..was the title of this movie by HBO I saw the other day.
It was really, really out-of-the-top shocking.
In case you haven't seen it, allow me to fill you in on the story:
A happily married couple (25 years, two children) was put on a real shaker when the husband (delicately played by Tom Wilkinson) confessed that he wants to switch gender. He wants to be a female. Really. And I don't mean just look like one, he wants a full transformation, with hormone injection and surgery and everything.
Needless to say (but I'm still gonna say it anyway), it blew everybody away. The church can't have it. The parents hated it. The children thought it was insane (actually, the teenage daughter kind of liked it, and at one scene even compared breast sizes with his dad. Oh my Lord). And the wife was just NOT accepting it well. To top all of this, he had to face this while still being trapped in a man's body. Why can't everyone see that he just wants to be happy? He's not harming anyone. He still loves his family, he still love his wife, he still love God. Is the price of finding yourself at the fullest worth losing everybody else?
Let's switch p.o.v to the wife here. Personally, anything she did to keep his husband from doing it can pass on as understandable. I mean,
The person she married and had sex with for the last 25 years wants a female genitalia. It was just plain WEIRD. It's like she can no longer respect him as a life partner (because that would make her a lesbian), and for the love of God, she can't even think of him as a person anymore. He's not...normal. Why can't he act like the man she fell in love with?
But, eventually, the wife gives in. They're both still madly in love with and can't live without each other, blah blah blah, and so it ends with a happy life of two women.
Alright, I heard stories like this all the time. Woman trapped in a man's body. I've actually grown to accept it, provided it's a really personal thing and is paid at its own expense.
But I always imagined all this to happen to a person. When it's put in such a condition, a married couple, a family, it's a whole other concept. I imagined what it'll be like if that was my dad. A transexual friend is cool. A female father is too much to think about.
And never have it occured in my little mind that a person can change sexuality but not sexual attraction!! The fact that Ruth (Tom's character) insists that he still loves his wife and would never love a man is another mind boggles for me.
I'm not going to start talking about sexuality here (I already did on Friendster), but it's amazing HOW MUCH IT AFFECTS LIFE and the normality of it. In one night, I was forced to think out of what I thought was my broad, flexible box.
It was all just a little too much. I actually ended up staring bug-eyed to the ceiling that night, which wasn't very good since I had an early busy day the next.
Maybe I'm not as affirmed to this whole controversial-but-true-to-yourself things as I thought.