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Romance is the stumbling block of trans films, providing a quandary even as it proves a popular standard for mainstream access into the transgender experience. Too often narrative expectation is subverted and romantic contact stifled because the filmmaker fears the audience will read the trans character's gender identity as inauthentic and the romance as transgressive. Duncan Tucker's Transamerica (2005), the award-winning film about a male-to-female transsexual who reconnects with her family in the midst of her transition, recalls earlier transgender films The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), The Crying Game (1992), and Boys Don't Cry (1999), where romance undermines the otherwise positive portrayal of the trans experience and reaffirms the dominant viewpoint that authentic gender is dependent upon birth sex rather than upon gender identity. The trans/romance dilemma is the result of two connected, but distinct cultural associations between transgender identity and sexual transgression: the traditional medical conflation of transgenderism with sexual deviance and the overarching presumption that any identity category transgression, more commonly known as "passing," is related to sexual transgression. The directors' attempts to resolve the anxiety inherent in these traditions with the gender casting of the trans character, shots of the trans body, and physical interaction between romantic partners end up only reinforcing the character's inauthenticity.
In dominant discourse, sex, a biological category, is conflated with gender, the social category of identity exhibited through appearance, mannerisms, dress, and so on. Failure to differentiate between sex and gender exists even when people recognize that the masculine and feminine characteristics assigned to each gender are social constructs that differ across cultures and time periods. Individually or as a group, transpersons expose the workings of this gender system, revealing that the binary is neither natural nor invariant and that male and female are not mutually exclusive categories.
Transgender is an umbrella term, which includes cross-dressers, drag queens and kings, transsexuals, and other genderqueer people who may identify outside of the two gender system. Organized transgender activism has existed since the 1960s, but has gained momentum and public attention since the early 1990s (Meyerowitz 20812, 227-41; Stryker 139-53). As a result of this work, as of early 2012, sixteen states have banned discrimination based on gender identity, as have almost 80% of Fortune...