'Framing Agnes' flips the script for trans stories

It's Been a Minute

NPR

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

When the world never stops questioning you, do you refuse to answer... or do you play along to get what you want? These questions are at the heart of Framing Agnes, an award-winning documentary about the legacy of a young trans woman in the 1950s who was forced to choose between access and honesty. The film uses the format of a talk show to re-enact interviews with the eponymous Agnes and five other trans people – taken from case files from a decades-old gender identity clinic at UCLA. Brittany Luse chats with the film's director, Chase Joynt, and historian Jules Gill-Peterson about the ways our society tells trans stories. They also dive into the limits of representation, the power dynamics of interviews and the nature of truth itself.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to It's Been a Minute for NPR.
0:06.2	I'm Brittany Luce.
0:08.1	In all my years of covering pop culture and black culture specifically, I've spent a lot
0:12.8	of time thinking about the limits of representation.
0:16.2	A satisfying as it is to slip into Wakanda for a few hours.
0:19.9	I don't have any illusions about how a movie like Black Panther will materially change my
0:24.3	life, but those images still hold power and stoke conversation beyond the synoblex.
0:29.9	So I'm really excited to be able to talk about a documentary that completely blew my mind,
0:35.4	with its interrogation of how trans people show up on screen and how that affects trans
0:40.2	people in real life.
0:41.8	The film is called Framing Agnes.
0:45.4	Framing Agnes is coming in like a wrecking ball to so many of the ways we've been coached
0:50.2	as a culture that's just getting used to the idea that there are trans people in a
0:55.1	massive public way.
0:57.2	This historian Jules Gil Petersen, who's also the narrator in Framing Agnes.
1:01.2	We've been asked to believe that while the problem is that historically trans people have
1:06.1	been sad and isolated in a loan, they haven't been able to tell their own stories.
1:10.3	They've been missing.
1:11.3	They've only ever been subjects.
1:13.5	They've been studied by doctors and they've been the subjects of media exposés.
1:19.5	But as soon as you give them the microphone, everything is better.
1:22.8	We'll tell good stories.
	...

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