's gender identities
were being sensationalized and they were being - electing -
to out themselves on national television
for whatever kind of financial incentives.
It was helpful to have some view
into the possibility that trans people existed
on television, but by and large,
the ostracization that those subjects faced
in putting themselves out there and I can't help
but think that they were doing it for us.
- Are you familiar with Christine Jorgensen?
- Yes, I do read the newspaper.
When Jorgensen came back from Europe,
I had something tangible to go by.
I figured I could do something like that myself.
For Agnes, that it was all new.
That Christine Jorgensen was the first time she was seeing
somebody and realizing
that there was another person out there like her.
- Ah, Christine Jorgensen.
Okay, here we go.
Picture this, the most famous woman in the world in 1952,
the most famous woman
in the world knocking atomic bomb tests off the front page
of newspapers is a trans woman.
We don't exactly know how
but her story was leaked to the press.
Poor Christine, she played the perfect part.
(upbeat music)
- [News presenter] Christine Jorgensen,
who used to answer to George, creates quite a stir
as she returns home to New York from Copenhagen.
- So we have this incredible footage of her landing
in New York at Idlewild Airport and, you know,
coming off the airplane, like, 'oh my goodness,
what is this media storm?
Oh, no, thank goodness, I'm dressed gorgeously'
and she has this incredible screen presence.
I mean, Christine Jorgensen is, you know,
almost like the Marilyn Monroe
of the moment and she comes out very like, 'well,
I'm just happy to be here and back on American soil. '
- I'm very impressed by everyone coming.
- [Reporter] Christine, are you happy to be home?
- Yes, of course, what American wouldn't be?
- And she just has this perfect persona
to personify post-war America.
America, the country so free that you, a man,
can become a woman.
Well, except not in America because she had
to go to Denmark.
Well, oh, well,
we'll just, we'll look over
that fact and the media is fascinated, right?
The term transsexual is still in its infancy
and so a lot of people are not exactly sure
what to make of her and there's a lot
of terrible salacious kind of tabloid coverage.
Well, isn't she really just a man?
And my God, is she going to marry a man?
And how will that work?
You know, and things that were fit to print and things
that were not fit to print and Christine really, you know,
in some ways is forced into this impossible position.
She senses, rightly, that she has a chance
to make it in life and be a celebrity and be a persona
but the only way to do that is to lean
into the fact that everyone wants a piece of her.
- Have you been offered a movie contract?
- Yes, but I haven't accepted it.
- It was very striking to see in all
of these transcripts everyone
references Christine Jorgensen in some way, right?
And I think that really got us to this connection
of thinking of Christine Jorgensen on the Mike Wallace Show.
- Right, and you know,
the structure of the Mike Wallace show is so interesting.
The Mike Wallace Interview in particular,
he identifies as a show about the current moment's
most extraordinary and curious people.
- This is Mike Wallace with
another television portrait
from our gallery of colorful people.
- [Chase] What's striking to me
about the relationship between Mike Wallace
and Garfinkel is
that the Mike Wallace Interview happens from '57 to '60,
exactly the same time that Garfinkel is at UCLA.
- [Agnes] It was was either
that I wasn't gonna see him anymore-
- (indistinct)
No I wasn't going to tell him.
- [Agnes] So I told.
- So I told him.
- [Agnes] Because I couldn't do the other,
I tried the other first but I couldn't do that so-
- Because I couldn't do the other first, I told him that.
- [Agnes] Oh well.
- Well.
- [Agnes] Well, of course not (indistinct)
- Well of course not.
- Are you feeling impatient?
- Not impatient in the sense that I can't wait,
but impatient in the sense
that I wonder what I'm waiting for.
- You are very smart.
- You know, there's a difference
between being smart and having all the information.
- UCLA is a really fascinating character in this history,
partially because it's a super interdisciplinary space
and so it's this wide open clinic
where they're seeing intersex folks,
gay and lesbian folks, trans folks
and people who aren't sure or don't necessarily explain
what they identify as
and the doctors are not especially concerned
about the differences,
but I think that's one
of the reasons why UCLA ends up being so interesting.
- [Kristen] Harold Garfinkel had died in 2011
and I knew that there was a sociologist
who had been gifted sort of all of his papers.
- [Chase] Kristen and I started visiting the archive
over and over again in part helping
to organize the content
and all the while we were looking for Agnes.
- You know, the funny story that we like
to tell is we found everything
that we found in the last moments.
- There was a large metal filing cabinet
that had long been rusted shut.
We pried the drawer open and found the entirety
of Agnes's case files
and in the back of the filing cabinet
were other case studies of gender nonconforming people
who never make it into the research.
(gentle upbeat music)
- It's weird because UCLA is both the archive,
the place where the records are held,
but also the place where all of this went down,
where Agnes was, where Stoller was, where Garfinkel was.
It feels a little haunted sometimes.
So I think there's a way
that I always feel like I'm looking
over my shoulder even though an archive is sort
of the most natural place for me to hang out as a scholar,
it feels like you can't fully walk in as yourself.
It's important to walk in as a researcher,
as someone with a PhD, as a specialist, as a scholar,
like that's your ticket in
because you don't want the same ticket
in that Agnes had or Barbara had.
- Even though I was raised by a single father. .
I love how everything she does,
it's like, I know where you want to go
and I'm not going to let you.
- Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [Crew Member] C mark, I mean, D mark, sorry.
- When did you decide to make the change?
- Well, I've been living as a woman for six months now
but it's been years since anyone looked twice at me.
Even as a man, I was very feminine,
plucked brows, bleached hair, painted nails.
One day I realized that people were going
to react to me no matter what I did.
So I might as well live more truthfully.
For myself.
- Tell me about your childhood.
Were you close with your parents?
- My mother died when I was little
but even though I was raised by a single father,
I always had my dolls and dishes.
- How did you go about finding others in your situation?
- When we were young, we didn't know about homosexuality
but we knew we were feminine.
We knew we were different and we found each other.
What I love about Barbara is exactly that,
that she is so networked that she rebukes this notion
that trans people have to be isolated or lonely.
- So there are many of you then?
- I'd say I know 22 of the 36 women
in town who have had the operation.
Even that Hollywood star.
Well, I shouldn't say her name.
Whenever we hear about someone
who's been arrested for cross-dressing,
we reach out, there's a group of us.
We do hospital visits after someone's operation
so they won't be alone.
We talk to each other about what hospitals to avoid.
I can always tell who's had
which procedure by how nice the room is
or how long the stay.
- But how do you find each other?
- Well, it's all about trust.
Once you're in the network,
you realize it just goes and goes and goes.
We're like a club.
What I loved about playing Barbara,
why I would like to spend more time
with her, is the confidence with which she discusses
not only networking, but dating, passing.
She has a self-possession that I don't have
in real life out in the world
and that's the kind of part that,
that's the fun part
because that's where you get to be different.
- [Host] You say we a lot.
- I'm not in this work alone.
- Do you know other people like you?
- Well, no, I don't.
- And why is that?
- I suppose I've just never met another person
like me before.
It's so interesting that Agnes was anonymous
and I believe that she
in many ways represents a generation
of trans women who were encouraged to disappear.
- For a trans woman to get access to surgery in the 1960s,
she had to swear she would never tell anyone ever again
that she had been trans and that she would leave the life
and you really saw that in cities,
people would leave neighborhoods, stop doing sex work,
try to get married, try to disappear.
- Hi.
- Hello.
- Such a treat to be with you today.
- Always.
- [Chase] Thank you for coming.
- Thank you, Chase.
- You know, because this project flips the scene
of the clinical office with the stage of the talk show,
to think about how meaning gets produced
about trans people in different environments.
You know, when we were talking about the feature,
you were like, I'm tired of telling certain kinds
of stories about my life and I don't want to do it anymore.
- I get a little fatigued about my story
because my story and telling my story,
it keeps getting positioned as sort
of this exceptional story.
- As a trans person in the world with you,
I had this immediate bodily reaction,
which was like, yeah, totally get it.
Much like Christine Jorgensen before her transformation,
our next guest was a military man.
- Spent most of my teenage years
in my father's church doing evangelical work.
- Do you remember at
what age did you start having these feelings?
- I've always known.
- Georgia is a resourceful woman.
I think like many trans women from her time
and even before who didn't have the language
or the policy or the access, they had to be resourceful.
- We have this sort of white-washed image
of the first trans people.
We see folks like Georgia,
the kind of person that maybe we feel surprised to meet,
a Black trans woman is going to this very conservative,
racially normative kind of space
where she's making it in to go toe-to-toe
with these titans of mid-century American social science.
I mean, does it get any straighter and whiter than that?
- Do you ever tell people the truth about yourself?
- Sometimes I tell people I'm a man just
to hear them say, I'm pulling their leg.
So that there's my life.
You know,
it's wild to be a part of a project like this
that kind of blows open a vault
of all this information and you're. .
and people are like, did that really happen?
Or is this really true?
And the reality is,
is that we live in a world that has been dominated
by stories being told by white people,
by the people who have the power,
the most power within white communities.
We have heard the story told by the hunter
and not by the lion and not
by the lions who not only fought back
but got away. And so I think that not only these stories,
but this just really inspires me to think about
how many more stories are there out there
that we don't know about.
- The archive that we get is really limited in that way.
These architects at UCLA that are building these new ways
of thinking, that are
founding these new schools of thought,
they don't want to talk about racial diversity.
They don't want to talk about racism.
They don't want to talk about class.
They want to produce mirror images
of the ideals of American culture at that time:
beautiful, white, middle-class, heterosexuals.
- Not all of our guests were surrounded
by like-minded individuals,
meet Henry, born in 1917.
Nope.
Meet Henry, born a girl in Long Beach, California.
- They always say that, 'born a girl'
- So rude.
- Back in the articles I was in in the 90s-
- Oh yeah.
- It would be, a girl, born a girl.
- About you?
- Even in the 90s, yes.
I was born in Southern California in 1917.
I worked as an engineer at Lockheed.
Well, Henry, interestingly enough,
I believe was interviewed
by Harold Garfinkel the year I was born.
- What is it like for you to embody a trans man
from the 1950s who was also writing about his life?
- Well, you know, I respect that,
we have that in common, he had that impulse
to put pen to paper and to put his thoughts
to paper and he knew that his experience was important.
It was unique.
I am a poet and I was writing poetry,
doing readings in the Bay Area since, you know,
since I arrived there in 1977.
I connected right away with the kind of beat,
neo-beat community in North Beach.
The kind of poetry I write is very non-narrative,
it's not so much telling a story about my life
or my feelings.
I don't really write that kind of thing
but I saw that there was a need, there was nothing,
there was very little out there and so I think,
and most of the things
that had been written were ghost-written
but I never saw them talk about,
I never read anything where they wrote very much
about the hormones and to me, the hormones,
in my case, the testosterone, was the access of change.
- As far as I can tell, it was rarer for trans men
to get on T and part of that is
because trans men tended to be more isolated
and they were more able to pass
in some ways because there were categories
of masculinity in-between female
and male in which men could travel.
- I grew up in the Midwest.
I was a tomboy mostly.
- What would you do if something as common
as using the lavatory caused an impossible predicament?
Denny faces this problem every day
on the floor of the factory.
- World War II made it possible
for women to wear slacks, you know, the dirty shirt effect.
- Making use of the facilities at work is unavoidable.
What would you do if you got caught?
- Well for all you know, it could have been shot off
in the war and, you know,
I just don't have the money to build it back.
I have a wife, I have a home
and if anybody is fresh enough to ask, I'd gag it up a bit.
Denny was a working class guy.
He was kind of a tomboy.
So he's kind of an in-betweener.
For a lot of years I passed intermittently.
So, you know, I wasn't on testosterone
and didn't have any top surgery
but I looked like a boy and I was in a punk band
and it was a lot my voice that would give me away
but so I'd go kind of in and out
and I worked construction and I was in a lot
of like predominantly male fields.
Being queer and looking the way we did,
it was, you didn't get jobs.
You know, you kind of stayed in your lane
because there weren't a lot of options.
That changed as things got more mainstream acceptable
but there were just things that, you know,
it's like, oh, you're going to do carpentry
and you're going to be a dancer and you're going to,
you know, we stayed in these very blue collar,
physical jobs which I stayed into all the way
after my MFA and second feature
because I ran out of work and there was, you know,
the economy crashed and I was painting buildings again
and just like, there were these real limitations
to looking like an outsider, that kind of stayed with you.
- When I moved to California
I did have trouble finding work.
My old job, my old documents,
they were all in, well that male name.
But I have a friend, she's like me
and she helped me take a position
as a receptionist at a hair salon.
- Does the owner know about you?
- They know I can type.
- Well, yes, I have a job.
I work in an office, pink collar work.
It's practically impossible to make the work interesting.
- I can't work.
I can't get a job as a man or a woman.
When I lived in the South,
I used to go into white people's homes and cook
for a bit of money.
I was a good cook.
- Trying to hold down a job and everything
that comes with that, being able to pay rent,
being able to save up for surgery,
being able to live,
it all really comes down
to whether you have access to the workplace
because of gender
and whether it's been racially segregated
and I think we see a lot of that
for Georgia. And there's a lot of lack
of autonomy that comes with not being able
to earn your own wages.
- I'm having a hard time getting work.
I still have an F on my license.
- My friend Henry is a lot like me,
but I fear he's a little depressed,
I don't think the testosterone is helping him.
- When I first contacted Dr. Wynn in Southern California,
he said that it was unethical to remove healthy organs.
After the long recovery,
they told me they wanted to operate again,
I couldn't handle any more poking and prodding.
- We will return to our story after the break.
I was just realizing story-wise, Morgan,
that we have it built in about surgery
and Dr. Wynn saying 'won't operate on healthy organs'
but then we have this after a long recovery line
because we haven't built in the fact that Henry had cancer.
- Oh yeah, he had cancer.
- He had cancer.
- Probably died of cancer, right?
- To be honest, I think he killed himself.
- Oh, really?
Oh God, that's terrible.
- (indistinct)
- I think so.
- Oh wow, that's a drag.
- Like, not very long after this
- Oh really?
Oh, wow. - Interview.
Kristen and I were able to find some people's birth
and death dates and he's one
of the people who we were able to identify
as having died quite early.
- Wow.
- And because of some
of the writing about his depression and his sort
of despondent orientation to his circumstances-
- Right.
- We think that that's probably what happened.
- Yeah.
A lot of his isolation was probably
because he didn't know how
to handle disclosure and it is tricky.
I mean, even for, sometimes for me, it's tricky.
I mean, obviously I'm public, but not everybody knows.
I don't announce it to everybody I know.
You know, but when I say I'm a writer and they say, well,
what do you write?
I mean, I'm a poet.
So I've got a poetry book out now, you know,
but if they ask, well, I say I wrote a memoir and they say,
what was that about?
Then I have to, you know, then I have to spill the beans.
- One of the most extraordinary things about
our archival find was a full copy
of Henry's autobiography manuscript
that he had obviously handed to Garfinkel
at some point throughout their sessions
and I think it's like a 47 page document,
a totally extraordinary snapshot
into someone's own self-narration.
I really continue to think about the presence of these texts
that were never published and are otherwise inaccessible
and how we can hold them now
and I brought a little excerpt of part
of Henry's life writing that I wanted
to offer up to you and I wonder if you might read it.
- Yeah.
So he writes,
there is not as much difference
between men and women as our society would have us believe,
both sexes have hearts that can be light
with pressure or heavy with misery,
both have tear ducts, but men are not supposed to use them.
Both have muscles
but it is not considered feminine
for a woman to develop hers.
- [Henry voiceover] If only we could learn
to live with each other as individuals,
sharply, we separate the sexes.
We place them in boxes marked male and female,
slam shut the lids and care not
whom we suffocate in the name of conformity.
- I defied the law of standardization.
Consequently, I belong in neither box,
yet, I have been inside both.
- These archival subjects,
these transcripts that we now have access
to are from a moment in time when categories are being made.
Where people in clinics and research institutions
and doctor's offices are thinking this but not that,
well, maybe this means that, and
we're actually in this moment
where these decisions and these comparisons
and these tensions are being animated
by people who are in positions
of structural and institutional power.
- I think one of the ways we could think
about this time period is it's the moment
when people's own everyday lives are starting
to interface with institutional categories.
Categories of law, medicine, psychology,
social science and so we're seeing
that as antagonism, right?
I think today we're often led
to believe like our categories will set us free.
Oh, we authored them all.
We have these lovely words like trans and transgender
and non-binary that have nothing
to do with medicine and so we'll be totally set free
because you're in the driver's seat.
You call yourself whatever you want.
You've got your pronouns and you're good to go.
But when we come back to this time period,
we see that these categories, which are systems
of classification, ways of drawing hard lines
and if you're on this side of the line,
you're out and if you're on this side of the line,
you're lucky, right?
Agnes is here, Georgia is here.
And what we see in this time period is
that those categories are the product of struggle.
It's a showdown.
That's why the talk show is so apt, it's a tête-à-tête,
but one person has a lot more credibility
than the other person.
One person is considered an expert.
The other person is considered
to not know anything about themselves.
- Do you consider yourself to be homosexual?
- In the beginning I was lumped in with homosexuals,
but I've never considered myself to be one.
- I don't understand the line of questioning.
- I've always been connected to the gay world.
I knew all the butches and the diesel dykes
in college and I realized I wasn't the only one
in the world experiencing female masculinity.
- Well, I tried to go back to the gay bars
but they treated me like a tourist.
I feel more confident with the heterosexual crowd,
as long as they don't know anything about my situation.
Well, yeah, to me it makes sense,
even though it seems like it shouldn't make sense
but it makes sense 'cause I am a heterosexual, right?
Kind of a weird one.
But if I'm around gay and lesbian people,
at some point, it'll, you know, they assume that,
you know, gay men might assume I'm gay and it's like,
well, I'm not.
- The thing that I hear
in Denny's voice is something I connect to which is,
you know, I'm not,
I don't really identify as a straight male
or cis-male at all, I really,
but I don't identify as a lesbian at all either.
I really feel that I'm, this in-between sort
of version and that there's like,
the paradox is sort of become my friend.
- I remember the first time I went out into gay life,
it was a bar in Detroit called The Fox.
I walked in wearing women's apparel
and I knew right away that was a mistake.
- What kind of a mistake?
- It's easier to be a homosexual in those kinds of places.
We need to create our own spaces.
There's like a hint of kind
of like disappointment and almost patronizing quality
in the way that Barbara interacts
with the doctor in the transcript
when she realizes that he's not really in the know.
- Some other people I've spoken to talk about pretense.
- Pretense?
- Being a man, but having to pass as a woman.
- There's no pretense.
If it is in you to be female
and women's apparel help you make a success of it,
then so be it.
- Yes, well, that's what everyone says
but some do admit that it is hard to shake off the pretense.
- I don't feel that way.
When I was a female impersonator, I was acting
but it's not like when I left I took off my face
and became a different person.
- I was wondering if you could help me make sense
of some of the frictions or relationship
between trans, cross-dressing and drag communities
as you understand them.
- When I first went out to clubs dressed as a woman,
and at that time that would have been
considered cross-dressing
'cause I wasn't living my life that way.
It seemed to me that the lines
between us all were a little bit blurrier.
You know, prior to social media,
prior to this particular phase of identity politics,
there was a kind of sense of behind closed doors
we were all just, you know,
the freaks and the others and gay in some way,
shape or form, whatever that meant.
- Many of us, when we come out of one box,
we hop into another box.
This is what it means to be trans,
this is what it means to be gay,
and have learned some unhealthy, I think,
performance behavior in performing gender along those lines.
- There were people who were uncomfortable
being seen as trans.
It tended to be people who
regardless of how they felt inside had
at one point in time been seen by the world
as straight white men and their way
of coping with that was to try
to eliminate the word that sparked
that discomfort and to draw very clean
and distinct lines between them
and drag because drag queens really were men.
So it was all about kind
of creating these rhetorical boundaries.
- Some of our other guests say
that they frequently end up on the wrong side of the law.
- I never have a problem,
but we are putting together information
who is arrestable based
on newspaper clippings that we've collected.
- And in the street, do you run into trouble?
- There will always be ignorant people,
but I experienced much more aggression
when I was perceived as a homosexual.
- I've put a bit of paint over the F
on my driver's license but the police scraped it off.
They asked me, are you a man or a woman?
And I said, well, that's a matter of opinion.
- I was pulled over for drunk driving in 1955 and
yeah, I was worried I was going to get booked
for being a sexual degenerate.
Once you're in the books,
you're in the books for the rest of your life.
- My husband had a baseball game.
I decided I would wear a pair of Capri pants
and these Japanese flats. These vice cops picked me up,
said I was soliciting.
I don't need to do that.
I have someone taking care of me.
They just kept asking, are you a man or a woman?
And took me to jail.
- And where's the harassment most common?
- Everywhere. Mexico, Chicago, Washington,
you can't get away from it.
I'm sick and tired of it.
I walk like a woman.
I feel like a woman,
everything I do is feminine and still.
- How long has this harassment been going on?
- Forever.
- I actually find it really hard to sit with Georgia.
I think a lot is put on her shoulders at the time
and so we encounter her in that context
and there's only so much we can do.
We're not there. And I think, you know,
beyond the initial surprise
to find a brilliant, pedagogical, well-spoken,
buttoned-up Black trans woman
in the mid-century speaking back to Garfinkel.
Beyond that, there's some real tough questions about
what she let slip about how hard her life really is
and the way that she tries to package that
for him so he can understand it.
Because there's a color line separating the two
of them and it's really at this time period
and unbridgeable gulf of white supremacy
and Jim Crow and a lot of that has to do
with the divide between public space
and private space. And so it's no coincidence
that iconic trans women of the era,
the Christine Jorgensen's
and the Agnes' are beautiful white women
that we can imagine
in a kitchen - making dinner for their husbands.
The private sphere is a refuge for those lucky enough
by the color of their skin and their income
to be able to flee to the suburbs where you can't be seen.
But for poorer Black trans people and trans people
of color living in places like LA,
moving through space was just
as dangerous then in some ways as it is now.
Walking down the street
which is the story that Georgia tells,
is enough reason to be picked up for prostitution,
for sex work, because just to exist and walk
through the world in public space
as a Black trans woman was
to be considered guilty of a crime.
- [Chase] I think often about the relationship
between visibility and vulnerability.
- Yes, yes.
You know, with the talk shows,
with, you know, media, with all of the,
even the fact that with news now we're actually starting
to hear some of the reports
of the trans murders and to think the violence
that our community experiences.
At the same time, you know,
more visibility provides us with so much more opportunities.
Those who are in the more privileged
parts of our community experience, get more privileged.
Those who are in the most vulnerable parts
of our community are more vulnerable and so,
sort of spotlight turns into this sort of magnifying glass.
It's like this kid holding a magnifying glass
over an ant and burning it because we burn up,
a lot of people in those margins,
we burn up under that spotlight.
When you're in the hood and now they know
how to look for trans people and what to look
for and what have you like, you know,
all eyes are on you and it's not always a good feeling.
- I think visibility is such a hotly contested
topic in our community because our survival
has been predicated on invisibility.
There was always an impulse, I think,
to avoid other trans people.
I remember early in my journey identifying
other trans women in particular in public space and like,
instead of having a moment of recognition
and acknowledgement, it was like a moment of
anxiety.
- I did have a moment where I was
in a diner in Brooklyn and this young woman came
in with her boyfriend and sat down right next
to me and I had that whole kind of moment of like,
should I say something?
Does she know who I am? Or whatever, and on the way out,
like I just looked at her and she just looked up
and it was just a, you know,
just like the subtlest of head nods and we went
about our day, but that was really powerful.
It's like, we're just out
in public doing our thing and we're not alone.
- The thing about women,
cis-women that we still have yet to sort
of claim is that cis-women come in all shapes,
sizes and tones. And so you have cis-women with deep voices.
You have cis-women with broad shoulders.
You have cis-women who are six feet tall or more.
Cis-women with Adam's apples.
But when you're talking about trans women,
then when we come together,
it's sort of an addition up to
what will get us clocked and we can't have an Adam's apple,
a six foot and baritone all in the same group
or else we're all gonna get clocked.
- I also think it's kind of interesting
that with trans people there was an interesting,
this kind of historical accident
that the people who got elevated the highest
were actually those
who shared an identity with the people who are most at risk.
The fact that it was Black trans women
who became ultimately the face of the movement
while it was Black trans women
who were most at risk in the movement.
- Can you do me a favor or yeah,
the favor, of summarizing the Laverne,
Katie Couric encounter?
- It was interesting to watch on TV
because it was such a milestone for us
as trans people
to see two trans people on Katie Couric's show,
Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrera
and what you saw was at first, Katie tries
to ask these very invasive questions about,
you know, what surgeries have you had,
what's going on with your body to Carmen Carrera and Carmen,
I think might not have had the words at the time
but she knew in her body just something felt wrong
about that question.
She's like, oh, I actually kind of don't want
to answer that question and then Laverne came out
and Katie kind of tried
to come back again and was like, well,
I asked Carmen these questions
and she felt it was a little intrusive, what do you think?
And Laverne had the words.
- The preoccupation with transition,
with surgery, objectifies trans people
and then we don't get to really deal
with the real lived experiences.
The reality of trans people's lives is
that so often we're targets of violence.
The homicide rate in the LGBT community is highest
amongst trans women and when we focus on transition,
we don't actually get to talk about those things.
This is the reality of so many trans people's lives
in this country, trans women
of color whose lives are in danger simply
for being who they are and we're looking
for justice for Islan's murder and we're looking
for justice for so many trans people
across this country and by focusing on bodies,
we don't focus on the lived realities
of that oppression and that discrimination.
- We turn to Laverne Cox and we turn to Janet Mock
and we turn to Angelica Ross and people
who are going to show us a path forward,
speak truth to power and we love it,
but we don't think about the pressure
that that puts on them and we don't think
about what it means to be put in that position,
where you can either sink or swim
and I think people are tired of swimming.
You shouldn't have to be a saint, you know, to get a job.
- [Host] So Georgia, what's next?
- I don't know.
I don't know.
This whole thing just has me so sick with worry
and I read my Bible, stay faithful, but I don't know.
I feel good about being a woman
but everything else,
I don't know.
(humming)
- I feel this kind of responsibility
for Georgia that is totally inappropriate.
I don't know Georgia.
My life is nothing like her.
I'm a trans woman of color, I'm not Black.
I don't share that experience.
I'm not from the South.
I never lived in that time period.
I don't know shit about Georgia
and in that way I'm much like Garfinkel.
There's what I think I know about her.
There's what I want her to mean for me
and I've had to work really hard in my life
to understand that that's also how I'm treated
in the world. And I think it's really painful
to try and turn to the past to learn a lesson
for this moment
when I just see the same thing happening
over and over again.
One of my first reactions to Agnes was, wow,
that's so interesting.
I'm nothing like that.
I could have never been her.
I also don't want to.
I don't want to be her.
But I think part of the problem then is if we think
that Agnes is unrepresentative,
we have to try and figure out what do we do
with the fact that she's iconic. And she's iconic
in this positive sense that she was very visible
because she ticked a lot of the boxes
and so she was able to leverage that, right?
She got things done.
She outwitted Robert Stoller,
she got hormones, she got surgery,
she made a life for herself, right?
And I don't begrudge her that for a moment.
She saw an opportunity and she took it
and so she's iconic in a certain way
but then we have to go and ask, how is Georgia iconic?
Well, she's not a household name.
Even amongst historians people don't know her story,
but people think they know who she is when they see her,
oh, the Black trans woman from that era,
she must be incarnating all that was horrible
and awful and racist and transphobic.
And so she becomes iconic too,
but almost like a negative icon.
And so it's easy for us to say, well,
Agnes doesn't work because she's too limited as you know,
an icon to stand in for trans people
so we'll just substitute her for Georgia.
And that will be a radical act
because Black trans women haven't had their time
and so we're just doing a good thing,
just like that. Boom, boom.
But it's the same system of icons
and it doesn't take into consideration that,
you know, when all is said and done,
Agnes gets some things that help her life.
Did Georgia get anything out of that experience?
I don't know but it doesn't seem like it.
And she's not the one that we remember
and so I'm really critical of trying
to recuperate the Georgia's of the past
as if that atones for the sins
of that time but also the sins of our present.
One of my mentors in college was teaching me
kind of how to be a historian and one of the things
that she told me that's always stuck with me is she said,
our job is not to act as if we know things about people
that they didn't know about themselves.
And if that's true, then we can't turn
to Georgia just like we can't turn to Agnes
to fix something that's our fault.
We can only meet them in so far
as they exist in this archive
and we can imagine more about them
but we have to admit when that imagining is about
what we want and need from them
and not what they were really there doing.
- If I could talk to Georgia, it really would be,
I just feel like there's this thread through the experience.
There's a story that I would relate to.
Girl, how did you make it through?
I always say, either you like me like this
or you don't like me at all
'cause I can't be nobody else but me.
- Many, many years ago I just gotten my PhD
and I decided to write a book
about the history of trans kids,
partly because there was no book
about the history of trans kids, partly
because trans kids were suddenly on 20/20
and there were being documentaries being made
about them and there were, you know,
new characters on TV shows
and I just had this premonition that like,
it's about to get really dangerous and really dark
and I had seen whispers in the archive
that kids transitioned and we didn't know this.
It's incredible to meet Jimmy
because Jimmy is a trans teenager.
- Hello, Jimmy, thank you for joining us this evening.
I must admit you are much younger
than most of the people we've been speaking to.
- Yeah, I'm a teen.
- Can you tell me a little bit about your family?
- I have two brothers and a sister.
- And what about your parents?
- My dad is a truck driver and my mom is a housewife.
- [Morgan] One of the interesting pieces
of Jimmy's story is that he comes
into the UCLA clinic with his mom and she's like supportive.
What do you think about that?
- I think a lot of things.
I think that like the space of the clinic is a space
where the mother can emerge as supportive.
My kids said that they were this thing
or that they needed this thing and then I checked
with an expert and the experts said
that that was going to be okay and so it could happen.
- Your parents must be a little overwhelmed
by your desire for all these changes.
- Yeah, well, you know, they're old people.
- I assume you go to school.
- Yeah, we just switched school districts
so that I could start the next year as a boy.
It didn't matter before
because everybody sounds the same pre-puberty.
- But you have to practice being a boy?
- You just grimace, hitch your pants up, and sit down.
- But there's a difference between wanting
to be a boy and being a boy.
- I don't see a difference.
To be an adolescent is kind of
to be like truculent or to feel aggrieved
or to kind of feel like no one around me knows
what I am going through.
I think the thing that I really identify
with here is that for lots of trans adolescents,
like that's true.
Like no one around me knows what I'm going through.
It's like the problem of adolescence writ insanely large.
- We didn't think there were trans teenagers that long ago.
A lot of trans kids today think they're the first ones
to go through this.
A lot of trans people think whenever you are able
to finally transition that one of the reasons it's
so hard is no one's ever done it before.
And so I really wanted to tell the stories of trans kids.
I wanted to find them.
I wanted to go to places like UCLA
and say they were there too.
They did it.
And I decided to write this book
in a lot of ways because I wanted
to avoid transitioning
and I thought if I could write a book
about trans people that did their lives justice
then I would have done my piece
and I wouldn't have to say yes to the thing
that I wanted. And I'm sure you can relate
to this in different ways as a maker
we bring ourselves into what we do
but sometimes we want so badly
to escape who we are in our work.
- I was talking to your mom backstage about the surgery.
- I got my tonsils out when I was little.
I don't see how this is much different.
I know I have male blood cells,
I just need to get the plumbing fixed.
- You've already got the hair.
- Like a surfer.
- What do you want to do when you grow up?
- I want live in Malibu and own a yacht.
- That sounds nice.
- My grandma says she'll buy the gasoline.
And I said I'd let her.
- What?
(laughing)
- And I said I'd let her.
- He is trolling the guy.
- Yeah. - Like he's like I'm gonna say
the most absurd thing I possibly can.
- I think so.
So there are several moments in Jimmy's interviews
which reading them, especially
as a transcript and not knowing
how he said the thing, is really interesting.
Moments that I read as basically him sort
of fucking with Garfinkel or like messing with him.
So there's a skill of playfulness just
for keeping yourself alive.
- In the course of like performing this person
or inhabiting this person,
there's like a grief that is really there for me.
This was like one of the things I kind
of believed that this was new,
that like this had never happened before and part
of the reason why all of these horrible things had
to happen to me and part of the reason
why when I said like over and over, you have to call me he,
you have to call me he, please call me he,
I can't live like this.
Part of the reason that the answer had
to be no was that this was all so new
and no one knew what to do with it.
Most of the doctors that I saw
as a youth just had no idea
what they were talking about and were sort
of pretending to or not in varying degrees.
I saw one dude
who was doing his PhD at UCLA,
when people want the like reparative therapy anecdote,
this is the reparative therapy anecdote:
So he's like telling me this story
about this trans man patient that he has and he's like,
so he was dating this girl and he brought the girl
into my office because it was the first relationship,
you know, he had tried to have and he was really happy
with her and they were sitting there together
and at one point she turned to him and she said,
'oh honey, I know you're a girl'
And as a 27 year old man, I'm like, oh,
I'm sure that there are all kinds
of ways that they could be understanding themselves, right?
But at the time I was fucking furious.
I just was like, why?
That was a horrible thing to say to him,
like he should have walked out of the office
and dumped her right there and the doctor was like,
no, no, no, you don't understand.
It was beautiful because that's the only way
that someone like that could ever
have a relationship. And I remember being like, well,
I'm never going to have a relationship like that.
Like, I'm never going to date somebody
who thinks I'm a girl. And he looked me
in my eyes and he said,
who loves people like that?
- Am I right to say that you're in a relationship?
- That's correct.
He's a decent man.
- But what about intimacy?
- What about it?
- I met my husband in 1955.
Most men would ask, are you a man or a woman?
So I had to find a man who liked that sort of thing.
- And what about love?
- You know what I say, love is like a gun collection,
many kinds, many calibers.
- I've been with June for many years
and she always told me she'd stay
with me through any changes.
- I met Cathy in 1942, love of my life.
- Sometimes I get so frustrated with my husband
'cause he's never had to worry
about anyone other than himself.
Not just him, most men.
- Bill and I have been together for some time,
Bill's a regular guy, normal.
Most couples have to determine
whether they're sexually compatible.
Bill and I had to figure out if we were sexually possible.
- And what does Bill think of your situation?
- Bill thinks of my situation
as like a toothache that the dentist has to pull.
- But what does Bill know?
- Well, Bill knows what you know.
- Well, what do I know?
- You tell me.
- I once dated a man who worked
on the railroad and he didn't know.
When I finally told him,
he was in shock but we worked it out.
You never know what people want
or how they might react. And my sex is just one part
of who I am.
- I guess I think sometimes
about the risk and walking through doors
that you can't walk back out of
and sometimes research feels like that.
And so we have this social scientific
and medical archive where trans people come
and they talk and they're not passive.
They don't lack the ability to do things.
They're not, they have, you know,
they have agency. They talk back, they look at the camera,
they make gestures,
they refuse to answer things.
They are people, but they're not recorded
as people and so the thing that they're
so conscious of is that they're always
in the frame, and Garfinkel or Stoller is outside.
And at the end of the day,
he turns off the tape recorder,
puts his suit jacket back on,
goes and gets in his car in the parking lot and drives home.
But for the trans people that he's studying,
they never get that moment, right?
They're always inside the frame and I think that
part of what's so hard to try
and do research differently
than those people did in the mid-century as trans people,
is that we're not able to leave the frame either.
We never exit and so I guess sometimes I feel afraid
that if I walk into this library and I go into this archive,
I'm never going to walk back out.
- Have you heard of the work of Dr. Harry Benjamin?
- I did speak to Dr. Benjamin, but $20 a visit?
That's outrageous.
I have friends who know doctors
who will prescribe hormones for much cheaper.
- Can you tell me about your experiences
with doctors at UCLA?
- Yeah, I see Dr. Lubin.
He kind of seems like a girl himself.
I also see Stoller, Goodwin, Rosen and Garfinkel.
I can't tell if they are trying to help me
or just help themselves.
- I've been in contact with Dr. Elmer Belt,
Christine Jorgensen put me in touch with him.
He's one of the better surgeons.
- Not all surgeons are good at these types of procedures?
- I always say there are three kinds of doctors.
There are those who are willing.
There are those who acknowledge that something must
be done but aren't willing to do it.
And those who wouldn't do it even if they knew how.
I've learned to tell which is which very quickly.
- Trans medicine is sort of a kind
of accidental stepchild or sibling
to the medicalization of intersex
infants and children and adults. And it's really kind
of a painful tale where we start
to see this divergence where trans people are asking
for the very things and being told they can't have them
that are being really violently
and forcibly imposed on intersex folks.
- Are you interested in the surgery?
- Some people say maybe you'll get fixed like
that Christine Jorgensen. Maybe.
- But do you ever feel embarrassed by your situation?
- I've been in many rooms with many doctors.
I'm not embarrassed.
- But they're going
to remove incredibly important parts of your body.
(laughing)
Why are you laughing?
- Oh, I don't know.
Why don't you just put it in a little box
so I can pet it and keep it for the rest of my life.
- Aren't you worried about complications?
- This is the upmost complication.
- [Jules Voiceover] I can remember at the very beginning
of graduate school I read a kind of sensationalist kind
of salacious sort of paragraph about Agnes
that implied the thing that was really interesting
about her was that she tricked Dr. Robert Stoller
at UCLA into thinking
that she was somehow biologically intersex in some way
when really she had been a trans teenager.
And I think the story
that I read suggested she was stealing estrogen pills
from her mother or something like that.
- Are you taking any medication?
- Well, that's a loaded question.
- Why would it be loaded?
- Sometimes I take alka tablets or aspirin.
- And then once the lie was revealed many years later
after she had gotten what she wanted which was surgery,
the doctors were left with a kind of bitter taste
in their mouth.
And I remember reading it and thinking
this whole thing is a lie.
You know, I remember thinking this passage is a lie.
It's not telling the real story.
- And what do you think of the lie?
- I think that we are only
human if we're allowed to be anti-heroes.
- [Host] So tell me, Agnes.
- What?
- [Host] What's next?
- So what's next.
My whole life. .
has been wrapped up getting this one thing.
Agnes, as you know,
somebody who manipulated the system is sort
of an anti-hero in a lot of ways.
So I'm okay with the lie.
You know, I think that we do what we have to do to survive.
- Do you ever modify your story?
- I use everything from my past that I can.
- Everything?
- I don't change any details.
- Maybe the response is I don't tell anything
that might give it away. Like maybe there's like a shorter-
- I think there's a-
- It's like a-
- It's the same thing I do, it's like you share a lot,
you just omit some things, you know?
- Do you ever feel like a fraud?
- Only when I'm dressed like a woman.
When I get mail delivered to my house in my female name,
I just say it's for a neighbor.
- Many white lies.
- Oh yeah, many.
- I felt like for so long,
I felt this need to refer to my own authenticity
to sort of like cite my own authenticity
as like the measure of why I needed people to treat me well.
Like how real of a man I was.
- And I love what you say, you know,
I realized looking back that there were things
that I had to say about myself
in order for people to respect me.
What's an example of something like that for you?
- Saying, like, when you call me 'she'
it makes me throw up.
Like I would make up that I had these like physical symptoms
which in retrospect I actually did, like,
I was experiencing like full body dissociation and stuff
but I didn't like, it was like the distress that I felt,
I felt like I had to legitimize it by being like,
I'm throwing up or like, I can't sleep.
Well, I actually couldn't sleep.
That was true. But just stuff like that.
I would come up with these weird things
'cause it was like the lie was better for the,
like, I thought that the lie would sound more
like the truth to them.
- I have a tricky relationship to the truth
for myself in terms of just the paradox
of my own body and what society might call a lie, you know,
or sometimes what I might call a lie
if I'm just passing
and that doesn't necessarily represent my existence
then it's like, yeah, I think the truth is,
you know, it does start to fall into that construct
of like who can afford certain truths and who cannot.
- In Agnes' time, you know,
trans folks were encouraged to present plausible narratives
which were made up stories about
where they came from and who they were.
So you would say, I came from a farm.
I was, you know, the prom queen.
It's like, whatever the story might be,
that is conflated with the notion
that trans people are presenting a false persona.
- I just don't think that's unique to trans people though.
- Tell me more.
- Well, people are constantly performing a certain self
in order, you know, to a certain end.
That's just what we do.
I mean, it's another version of code switching.
It's additionally I think exasperated
because of the sense of duplicity
and performance being an aspect of transness itself.
- To me too it speaks to this management
of these layers of disclosure where I'll tell one kind
of story in public and I'll hold
another story in private because I have a broader agenda.
- That's right.
- And I wonder,
what role does truth play in your agenda?
- Truth is a, ugh, what do I even say about truth?
I don't know what the hell truth is.
I mean, I know some experiences have
a certain kind of resonance that I might describe
with a lowercase t, truth,
I don't know, what do you mean by that?
Why are you asking that question?
- Now, I have a very hard question.
Do you have any regrets?
- That's your hard question?
- How do you justify the lies?
- How do you justify your questions?
- We've all been misled so many times
and we can watch it happen in real time.
Garfinkel is misleading America, right?
Or Mike Wallace is misleading America.
Trans people are slyly misleading
every non-trans person they talk
to in order to protect themselves, to save themselves.
Medicine has misled us to believe
that being trans is some sort of medical condition,
social science has misled us to believe
that being trans is to be deviant. But, you know,
trans people have also misled each other
and told half-truths and we've tried our best
in really difficult conditions to find ways
to talk about ourselves and defend ourselves,
a lot of which are extremely imperfect.
- So, you know, obviously,
I'm sparking wildly with some of the things
that you're saying and thinking
so much about documentary as another method
of authority and as another method
of excavation and interrogation and thinking
about my role as a white,
trans masculine person in collaboration with a,
you know, institutionally embedded, cis, punk, academic,
like we didn't rehearse that summary of identity,
but you know,
and like what role can collaboration
and storytelling play in shifting the terms of engagement?
And I don't know, like,
I'm not sure that we can shift the terms of engagement.
I'm really not.
- That question of, can we move the frame?
Can we do things differently?
I don't know.
All I know is I can't do that by myself
but with both of you, yeah,
a little bit more,
with everyone in this project, a lot more,
with everyone watching who's going to be,
I hope changed by what they see.
That's a lot of people all of a sudden.
- You have a very interesting story.
Have you ever considered writing a memoir?
- Doctor asked me to write my autobiography.
I thought the only reason
to do it is if it would help someone.
- Maybe people with your condition would benefit
from this program.
- And that relates to what?
- One of the other women
that I've spoken to on this subject,
there couldn't have been a more lonely person.
She was very young, very passable
but she's still faced many
of the troubles common to people like you.
- My life isn't troubled.
There's no reason to be lonely.
People choose to be.
We are here.
- Have I said something wrong?
- I think you're wrong about a lot of things.
- Thank you for speaking with me tonight, Denny.
- I bet I've been some help with your program.
- We end as we began,
asking questions that do not yet have answers.
In the eyes of some,
these individuals represent new frontiers
of scientific progress,
in the eyes of others,
they pose a threat to the very fabric of American life.
Whether a sign of innovation or inversion,
only time will tell.
From our studios in Los Angeles, goodnight.
- One of the many lies of visibility is
that being seen is your emancipation.
We've almost limited our imagination about
what a good trans life would be or what freedom means
and associated it with publicity or visibility.
And even if that's so obviously not true
for people whose visibility puts them in danger,
I don't know why we don't ask more often,
what would it feel like to be left alone?
What's the right to be invisible?
And there are so many forms of invisibility
that we get to see, even in this archive.
The doctor, the scientist, the white man,
the non-trans person who kind of just fades
into the background because we don't linger on them.
We take them for granted.
They make sense in this place.
So even when they're on screen,
they're relatively invisible.
But I think sometimes we might look
at an archive like this and say, oh, what a shame.
There's no Mexican Americans and LA was full of them.
There are no immigrants from Asia, right?
There aren't that many more young people,
there aren't any really old people.
Ah, it's so unrepresentative.
It's so sad that we didn't get those stories.
Is it though?
I mean, I think, and this is kind of challenging
because it asks you
to go somewhere where we have no evidence,
everyone who's not on screen might've been damn happy
that they weren't because they didn't have
to be put in these situations that were
so difficult. And so I think something
that we overlook when returning to the past and noting,
oh, it's such a partial account,
we're missing so many people's lives,
yeah, it's not because they didn't exist though,
and what they were doing
with their lives might have so exceeded our imagination
that one thing I like
to think about is they get the last laugh.
And the fact that we don't know
who they are says very little
about them and everything about us.
And so I think there's something
that we're searching for here that is bigger than any of us
because you can't carry those burdens.
People like Agnes lived impossible lives.
But they lived impossible lives.
Agnes did the impossible.
She outwitted every clinician that she worked with.
She got what she needed.
She transitioned and then she comes back and she tells them?
Okay, we don't get everything that she's done.
We don't know what her motives were,
but she made that work.
And we're still living impossible lives today and so to me,
even if I don't see myself in Agnes,
if I don't need Agnes' story to make the things
that are hard in my life work, I still need her.
You know, I still need to go there.
I still need to know
that her impossibility wasn't the end of the story.
And that there is something
within the impossible
or in between a truth and a lie where life takes place.
(gentle upbeat music)