9:30pm Wednesday, June 30 on TV One
This week’s local Real Life documentary Is She Or Isn’t He? (tonight at 9.30pm on TV ONE) tells the story of a self-proclaimed ‘fat, hairy woman with a penis’ and her five-year search to find love and acceptance.
Graham grew up as small town boy who believed he was a woman – he was clearly an outsider and could only see one solution – to change his gender. Graham decided to become Ashleigh, and so begins filmmaker Justin Pemberton’s five-year project documenting Ashleigh’s attempt to transition.
Pemberton met Ashleigh as Graham six years ago and the film starts before she has told her family about her plans, or even chosen her female name. Ashleigh tells Pemberton that she is a woman with ‘a deformity’, and she wants more than anything to be an attractive woman “with beautiful big breasts that a [heterosexual] man would love.”
At the start of the film Ashleigh begins to wear makeup, starts taking female hormones and getting laser treatments to remove her manly hair. But despite her resolve, it’s another two years before she feels brave enough to actually dress as a woman. Just as Ashleigh starts to really change her appearance, she also reveals the inner conflict and confusion surrounding what she’s doing.
Pemberton says of Ashleigh’s decision, “I was curious about how she could be so certain about her sexuality and wanting to change her gender when she’d clearly not really explored any other options,”.
Ashleigh dreads being identified as ‘transgender’ and after visiting an exhibition of photographs of transgender women, leaves dismissive of those ‘tragic transgenders’.
But for Pemberton, seeing Asleigh’s attitude toward others who have also undergone gender transformation is quite bizarre. “The painful irony is that she becomes transgender, which is not considered by most to be ‘normal’,” he says.
Real Life: Is She or Isn’t He? is the longest documentary project ever commissioned by New Zealand On Air and will undoubtedly provoke debate about how New Zealanders define their sex and sexuality and how they deal with people seeking transgender surgery.
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