Disclosure (2020)

Jen Richards: Self - Actress, Writer

Quotes 

• Self - Actress : I had to be okay with my mom saying, "I will never call you Jen because Jen murdered my son." I had to- I had to be okay with that in order to survive myself, you know? In order to deal with not being able to see my grandma before she died because I could only come home if I dressed as a boy. You know. I had to deal with the fact that one of my best friends, who, like, I stood up at his wedding, won't let me meet his children. I have to deal with those things. Like, I have to live with those things. And I have to make that okay. I have to understand their position and be okay with it. And when I saw that father go so much further than I thought was even possible, it hurt, I couldn't bear it, because then, all of a sudden, all those people who couldn't accept me... When I knew it was possible to go beyond acceptance... Why couldn't my mom have been like him? That's the question I never asked until that moment. Why couldn't my mom have been like him? Why couldn't my friends have been like him and seen the value in my experience? But the person who's most responsible for failing to have that kind of vision is me. I have never seen myself the way that father saw his own child. I'd never seen myself that way, I'd never looked at myself with the kind of love and respect and awe that that father had for his own child. No one's looked at me that way, how could I look at me that way? I had to see it. And now that I have, I want that.

• Self - Actress : I think that one woman's armor becomes another woman's adornment, in the sense that a kind of Kardashian aesthetic - this hyper-feminine, plump lips, the big hair, the extensions, the silicone-injected curves of the body - in some ways might be a reflection of a change in aesthetics that comes out of the kind of gay men who are often doing the styling for celebrities. And that, for them, it comes out of the street queens that they know from the clubs. And for them, it comes out of, ultimately, the sex workers, who have to hyper-feminize their body in order to compete for clients in order to survive. And of course they're then imitating an older version of femininity that they learned that men like from movies and TV, and it kind of creates this ultimate cycle. But a lot of people will look at trans women's performance of femininity and see it as somehow reinforcing the worst patriarchal stereotypes of women, and I think it's really unfair and ahistorical to foist that same perspective on people who are just trying to survive.

• Self - Actress : When you start watching trans clips back-to-back, you see how often all the people around the trans character feel betrayed or lied to. But frankly, I kind of hate the idea of disclosure... in the sense that it presupposes that there is something to disclose.

• Self - Actress : It's an interesting question, a kind of thought experiment, to go back and think what I would feel today as an out trans person if I had never seen any representation of myself in the media. On the one hand, I might not have ever internalized that sense of being monstrous, of having fears around disclosure, of seeing myself as something abhorrent, and as a punchline and as a joke. I might be able to go on a date with a man without having the image of men vomiting. On the flip side, would I even know I'm trans if I had never seen any kind of depiction of gender variance on screen?

• Self - Actress : There is a one-word solution to almost all the problems in trans media. We just need more. And that way, the occasional clumsy representation wouldn't matter as much, because it wouldn't be all that there is.