Extended Essay

English B

Category 2:​ culture and society section

To what extent are the films ​Boys Don't Cry​ and ​the Danish girl​ a reflection of
Transgenders in the 20th century.

Number of words: ​3524

Table of contents

Introduction ………………………………………………………….. 2

State of LGBT rights ………………………………………………... 4

Representation of transgender in films …………………………... 6

Characters of the movies ………………………………………...... 7

Boys don't cry ………………………………………………... 8

The Danish girl ………………………………………………. 9

Conclusion …………………………………………………………. 10

Bibliography ………………………………………………………... 11

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 Introduction

In order to understand the evaluation of this extended essay, we need with a view to
understand the difference among gender and sex. The term sex refers to the organic
difference between male and woman while gender might be described as the social and
cultural role of every intercourse within a giving society ​(​Medical News Today, 2017​)​. Sometimes,
like in these cases, a person's genetically assigned intercourse does now not line up with their
gender identity.
 
Imagine living in a society where some people around you have a closed mind. You
have to try and go unnoticed and try to dissimulate every step you take, trying not to stand
out and make a scene. You stay quiet and fear what might happen if you come out of the
closet and show everyone your true identity.
Even Though we are in 2020, transgender people are still facing outbreaks of
anti-trans violence. Regardless if it occurs on the streets, at their jobs, within the school
system or at the hands of government officials, the right protocols have not been adopted and
continue to put trans people at risk. According to the National Transgender Discrimination
Survey, twenty six percent of trans people have been physically assaulted on at least one
occasion or suffered a homophobic hate crime1. Most of these crimes have been committed
against black transgender woman as they make up nearly three out of four cases2. The vast
majority of transgender people report that they feel uncomfortable seeking police assistance
as a result of their policy when dealing with transgender harassment or assault. They feel this
way thanks to the way police officers deal with these kinds of cases. The National Coalition
of Anti-Violence Programs found in 2013 that transgender people were more likely to
experience police violence than the general population as a whole.

The main purpose of this extended essay is to analyze how transgender people in the
movies Boys don't cry and ​the Danish girl are a representation of trans rights in 1930s

1
​ Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, at 80.
2
​National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and HIV-Affected Hate Violence in 2013. New York, NY: NCAVP (2014).
Available at: ​http://avp.org/storage/documents/2013_ncavp_hvreport_final.pdf

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Germany and Nebraska in the 1990s. In addition, these two societies will be compared and
contrasted to see how they have evolved and progressed in relation in regards to LGBT
rights. This will be done by evaluating statistics and real life cases in which homophobic
attacks occured in the two countries as well as investigating the evolution of LGBT laws
during the period of time in which the movies were released.

The movie ​Boys don't cry (1999) is based on the story of Brandon Teena, a young
transgender teen, who was unfortunately raped and murdered in Falls City, Nebraska in
1993. It represents those developing rural zones in the bible belt of the United States.
According to Pew Research Centre in Nebraska most of their population are christians, more
specifically, evangelical protestants, mainline protestants and catholics. These religious
groups represent 75% of the population in Nebraska.
This is the background in which the main character, Teena finds herself dealing with
these identity issues. From the point of view of the viewer, we get an inside look at her real
identity. While the viewer is aware of her personal struggles, in reality nobody knows she is
suffering and does her best to hide her real identity from her friends. She lives her life
according to her male identity, Brandon but her friends are unaware of her identity until they
find a document with her birth name. While her girlfriend accepted her, her male friends saw
her differently. Her male friends felt completely deceived and wanted to get revenge as they
felt they had been lied to. They decide to kidnap her and they bring her to a room where she
is raped. She tries to fight back but her aggression causes her aggressors to be more violent
and end up killing her. When the police come upon the crime scene things are not handled
correctly. When it's covered in the media it is also reported and gives a complete spin on the
actual events. The Police mishandle the investigation. She previously went to them for help
and they laughed at her and made her feel like it was her fault that she was being harassed.
In regards to the Media's Handling of the investigation, instead of looking at the murder as a
hate crime, they put the focus on the fact that she is transsexual.The fact that she lived this
alternative lifestyle meant that it was mostly her fault.

​The Danish girl (2015) ​was based on the story of Einar Wegener, the first person to undergo
sex-surgery in Germany. Unfortunately, it was the first time they tried this experimental

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method, so he did not feel completely like a woman and needed to undergo a second
operation. In this second operation, her body could not handle it and she died.

What ​the Danish girl has in common with ​Boys dont cry is that in both movies you
could see a reflection of society and the country itself. In this essay we will discuss the
contrast between the two societies, one in Germany and the other in Nebraska. Also, we are
going to analize how transgenders are viewed in their communities using statistics and real
life incidents.

State of LGBT rights

The LGBT collective has been looking for their freedom of expression and acceptance
in all parts of the world since they are not well integrated in society. The countries we are
going to investigate are Germany and the United States.
The LGBT collective during the subsequent length had no voice until the Stonewall
rebel occured. The Stonewall rise up became a way of expression from the homosexual
community against a police raid in an LGBT bar in Manhattan in 1969. This event is taken
into consideration as the most crucial event leading to the gay liberation motion and the
modern combat for LGBT rights inside the United States (Pruitt, S, 2019)​.  ​Years later, George
Bush in 1990 become president with his plan to protect people that suffered from
discrimination. In his presidency, he signed the Hate Crime Statistics Act which encouraged
the Attorney General to assemble all the cases about hate crimes. In this case, it was the first
time that a federal institution recognized LGBT people.

Now we have an idea of what was happening in the United States at the period of the
movie ​Boys don't cry was produced and based on. Apart from analysing the United States in
general, we are going to go deeper into Nebraska, the state where the story took place. In
Nebraska were permitted sodomy laws until 1979 were the federal state overthrew them by
reviewing the penal code ​(Equaldex, 2016)​. From that moment, it was achieved the legality of
same sex activity. Furthermore, until 2015 it was illegal to marry in the state of Nebraska and

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if we talk about criminal justice laws and policies, they sentence with jail hate crimes while
in the 1990s was developing.
In addition, the main character of the movie is a transexual person that wanted to be
defined as a man instead of a woman. In Nebraska, nowadays gender identity and expression
is legal by changing their gender on their birth certificate where in the 1990s was
unimaginable.

All the advances related to the LGBT collective in Nebraska are achieved in the 20th
century where in the rest of states, started years before. So, if the state has advanced so late in
relation to LGBT rights, the society in Nebraska has evolved also in the 20th century or
earlier?

Leaving the United States apart, we are moving to Germany and the 1930s where the
movie ​the Danish Girl took place. The story is about a Danish man called Lili that ends up
realizing that he wants to become a woman thanks to his wife. For that reason, he decided to
travel to Berlin and undergo sex reassignment by one of the best doctors in that area.

The LGBT rights in Germany were the opposite to the ones of the United States by
the fact that this collective has been tolerated by society since 1920. By this time, Berlin was
the capital for gender minorities where people travelled to see Doctor Hirschfeld, specialist
on gender operations. The amount of people was so extensive that the German authorities had
to implant special identifications called “travesties pass” to the institutes that includes
medical treatment as well as social networking and job placement ​(Beachy 2014: 172-80). To
remove any possibility of community or shared identification, they decided to allow the
Danish Girl to represent Lili as a lonely “transgender pioneer” however, historically
speaking, she was one one of many people to underwent medical reassignment. Lili was not
even the first one, it was Martha Baer in 1907​.

In the 21st century, Germany developed other laws in relation to the LGBT collective.
In 2001 same-sex couples have been legally recognized as well as letting them participate in
the military service ​(​Berg. K, 2018)​. If we compared both countries, in relation to the 20th
century, we could say that the mentality of the german government and society were more

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thoughtful about the LGBT collective by helping them with job employment and medical
surgeries. Moreover, Nebraska is still developing new laws and benefits towards transgender
people and the hole LGBT collective.

Both movies are an exact representation on their respective societies because in the
movie ​Boys don't cry we have the discrimination towards Brandon, the main character when
they discover he is transgender and in ​The danish girl,​ the main character is well accepted in
Berlin without any discriminatory comment or violent act towards her. They are totally
diverse between them over a period of time and the rights LGBT people receive.

Representation of transgenders in films

Nowadays we are influenced by external factors that in some way affects our way of
thinking, making us accesibles to manipulation with fake information or exposing the facts
only from a point of view. If we talk about transgenders in cinema, they are assigned by the
nickname of “The others”. The definition of “The others” is the idea of what is not
considered normal in our society ​(​Donnelly, N. 2015)​. Therefore, most of the habitants that
composed the planet are denominated as cisgenders, making transgender individuals feel
more excluded than they are and taking part of a minority group. According to Merriam
Webster, ​cisgenders are those individuals whose gender identity matches to their sexual
phenotype, the opposite of transgender. If we take into account that in cinema a member of
the LGBT collective is being undervalued, the audience could copy that stereotype and use it
against them in real life.

This manipulation starts with the representation of transgenders in movies. First of all,
we have the one that occurs in comedies leading to offensive representations. The objective
of transgenders in this type of movies is to make the audience laugh. For example, In the case
of representing trasexuals as travesties. Travesties are usually mens dressed up like women
that commonly act in shows. In this case, the interpretation is not a hundred percent
transexual since the man does not feel like a woman, he only dresses up like one of them

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because he needs to achieve something but the person who is watching the movie does not
differentiate between them if we do not explain it ​(​Díez, V. 2015)​.
Nonetheless, this could have an indirect influence in society in the way they see
transsexuals since they carry these fictional characters to real life, misunderstanding
transexual with travesti leading to unnecessary jokes even to aggressions.

Regardless of the negative points of humorous movies about transgenders and its
effect in society, directors are starting to be meticulous about the external problem that this
kind of films could be doing by giving them a new and attractive point of view. In this new
productions, actual cases of transsexuals are portrayed without his initial thought of making
people laugh. Furthermore, their actual objective is to highlight the problematic that
transgenders are going through and leaving apart the stigma that society puts ons them ​(​Díez, V.
2015)​.

Everything is related to how they reflect transgenders in society. The way the
different movies characterized transgender people with their prejudices and stereotypes,
makes people difficult to introduce LGBT collective into society if they do not distinguish
between travesti and transexual leading to a serious misunderstood.

Characters of the movies

Boys don't cry:

The main character of this movie is based on a real case in a modest village in
Nebraska. His name is Brandon Teena, a young teenager who was raped and murdered just
for being transgender when they discover in the trash a court summons with his female name,
Teena Brandon. This film is a clear representation of how the stigma and the prejudice
against transexuals affect into society, leading to a murder of an innocent teenager when the
only thing that he wanted was to feel safe and accepted. This is the main point when
analysing this representation and the stigma of transgenders.

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 As I said before, the crime occured in a rural zone of Nebraska in 1993 where LGBT
collective was not accepted in society. According to Pew Research Centre, the 34% of
Catholic citizens strongly oppose against same-sex marriage vs 57% in favour and a 9% do
not know in the whole United States but if we center the percentage to Nebraska, a 44% of
the population is against and a 51%in favour leading to a small difference between both
groups.
During the 1990 and the 1999, in the United States 17 hate crimes against this
collective were committed. One of the most famous cases, without taking into account the
one of Brandon, is the one of Matthew Shepard, a gay student who was brutally attacked,
tortured and abandoned in Colorado.

By this time, the Requests for new rules to address hate crimes received momentum
during insurance of the incident. The state law stated that crimes committed on the basis of
sexual orientation could not be prosecuted as hate crimes.
When Clinton became president, one of his primary targets changed into to renovate
the federal hate crime regulation to encompass gay people and all of the individuals of the
LGBT community ​(Msnbc, 2018)​.
The most widespread within the case of Matthew is that the media insurance became
given to the murder and to what role his sexual orientation performed as a motive inside the
commission of the crime.​This also happened in Brandons case. The village of Brandon was
crowded with media and reporters to convey the successes. In spite of transmitting the real
story, they turn around everything and point Brandon as the real guilty ​(Eileraas, K 2002)​.
All these hate crimes are related to the whole collective because it is a loose war
where they have been fighting over for years. Although the LGBT group has been working
on achieving their rights, nowadays we continue finding cases like this.

In the two cases exposed before, the police acted in different ways. In the case of
Brandon, when he wanted to testify on what happened the day his murderers rapped him, the
police officer treated hin in a shameful way to the point of dehumanizing him for the type of
questions he was answering. Now, if we talk about Matthews' case, it was completely
opposite. In this event that occured one year later, the first police officer that arrived at the
crime scene, found Matthew alive but covered with blood. She tried to help him by cleaning

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an airway in Mathews mouth with her hands because her medical equipment were faulty
(​Sheerin, J. 2018)​. Even though she had the defective medical material, she did what he could to
help him.
These two actuations of the police towards discriminations crimes are totally opposed.
In the first one the police do not try to help Brandon on his situation after telling the officer
he was victim of a rape and the second one he does everything he could to keep the boy alive.

In these two cases, the representation of the LGBT collective on movies are not
totally the same in all the situations we find in real life. Both occurred in the same period of
time but in different states so it could be problematic on the rights of LGBT people in those
states. Like I have said before, Nebraska does not have clear rights towards the LGBT
collective like other states, since there could be those rights, for example in the different
actions of police in these cases.

The Danish Girl:

In the same way as in the previous movie, the main character is inspired on the real
story about Einar Wegener, also called Lili Elbe, was the first person to undergo sex
reassignment surgery in Germany to become a veritable women. She took this big step
because he believed that a woman was hiding inside him and it was not his real body. He felt
like a woman. The audience could develop what may be happening in the movie when Gerda
asks Einar to dress up and pose to her like a woman because the model did not show up. By
this scene, you could imagine that Einar feels more comfortable being Lili than himself.

The main point of The Danish girl is to represent transgender identity from a
cisgender mentality. This effect could be found by the representation of a transgender
character by a cisgender actor called Eddie Redmayne. The presence of this actor intensifies
the story of Lili from his point of view, allowing the audience to perceive a more realistic
interpretation and giving the audience a reason to overcome the mentality of assuming that
​ urthermore, The Danish girl
transgender woman are actually ill ​(“Men in dresses”). F
emphasizes the assumption that viewers have on transgenders bodies, making them see that
their bodies are not medical anomalies. The film instead tries to remove these attitudes

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towards transgender bodies by not mentioning any historical reference respect to the
existence of Lili, even though sexologists made progress in relation to discoveries in the
sexuality of transgender persons​ (​Keegan, C. 2018)​.

Moreover, when she traveled to Germany, she did not feel discriminated against at
any time by the society since the German government, in that period of time, had laws that
favored the LGBT collective. Another real example in germany of reassignment sex surgery
was from a jewish woman called Martha Bear subsequently known as Karl. M. Boer.

The case of Martha was complicated. She grew up as a girl but she knew that his
external appearance did not join with his sense of self. This was written by him in his
autobiography called “Memories of a Man's Maiden Years ” published in 1907. In his case,
he knew from the beginning something was happening inside his body.
The real change occured when he suffered an accident in Berlin and was attended in the
hospital. The doctors noticed his unusual body and the fact that he presented himself as a man
when in his ID card cames like a woman. So, the doctors decided to call Hirschfeld, the most
famous sexologist in germany to give a recommendation of this case. After Hirschfeld and
the state approval, he underwent a sex-change operation in 1906 ​(​Aderet, O. 2018)​.

As you can observe, Lili was not the first transgender person to underwent sex-
reassignment surgery, it was Karl. Nonetheless, both cases are similar in spite of being ten
years of difference between them. The main point of both cases is to give the society an idea
of how the German government treated the LGBT collective and the rights they receive. In
this case, it is a real representation of how transgenders lived in the 20th century in germany.

Conclusion

To conclude, as we could observe, the movie ​Boys don't cry ​gives a clear idea of how
transgender lives in Nebraska but we do not have to extrapolated to the rest of states in the
United States. With the two real examples given about Matthew Shepard and Brandon, the
main character of the movie, the LGBT rights are seen in different ways.

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 With the police performance towards this collective, there is a significant difference
between both cases when in Brandons case, the police treated him in a dreadful way instead
of helping him finding his rapists and in the one of Matthew, the police tried to keep him
alive in spite of having his medical equipment broken. In this case, the representation of
transgender in the movie only affects at the Nebraska state, not to the hole United States.

On the other side, the representation of transgender in the movie The Danish girl
represents the reality of how the LGBT collective in general lives in germany leading the
audience to have a clear idea of the society in the 20th century. Now, comparing the case of
Karl with Lili, are similar between them because both wanted to went through
sex-reassignment surgery and they provided to them.

If we compare both movies, we could say that the representation of transgender

characters in their respectives societies are clearly presented and well demonstrated. This
keeps the situation in the whole movie to the spectator leading to an idea of how the real
Nebraska and Germany were in the 20th century.

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