Red Without Blue - a film review

Mark and Alex
Oliver and Claire

I am out of step with many of my LGBTQ brothers and sisters when it comes to transgender issues. I am conservative when it comes to language use and I like the idea of using “sex” for biological identity and “gender” for social identity. How useful those distinctions are depends on the exact nature of the issue you are dealing with, but the distinction is there if and when you find it useful to make it. 

People like me who do make it extend it to the adjectives transgender and transsexual, as in transgender (or transgendered) and transsexual people and to the abstract notions of transgenderism and transsexuality. And that’s where we run into conflict. In order to maintain a distinction between transgenderism and transsexuality, you have to tie the “sex” in transsexuality to something biological, and that leads you to conclude that a transgendered person is “behaving” according to the social norms expected of the other sex, and the transsexual is a person who has crossed the biological line by having sexual adjustment surgery to their sexual organs. And that, in turn, leads you to ask questions like “Have you actually undergone surgery?” which is commonly felt to be nobody’s business and a rude question. To avoid being rude, people have come to think of “transsexual” as a word which belongs on the trash heap of history; they use “transgender” for the entire ideological spectrum, and blur the distinction. The political has superceded the scientific. 

In the same way I have come around gradually to accept the notion of “hate speech,” I now also avoid the term transsexual. I used to argue that freedom of speech is so important that the best way to counter ugly slurs was with corrective speech and rational argument, and not by trying to solve bad attitudes through legal means. But I’ve come to understand, by observing how often people who are bullied by hate speech end up taking their own lives, that it’s not that simple. And I’ve watched how Germany, as part of its rise from the ashes of the Second World War, made it illegal to use the language and the symbols of the Third Reich, and how much that has aided the restoration of dignity to that country, after hitting bottom in terms of human decency. I think there is a parallel in hate speech. To gather in a gang and taunt a kid with terms like faggot has scarred many a kid for life. I’ve known men in their fifties and sixties who cannot speak of such memories without feeling emotional distress many decades after the event. I have come to accept that sometimes it’s appropriate that the political should supercede the scientific, if it keeps us from crossing the line into cruelty. 

This struggle to understand, to come to terms with the concepts of gender identity and the difficulty in finding the right language for those concepts which naturally follows from the effort, is beautifully encapsulated in the documentary Red Without Blue, now available on Amazon Prime Streaming.  You may be annoyed by the fact that the filmmakers don't provide answers to the big questions, like whether and to what degree gender dysphoria is related to bad parenting, and how much is built into the psyche. Or you may accept that they probably would have provided answers if they had them, and their decision to paint a portrait rather than teach a lesson is not simply an artistic choice but a practical one.

It’s possible you will go through the same transition I did in watching the film, a transition which mirrors my evolution (and I suspect the evolution of many people) on transgender issues. For the first half of the film I found myself pitying the family, two twin boys at sea sexually, their mother burdened with Christian Science nonsense into thinking God assigned you a sex and it’s your moral duty to live with his decision, all the while sharing her bed with her best female friend and insisting she is not a lesbian. And their father who was so distant from his family that he couldn’t share with them the fact that he had lost his job and was only pretending to go to work for six months thereafter. And the very few people who they remained on civil terms with after displaying their inability to get their shit together. (I use that disparaging term consciously to reflect my initial response.) 

As the film progressed, I was reminded once again that the difficulty I had as a child coming to terms with sexuality which came from growing up in a homophobic world pales in comparison with the challenge of facing gender dysphoria, the conviction that you were born into the wrong body. And reminded that the problem of homophobia, i.e., a socially constructed prejudice, is qualitatively different from the conviction that one is dealing with a natural disaster to the body that needs to be put right somehow. It sort of reminds me of a Danish woman who told me once that she had no sympathy for immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East who were having trouble adjusting to life in America. She had done it; why couldn’t they?  The letters L,G,B and T are put together because the four distinct groups face the same political battles. The psychological ones are of a different order of magnitude.

Religionists like to tell you that God gives you no burden he doesn’t also give you the strength to bear. I don’t buy that and when I hear that cliché repeated, I am always tempted to share what I think of as the perfect response: “He may give you heavy burdens to bear, but he also gives you drugs to make the burden lighter.” 

Red Without Blue is not a didactic piece. It doesn’t provide a moral or a practical lesson in how to deal with the challenges of gender dysphoria. It is, rather, a portrait of a family that goes through hell, gets it terribly wrong much of the time and stumbles through life where many calmly sail. They are not likeable. Not people you want for friends necessarily. 

But - and I hope this is not a spoiler - they evolve, and whether you want them for friends in the end is less important, I think, than the fact that they help you understand and appreciate that life is not about the destination but about the journey. 

The film you think is failing in the first half because the characters are so damned unsympathetic, succeeds in the end, because they turn out to be not such bad guys after all. They just needed time to get things right.

Don't we all?

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