Who We Become Building a Trans Family

My name is Adam Perez and I’m co-producing a feature documentary with my partner Jan Hendrik Hinzel entitled “who we become.” The film is about building a trans family, focusing on a makeshift family bonded by the search for community.

We are reaching out to different organizations and people to spread the word out about the film.

If you have any suggestions, or advice for us, we would love to hear it. Hendrik and I are working with the Bronx Documentary Center, but we’ve financed, produced, edited, designed everything ourselves. We recently launched an indiegogo campaign to raise funds for an editor.

We were hoping you could share this with your team and network.

Here’s a link to our campaign: http://igg.me/at/wwbfilm/x

Who We Become Building a Trans Family

Who we become is a documentary about building a trans family. The film focuses on a makeshift family bonded by the search for community. Jace, who was forced to leave his home, moved to NYC where he found refuge with a trans family and started a new life away from his rural Texas hometown. As soon as he arrived in New York, he started taking hormones for his transition from female to male. With few resources, Kim and Cris run a clinic in the Bronx that deals with trans care. They try tirelessly to create a family of transgender individuals who are isolated by friends and disowned by their families.

Within the trans community there is a debate about whether one should live openly as trans or remain stealth, meaning not disclosing you are trans. There is a strong fear in the community that being trans could mean risking one’s life. This summer alone, five trans women were murdered in the U.S. The Human Rights Campaign reported that a transgender person has a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered. And for people of color, the probability is even higher.

In times of increasing hate crimes against members of the LGBTQ community in New York, the trans community struggles to find solidarity. There is a debate within the group about the goals of the trans community, collective identity and a changing of the guard. Other factors like race and income inequality compact this tension.

Past documentaries on trans people have focused on the medical transition, drag culture and trans women. We wanted to shift the focus and illustrate how for many trans people, community means family and family is essential to their survival. We also wanted to show the struggle of navigating life as a transgender person.

We hope that our documentary can contribute to more acceptance of transgender individuals and shed a light on the violence and struggles many of them face.

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