The First Transgender Documentary Film
Doris Wishman’s 1978 Doc, Let Me Die a Woman!, Asks Gender Questions
© Kat Long
Sep 29, 2008
Though almost forgotten today, the prolific low-budget filmmaker Doris Wishman’s 1978 documentary Let Me Die a Woman! stars real transgender men and women and casts their sexual experiences from a sympathetic point of view. The film is significant for its actual footage of sex-change surgery, its neutrality in discussing an explosively controversial subject, and its realistic portraits of transgender sexuality.
Doris Wishman, an Unlikely Documentarian
Doris Wishman, who died in 2002 at the age of ninety, was the most prolific female filmmaker of the sound-movie era. In a career that spanned more than forty years and at least thirty films, she excelled in writing, directing, and editing the idiosyncratic, low-budget sexploitation movies that had their provenance in the white slave films of the early twentieth century.
Wishman primarily directed fictional dramas, which makes her only documentary feature Let Me Die a Woman! an aberration in her oeuvre. She had an uncanny sense for filming subject matter that was sexy, popular and controversial, so it is likely that she filmed Let Me Die a Woman! to make a profit rather than foster the case for transgender rights and equality.
Rare Footage, Uncommon Compassion
Nevertheless, the film was the first to realistically discuss the desire for sex-change surgery and include filmed footage of such operations. Typical of Wishman’s low-budget constraints, the film consists of two main scenarios: a group therapy session, headed by a gender researcher named Dr. Leo Wollman and attended by real-life transgender women and men; and cut-away shots to an operating room where actual doctors perform gender-reassignment surgery on a biological man (whose face is not seen and who is not identified). At a time when gender-reassignment surgery was a controversial subject within the medical profession (though not new, as the story of Michael Dillon attests), Wishman’s inclusion of such footage was remarkable.
The group therapy scenes reveal the conflicts transgender people often encountered. In one scene, a patient named Debbie says she is in love with her boyfriend, but he doesn’t know her “secret.” “You have the body of a woman. You feel like a woman, don’t you?” asks Dr. Wollman. Debbie insists she does. Another patient, Roslyn, suggests, “There’s always the chance that someone will tell him and leave you because you weren’t honest with him.” Dr. Wollman tells Debbie that honesty and truth are more important in her relationship than gender. “If Jim cares for you as much as you say he does, he wouldn’t leave you. If he finds out from someone else, he’ll feel that he cannot trust you…Then too, if you keep your secret, you’ll always be worried.” Wishman’s quotidian portrayals contradicted the sensational media coverage accorded other stories of transgender transformation, such as that of Christine Jorgensen in the 1950s.
Let Me Die a Woman! may not have aged well, considering the advances in gender-related psychology, medical treatment, and the transgender identity movement since its 1978 release. But Wishman should be credited with illuminating—with the limited filmmaking resources she had—the very real issues and challenges that continue to face the transgender community.
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