by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned the TV back on and
watched From This Day Forward, a quite
compelling and unusual documentary from filmmaker Sharon Shattuck about her
Transgender father Trisha Marie, nèe
Michael, and the effect his/her “coming out” had on his wife Martha and their
two daughters, Sharon and her younger sister Laura. Michael and Martha Shattuck
met in Chicago and got married there, but when the kids were still in grade
school they decided to relocate to rural Michigan. What made this unusual was
that Trisha Shattuck has not done a
definitive gender transition, largely out of respect for the feelings of his
wife and his desire to stay in a relationship with her even though she’s
cisgender and heterosexual. Instead she appears as a woman in some scenes and
as a man in others, and though she’s shown taking hormone treatments (we get an
odd close-up showing just how big and thick the needle and syringe needed to
administer them is) it’s not at all clear how consistently she takes them. Trisha — Michael, as he was then — was
up-front with his girlfriend and wife-to-be from their second or third date on,
when he took her to his closet and showed her his collection of women’s
clothes.
But it would take years before he was comfortable with appearing
publicly as a woman and being honest with the children — and while Sharon was
old enough by the time her dad came out as Transgender to handle it relatively
well, Laura was in middle school and was absolutely devastated that her dad was
doing this to her and setting her up for the relentless and remorseless teasing
and bullying she was going to get from the other students. I thought I knew a
lot about Transgender people from the previous books I’ve read, films I’ve seen
and, most importantly, the interviews I’ve done with them, but this film taught
me a few things — in some ways it’s a feast day for anyone who thinks “gender”
is a socially constructed concept, because Trisha is neither the male her
genetics made her nor a totally “transitioned” Transwoman. The film is quite
beautiful not only in showing us the range of options through which we can
present ourselves — the continuum between total cis-male and total cis-female —
but in being honest about the hurt people seeking their own path to happiness
can sometimes wreak on those who love them and those they’re responsible for.
It’s also the sort of film that couldn’t have been made before the modern age
of cheap smartphone video and its democratization of filmmaking; though Sharon
Shattuck is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker whose previous productions have been
animated films for television (From This Day Forward appears to be her first foray into live action), she
frequently yields the camera to both her parents and many of the most
astonishing moments in the movie are told from dad’s point of view, as she
talks about her dual life, shows off her paintings (she’s an accomplished
artist who works as a landscape gardener, while her wife is a doctor — and when
the kids were young Martha was the family’s principal breadwinner and Michael
mostly a stay-at-home dad, a role he found fulfilling because it was as close
as he could ever come to be a mother)
and explains how their contents reveal where s/he was psychologically in the
various stages of his/her transition.
The events of the last two years,
particularly the celebrity comings-out of Chas Bono and Caitlyn Jenner, have
definitely improved the average person’s awareness that Transgender people
exist and at least some of what they go
through, but most folks who think about Transgender people at all still think
of them in terms of the gender binary — they identify as XX but were born in an
XY body, or vice versa — whereas films like From This Day Forward showcase the myriad of possibilities in between the two
gender extremes. From This Day Forward
also shows the traumas the Transgender person can put the people in their
families through and how one person’s self-discovery can be another person’s
deep-rooted pain. Trisha Shattuck went through quite a lot to modify her
physical appearance to be more female — first electrolysis (the acutely painful
and time-consuming process of burning out every follicle of facial hair so they
don’t have to worry about a three o’clock shadow “outing” them as genetically
male), then cosmetic surgery to smooth down the eyebrows (a particularly
painful part of the process — Trisha recalls that the wounds bled profusely and
out of all the nurses in the hospital the only one who would tend to her was a Gay one) and minimize the
Adam’s apple, then hormone treatments — along with a name change, which under
Michigan law had to be publicized with a legal notice in the local newspaper,
and that was a trauma for Trisha
because she was sure people would notice her ad to change her name from Michael
to Trisha and that would “out” her —
but she grew back from the final gender-reassignment operation, obviously
because she still wanted to be able to make love to her wife and she couldn’t
do that unless, at least in bed with the lights out and no one there but the
two of them, she presented as fully anatomically male. (This may also be why
Trisha made her hormone treatments intermittent; Trans people I’ve known have
told me that if you’re on estrogen, even if you still have a penis, it loses
the ability to get an erection.)
The suspense the film is built around concerns
daughter Sharon meeting, falling in love with and agreeing to marry a man,
Jonathan Eaves, and what will her dad wear to the wedding — a suit or a dress?
At first Trisha seems fully determined to wear the dress, and even has one
picked out: a nice black number that looks decidedly retro, like something
Ginger Rogers would have danced in with Fred Astaire (a comparison actually
made in the dialogue) — but eventually she settles for a suit, and about the
only concession to femininity is that she wears it with an elaborately colored
silk scarf instead of a tie. From This Day Forward is quite a moving story, and while I wouldn’t go as far as
the person at a screening quoted by an imdb.com reviewer as saying, “I
want to live in that world” — even with people as incredibly supportive as her
daughters and especially her wife,
Trisha Shattuck still has a lot of hardships (and quite frankly, at least in
part because she started her transition so late, she doesn’t look all that
convincing as a woman — I was frankly reminded of Boris Karloff in his drag role as “Miss Muffin” in the 1960’s TV show The
Girl from U.N.C.L.E.), and it’s difficult
for anyone who isn’t Transgender
to understand the sheer wretchedness and hopelessness of realizing you’ve been
born into the wrong body for your psychological sense of gender, and the amount
of work you need to do to win your way to acceptance, self-love and then the
love of others — but if a movie like this (or even my friendships with Trans
people) can’t make me feel what it would be like to be Transgender, at least it
can do the next best thing: engender, not “sympathy” (with all its patronizing
connotations) but empathy with
Trans people, what they’ve gone through and how powerful they’ve had to be to
survive, accept themselves and present to the world as who they are with no
apologies or ill feelings.
