QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

Agnes's iconic story—the teenage trans girl who lied about being intersex to access gender affirming surgery in the 1950s—personifies how trans and gender nonconforming people are expected to produce a certain narrative of self to make their trans experience legible. Access to medical services and legal recognition are entirely dependent on performing legible narratives of trans experience. This was the experience of Agnes and other participants in Dr. Harold Garfinkel's 1958 sociological study at the UCLA gender clinic, one of the first clinics in the United States to treat trans patients with hormone replacement therapy and gender confirmation surgery.¹ Spotlighting the complexities of trans lives in the 1950s, Framing Agnes stages a fantastical reenactment of these never-before-seen medical transcripts, bringing to life "a lineage of collaborators and conspirators who have been forgotten for far too long."² Talk-show-inspired segments feature director Chase Joynt as Dr. Garfinkel, who is reimagined as a talk-show host interviewing the study participants, who are reimagined as guests of the show. These scenes are sutured together with clips of coaching sessions and unscripted interviews between Joynt (as himself) and the actors, clips of quasi-narrator Jules Gill-Peterson, and footage of Gill-Peterson and Agnes (played by Zackary Drucker) aimlessly haunting the abandoned UCLA campus. The constant transition between sets and scenes produces the effect of flipping through channels. [End Page 188]

Described as a collaborative, communally driven project, Framing Agnes features a talented team of mostly trans creators, including the director, screenwriters, research team, and cast. This fact alone would be enough to excite a trans viewer about the film's potential, but it is that Framing Agnes seems to be made for a trans audience that has me feeling seen in a way that feels like love.³ No doubt there exist numerous ways to frame a conversation on a film as beautifully complex as Framing Agnes, but t4t emerges as one mode for arriving at a deeper appreciation for the contributions this brilliant film offers. More than a remnant of craigslist personal ads that describes erotic intimacies between trans individuals, Hil Malatino describes t4t as a powerful political and conceptual framework. T4t is "a form of strategic separatism through which trans people might practice love, solidarity, and mutual aid between ourselves while actively decentering cis subjectivities, perceptions, and erotic economies, refusing assimilationist attempts at fixing the trans subject."⁴ As a cinematic project created by trans people about trans people, and in a way that feels like it is actually for trans people, the t4t ethos of Framing Agnes stretches the collective imagination of what trans representation and visibility could look like in media and historical research.

Too much of trans media is created by and for cis audiences, which results in at best boring and at worst violent representations, resulting in a flattening of the abundances and excesses of trans subjectivities. Meanwhile, Framing Agnes offers "a break from cis-centric optics and assumptions,"⁵ and proceeds under the assumption that the viewer can approach the conversation with a certain level of familiarity—sometimes even an intimate knowledge—of the discussions that unfold. In addition, the film's interview structure lends itself as an invitation to the viewer to be engaged as an active member of the conversations as they unfold on the screen. Framing Agnes engages the trans viewer as a thought partner through posing critical questions, such as what do we want out of trans visibility? What do we want to see when we see trans people on screen? In this sense, Framing Agnes is a film that exudes a t4t ethos because it is primarily created by, about, and for trans people, and is a rejection of stale, reductive trans narratives that most trans media plays on repeat.

Oriented toward an ultimate un-scripting of trans subjectivities, Framing Agnes rescripts Dr. Garfinkel's clinical interviews with his six subjects, Agnes, Georgia, Barbara, Denny, Henry, and Jimmy, and reenacts and stages the interview series as a daytime television talk...