While the trans community and its allies know that trans people have always existed, it is up to queer and feminist historians to provide a representation of that past, to tell histories of trans individuals from the archives we have available. Framing Agnes (Chase Joynt, 2022) depicts Joynt’s and Kristen Schilt’s search for such archives in UCLA, the site of one of the nation’s first clinics to treat trans and gender non-conforming people. Specifically, they are looking for Agnes, whom they found in a rusted-shut cabinet drawer.
The film begins with the story of Agnes Torres (played by Zackary Drucker), who approached the psychiatry department at UCLA about receiving gender-affirming surgery (GAS) in the late 1950s and later became one of the first-known case studies of a person receiving gender-affirming care (GAC) (Goldberg). Agnes’s ability to navigate discriminatory medical institutions and advocate for herself made her a trans icon and hero for other members of the trans community fighting to receive GAC. Medical histories, however, remember Agnes differently. For others, Agnes serves as an example of the deceitful nature of trans people who will say anything to get the care they want. These two “framings” of Agnes—as hero and antihero—serve as the film’s central meditation.
Histories told from archival sources are always necessarily “framed” because archival documents and ephemera cannot speak for themselves, but trans histories are particularly in need of proper framing, or at least a critical interrogation of the frames in which we put them. By looking at the UCLA gender clinic’s archives, Framing Agnes begins by reframing America’s history of trans care, which was thought to begin with the opening of the Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic in 1966 (Caraballo). The film shows that UCLA pioneered this work much earlier, performing GAS in 1950 and building the first gender identity clinic opened in 1962 (“History Timeline”). In fact, Drs. Robert Stoller and Harold Garfinkel conducted extensive studies on transgender and gender nonconforming people who visited their clinic, one of whom was Agnes. The film reenacts Garfinkel’s interviews with a range of patients, including a black trans woman named Georgia (Angelica Ross) and a teenage trans boy named Jimmy (Stephen Ira). These reenacted interviews, set on the stage of a fictional talk show, portray the narratives trans people were expected to share with the medical community in order to get the care they needed.
While Agnes represents only one of the many patients Garfinkel interviewed, her story is the one that became cemented in the historical imagination, perhaps because of the salaciousness of her lie, or perhaps because of her physical similarity to another trans icon: Christine Jorgensen.[1] Jorgensen, the first American known to receive GAS in 1952, became the first trans person to captivate the public, gracing the covers of magazines and releasing a self-titled autobiography in 1968 (Jorgensen). The film draws parallels between the ways that Agnes and Jorgensen were both able to “pass” and readily assimilate because of their whiteness, social class, and glamor. By turning to Jorgensen, Framing Agnes also demonstrates how the medical procedures Agnes and others sought have always been mediated by popular media representation. Media coverage of Jorgensen, such as the New York Daily News headline “Ex-PI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” focused specifically on her physical transition and the idea of changing sexes. The film’s inclusion of Jorgensen, moreover, demonstrates which stories of trans experience permeate popular consciousness and the frames that limit how those stories are told.
The film ends with an acknowledgement of trans and gender nonconforming communities’ desire for the past, along with a warning about how these histories can be misused. Near the end of Framing Agnes, trans historian Jules Gill-Peterson, one of the film’s interlocutors, cautions against using histories like Agnes’s to teach us about our present. Using trans personal histories that we can only ever partially understand to comment on the state of trans rights today ultimately reduces trans experiences to a tool for social change. Filmmaker Tourmaline explains this reduction with Marsha P. Johnson: “[Johnson’s] image and ideas were extracted throughout her life, while she experienced so much violence—from the police, the outside world, and often from lesbian and gay activists and artists. It is this kind of violent extraction—of black life, trans life, queer life, disabled life, poor life—that leads so many of us to hold our ideas close to our chests.” Extracting trans people’s images and ideas from the rest of their lives performs an epistemological violence that denies the complexity of their lived experience. In all likelihood, Agnes was neither an activist fighting on behalf of the trans community nor a renegade seeking to deceive medical institutions; she was a person navigating a broken system in order to live a more authentic life.
Works Cited
Caraballo, Alejandra. “To protect gender-affirming care, we must learn from trans history.” Harvard Public Health, 21 June 2023, https://harvardpublichealth.org/equity/to-protect-gender-affirming-care-we-must-learn-from-trans-history/.
Goldberg, RL. “Reframing Agnes.” The Paris Review, 26 Apr. 2019, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/04/26/reframing-agnes/.
“History Timeline.” UCLA LGBTQ Campus Resource Center, https://lgbtq.ucla.edu/history-timeline#:~:text=Doctors%20in%20the%20UCLA%20Department,traditional%20gender%20roles%20in%20children. Accessed 3 Apr. 2024.
Jorgensen, Christine. Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography. New York, Bantam Books, 1968.
Joynt, Chase, director. Framing Agnes. Level Ground, 2022.
Tourmaline. “Tourmaline on Transgender Storytelling, David France, and the Netflix Marsha P. Johnson Documentary.” Teen Vogue, 11 Oct. 2017, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/reina-gossett-marsha-p-johnson-op-ed.
[1] Agnes lied to Stoller and Garfinkel about being intersex in order to receive surgery; she told them that while she was born a boy, she began developing breast tissue during puberty. Because at that time surgeons would not operate on “healthy tissues,” Agnes needed to present a gender incongruence that clinicians of the time would understand as medically necessary for surgery.
Image Source: Marcus Gossler, Creative Commons
