"SOMETIMES YOU CAN'T JUST CIRCLE ONE" Third Gender, Fourth Wall at TrannyFest
BY LEXI LEBAN

At first glance, an incredible freedom of gender expression seems to have taken hold in our culture. Dennis Rodman, member of the NBA-champion Chicago Bulls, dresses in a wedding gown for his book signing and openly discusses the fact that he has cross dressed ever since he was a child. Singer K.D. Lang appears on the cover of Vanity Fair getting a shave from Cindy Crawford. The TV news magazine 20/20 devotes a segment to intersexuals (formerly called hermaphrodites). RuPaul has a talk show on VH1. Film images of drag queens and transsexuals in mainstream cinema, from The Crying Game to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, suggest that we've "come a long way, baby."

Real social change, however, often lags behind mere visibility or fashion.

In the 20/20 segment on intersexuals, the case was raised of a child named Jade, who was born with "ambiguous" primary sex characteristics. Because she did not easily fit into either category of male or female, she was subjected to emergency surgery to alter her genitalia to make her an anatomical female. As I watched the program, I felt the violence of a physician taking a knife and "fixing the problem." Our society has invested a lot in the binary gender system, which allows only two ways of classifying anatomical sex. According to historian and novelist Leslie Feinberg, in her book Transgender Warriors, "Intersexual bodies are rarely sick ones, and the emergency is culturally constructed." Morgan Holmes, an intersex woman, says, "What is even more difficult than defining oneself as a member of the community 'woman' is attempting to define oneself as an intersex/woman. The task requires taking back an identity which has been made illegitimate through culture and has been stolen through surgery." Holmes' comments point out our cultural discomfort with difference and with the individual right to choose to define one's own gender identity - to determine what to do with one's own body.

In San Francisco, on November 22 at the Roxie Cinema, audiences will get the opportunity to examine these and other thought-provoking issues at TrannyFest, a celebration of "transgender and transgenre cinema" devoted to "breaking boxes and bridging communities." The event, which is cosponsored by Film Arts Foundation (FAF) is the first U.S. film festival of its kind. Festival co-directors Elise Hurwitz, Christopher Lee and Alison Austin invite viewers to make "gender chaos history" while enjoying six programs of a "finger-snapping, groin-bumping, tear-jerking, heartwarming mix of experimental, documentary, narrative and pornographic shorts and features by transgendered filmmakers or about gender expression diversity." Included among the festival organizers are local activists Yosenio Lewis, Andrea Pasillas and Ahimsa Timoteo.

"One of the main reasons we felt this festival was so important was to take control of our own images," says Austin. Lee adds, "We want to give voice to folks who have not had the opportunity to be heard before." Among the works shown at the first TrannyFest will be several films by Film Arts Foundation members, including Machiko Saito's Premenstrual Spotting, Rae Rea's Third and Elise Hurwitz and Christopher Lee's Trappings of Transhood. Other films include Wanted Alive: Teresita La Campesina by La Tina, Shotgun by Jordy Jones, Look of Love by Charles Lofton, Kings of New York by Lucia Davis, Ground Bloom Flower by Gay Natsu, You Don't Know Dick by Candace Schermerhorn and Bestor Cram and many others.

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