Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

The Southern Comfort film screening today was interesting for me in a number of ways.  I realized while watching and listening to Robert's trans friends and their individual lovers that I lost track of who had begun life as a male and who had begun life as a female.  As the film went on, I was able to understand that this did not matter.  What mattered was the fact that these people got to fulfill the identities that they had always internally connected with, but the disrespect and medical neglect they were met with during their lives was terrible to hear about and to even see visually (like in the case of Cas' breast removal). 

The wisdom of Lola Cola at the end of the film about why nature delights in diversity yet human beings do not, really resonated with me.  It took a lot of courage for the people in this documentary to confront the fact that they were betraying their true genders by dressing and posing to fit the expectations of the sexes they were filed under at birth.  This kind of courage is unfortunately not respected by enough people because it threatens the traditional norms of gender that have been hammered into peoples' brains since Day 1.  The story of Robert Eads illustrates the unwillingness of society to become more open to a society that does not attempt to hide or sugarcoat the truth.