To be queer, especially trans, is to create a series of lies we tell to protect ourselves. Director Chase Joynt’s new documentary Framing Agnes examines one of the most famous lies a trans person ever told and breaks open the documentary form to find a more perfect and truthful way to talk about themselves. Whether or not it finds that more perfect way is up for debate.
In the late 1950s, a transgender woman named Agnes (sometimes called Agnes Torres) participated in a program at UCLA focused on gender and sexual health. Agnes lied to sociologists and doctors, claiming to be a cis male who spontaneously began growing breasts. She received gender reassignment surgery because the program bought the lie. Sociologists Robert Stoller and Harold Garfinkel extensively interviewed Agnes and turned those interviews into groundbreaking research. Agnes later revealed the lie, forcing Stoller and Garfinkel to retract the research.
Joynt gained access to Garfinkel’s archives after his death in 2011. He found the entirety of Agnes’ transcripts, as well as the transcripts of six other transgender individuals Garfinkel and Stoller interviewed. The interviews took place in a clinic, but Joynt frames them as a daytime talk show interview. Joynt, who is transmasculine, gathered seven transgender actors to re-enact the transcripts. The seven actors play the transgender patients, while Joynt plays a Mike Wallace-esque interviewer.
The film spends more time interviewing the actors and transgender historian Jules Gill-Peterson than it does on the re-enactments. Perhaps that was the point. Towards the end of the film, Gill-Peterson says: “People like Agnes lived impossible lives. But they lived impossible lives.” That slight change is very much the crux of Framing Agnes. It’s not about Agnes, but rather Framing her in trans history.
Framing Agnes takes direct aim at the so-called “Great Man” model of history: the idea that history is made by great individuals. In trans history, these people are often Agnes, Christine Jorgenson, or Laverne Cox. They are the people seen on daytime television or written about in research papers. Individual people can only be so representative of a broader population, though. The film instead presents a sort of history from below, wherein every trans person is in part responsible for the advancement of the whole. Some are interviewed by sociologists; some network with fellow trans people to find solidarity; still others live quiet lives and find success in survival.
The film frames these seven people as part of the first generation of trans people who brushed up against the boxes cisgender society tried to put them in. Each of these people has their own way of fighting back against them and their own response to Garfinkel’s imperfect attempts at understanding. He conducts these interviews with a clear position: he already knows it all, and it is the subjects who don’t know anything. The subjects know better than that. Agnes responds to the question “How do you justify the lies?” with “How do you justify your questions?” The film omits Garfinkel’s response, if he had one at all.
Where Framing Agnes stumbles is the argument that trans people have made any progress since these interviews were conducted.The film argues that while progress has been made, it’s mostly lip service. The actual challenges trans people face haven’t been addressed; not just the violence brought upon us, but also access to hormones and the right to walk around in gender-affirming clothing without being harassed or arrested. The film’s structural editing, however, means the argument is haphazardly presented. The starkest example happens early in the film. One of the interview subjects calls hormones “access to change” in a diary excerpt, when later Gill-Peterson notes that many people today falsely believe that our language sets us free. If you have pronouns, you’re good to go. If those two segments are flipped, the argument is far more cogent.
A single blemish doesn’t take away from Framing Agnes as an inventive, touching documentary that reframes what it means to be successful as a trans person. Visibility is not necessarily emancipation. What is emancipation is the ability to live our lives as ourselves without interruption or fear. The subjects interviewed weren’t at that point, and the film makes you question whether or not we’ve come any closer.
What an excellent write up!