Trans film event: "She's a Boy I Knew"

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Using interviews, animation, old family footage, and voice mail, Vancouver filmmaker Gwen Haworth documents her male-to-female gender transition partially through the voices of her anxious but loving family, best friend, and wife.

Calling for a new era of DIY transgender self-representation, Haworth's feature debut is a comic, heartbreaking, and uplifting autobiography that breaks away from the marginalized depictions of transsexuals that populate mainstream media. The film celebrates creative activism, self-advocacy and empowerment.

"She's a Boy I Knew" begins in 2000 with Steven Haworth's decision to come out to his family about his life-long female gender identity. The resulting auto-ethnography is not only an exploration into the filmmaker's process of transition from biological male to female, from Steven to Gwen, but also an emotionally charged account of the individual experiences, struggles, and stakes that her two sisters, mother, father, best friend and wife brought to Gwen's transition. As her transition progresses, Gwen is forced to reckon with the end of her marriage and the loss of her status as son and brother. But in doing so, she also discovers that while the nature of personal relationships may change, the love and support present within those relationships can remain just as powerful and sometimes even more so.

dir: Gwen Haworth
rated: n/a 2007
film running time 70 min
more info [4]

Everyone welcome - allies welcome.

Open discussion follows.

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