Two years ago my Hungry Beast buddy Ali Russell and I decided to make a doco on Australia’s FTM community.
We’d noticed a number of our friends, who had previously identified as “dykes”, were coming out as trans and we thought it was important to document this aspect of local queer culture.
The previous year I’d attended the Trans March in San Fran and was blown away by what appeared to be an explosion of trans male culture — thousands of men and gender non-conformists walking topless through the Castro proudly sporting chest scars, moustaches and beards.
While this was happening on the streets, trans guys were close to invisible in the non-LGBTI media — even though YouTube was bursting at the seams with video diaries of FTMs across the world undergoing dramatic physical and emotional changes in their journeys from female to male.
We initially thought it’d be cool to make a reality series like The Real L-Word that instead focused on Sydney’s thriving trans community. But a mini-doco series to share at festivals and on the web seemed like a more achievable goal, and we received a small grant from the Aurora Foundation to help make it happen.
When it came to finding talent, Ali and I mined our friendship groups, scoured YouTube and met with local trans boys, each at a different stage in their transition process.
For us it was about finding unique individuals who each had a different story to tell, but most importantly, finding guys who were OK with sharing their experiences and being “out” — a very courageous and potentially risky thing to do in a world that still struggles to get its head around anyone or anything that’s a bit different.
We eventually found three amazing gents — Xavier, Dex and Danny — and over the course of a year captured their experiences negotiating testosterone, surgery, and the trials of love, sex and family.
Trans Boys premiered at this year’s Mardi Gras Film Festival alongside the Chaz Bono documentary Becoming Chaz and just finished a run at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.
It’s wonderful to now see a variety of Australian trans male voices being heard on the festival circuit and on TV with the Tom Cho documentary Mind (ABC), and even the appearance of singer Paige Phoenix on Channel 7’s X Factor.
Bring it on.
