The film that I chose for this blog entry was TRANSAMERICA. The film was rather intrigueing to actually see transgendered people and how they go about their daily lives with all of the struggles that go along with it. The film was about a transgendered woman named Sabrina Osbourne, who was previously named Stanley Wilkins. She is a telemarketer, who was seeing therapists and a psychologist throughout the movie. The psychologist was making sure that she was ready to undergo genital surgery. And she wasn’t ready to do it in the beginning of the movie, because she couldn’t let something go that was apart of Stanley. So Sabrina goes to New York to retrieve her son from jail from drug conviction and prostitution. He is a juvenile, age 17, named Toby. All the while she doesn’t tell Toby that she is his father, and keeps it a secret until the end of the movie. Although Toby finally discovers during the car ride that she is a transgender and makes fun of her in public. So they go traveling across the country to Calacoon, Kentucky where Toby grew up. They visit his neighbors, and his step-father, with whom Toby tries to have intercourse with. Sabrina and Toby learn a lot about each other, with camping out at night, and visiting people from Texas that were having a transgender party. Their last stop was to go to Sabrina’s parents house, which sort of turned out to be a disaster. Her mother is especially not accepting of her change, and has a hard time calling her Stanley. They fight, and Sabrina steals some hormone pills from her mother, because their car got stolen with all her items. She tells her family that Toby is her son, and they are very excited and shower him with love and kindness, which he finds strange. They offer him to stay with them, and Sabrina to go back to California to have her surgery. Then Toby asks Sabrina to marry him, and Sabrina finally reveals that she is his father. He slaps her and runs away, back to California. Sabrina has her surgery, and admits that she screwed up with Toby. Toby all the while is making adult movies, which was his passion. He goes to visit her, they have a beer, and it makes a nice ending to the story.
Transgendered people in this movie are represented as if they don’t fit in and they are outsiders. Other than at the transgender party, Sabrina’s family was definitely not accepting of her, nor the public, or people at the restaurant. The film didn’t further stereotype transgendered people, although it challenged them and their beliefs. And it seemed that society was beginning to be more accepting of them. I enjoyed the film, although I feel that the person playing the transgendered part, was to feminine, and didn’t exude the male qualities that you would expect to see from someone making the transition. It may be because there was an actress playing the transgendered part, and not a real man changing to a woman.
RESOURCES:
www.transamerica-movie.com
www.itpeople.org
www.thebody.com/index/whatis/transgendered.html
www.wikipedia.org/transgender
