GenderLife Forum: The Information Exchange

Tonight at 8PM EST.

Every other CNN documentary has been made with a 'personality', Amanpour, Cooper, someone, that leads the viewer through the story. This documentary doesn't have anyone doing that.

It's almost 2 years of a crew following Susan around plus interviews with others that were involved, like her electrologist, the mayor of Largo, FL. There is also part of an interview with Donna Rose about Susan that was filmed at last years Southern Comfort Conference.

I hope many people here watch it and comment on it. I'm looking forward to reading what people think of it, good, bad or indifferent.

Brenda

Susan Stanton pissed off a lot of people a while back by making statements in a CNN interview that she thought transpeople should not be included in a federal ENDA statute. Those were statements that can never be forgiven. For that reason alone I would never watch or support that person in any way. Such statements were all the more bizarre because ENDA inclusion might have saved Stanton's old job. Apparently Stanton now has a similar job in a city down the road in Florida anyway.

I will not be watching any stupid "transition" documentary, because they are a boring waste anyway, and mostly filled with mocking and insensitive depictions of cringe worthy, wrongful stereotyping.

Now that Stanton has a new job, maybe she ought to take time off to spend some of that money on FFS, instead of being followed around by cameras, having a narcissistic wet dream.

You're right she did. That's brought out in the documentary.

The filming ended close to 18 months ago. It's been in editing and being shown at various film festivals. This is the first time being broadcast.

FYI, she has some facial surgery when she had SRS. It's in the documentary.

I don't think that the documentary has the "mocking and insensitive depictions" or "wrongful stereotyping" but that's my opinion. I would like to read what others say.

Brenda

I am quite disenchanted by what gives the impression, primarily, of being attention whoring by certain people who become the subject of these sorts of "documentaries". There is nothing unique about any of us when there are thousands of us who have been through similar life passages without warranting television cameras in our lives as we went through them.

I don't think this is about being unique but an opportunity to show the uneducated public an all to common story.

In addition, all too often these sorts of documentaries of people in their forties fail to explain why they kept secrets from their spouses for decades, and why they often demonstrate so little empathy for the rightful anger of their spouses who usually feel betrayed by such disclosures after decades of living in the dark, often with children involved, whose lives in many instances also seem taken for granted in the process. The tacit lack of empathy for the family members whose attachments are usually torn asunder by in these documentaries seems to remain a huge elephant in the room that rarely get little more than superficial attention, and often ridiculous excuses, based primarily on claims of pre-internet ignorance.

Transition? Done it.

It's boring. Next.

Claims of "educating" the "public" seems specious after nearly forty years of media attention from Christine Jorgenson, through Renee Richards, Canary Conn, and countless others throughout the decades, often portrayed in full-length television biopics, and such. The "public" has been bombarded with "information" about trans-people for decade upon decade. For the most part though, the average person has developed little more than an ability to make trans-people the punch line of jokes. It also seems like the average person has just become inured, to the subject, and seem to often just refer to even the most beautiful post-vaginoplasty women merely as "men", period. We say transsexual, they just say "men", all too often, no matter how many of these "stories" they see on television.

Thank you.