Gender Transformation: The Untold Realities (film review)

By Brandon Showalter, Opinion writer and social commentator Friday, July 07, 2023

NEW YORK CITY — An El Salvadoran immigrant woman is standing behind a podium in a Washington, D.C., auditorium. It’s March 2022 and anguish is etched on her face, her grief palpable and her lips quivering. She’s recounting her worst nightmare: how she learned that her troubled teen daughter had knelt in front of an oncoming train and ended her life. 

This petite Latina lady is Abigail Martinez. Her daughter Yaeli died by suicide in September of 2019 in Southern California, long before the public began paying attention to the widening impact of transgender ideology. Martinez had to hear about how local authorities had retrieved the “pieces” of Yaeli’s remains from the railroad tracks. Her voice halts a bit as she details the horror. This was the first time she shared her story publicly.

Fast forward to today, and Yaeli’s story is still seared in my memory but it’s only one of many, and more are coming. Her story, and others, are being told in a wave of documentaries, including the most recent docudrama “Gender Transformation: The Untold Realities” by Swedish filmmaker Tobias Elvhage of EpochTV, which premiered at Cinema Village in New York City in the Manhattan Film Festival on June 16.

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The filmmakers take viewers on Yaeli’s journey, recreating the events that led to her gender confusion, medicalization, and ultimately, suicide. It serves as a case study of what could happen when a child becomes mired in the belief that their sexed body is somehow “wrong”. The film extends the lens to how schools, government agencies and medical institutions manipulate parents to get on the metaphorical train of gender transitioning, often against their better instincts.

Interspersed with Yaeli’s tale is expert commentary from a variety of professionals who have put their heads above the parapet to speak out about the dangers of what is euphemistically known as “gender-affirming care.” 

Among those appearing are Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an endocrinologist; Jennifer Bilek, an extraordinary investigative journalist; Walt Heyer, a detransitioner in his 80s and the founder of Sex Change Regret; and Erin Friday, a doggedly determined attorney and mom of a teen girl who was once caught up in a trans identity. Other contributors are Dr. Miriam Grossman, a child and adolescent psychiatrist; Dr. Katherine Welch, a doctor from Indianapolis; and Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, a licensed clinical social worker. Brave, young detransitioners, most notably Chloe Cole, also appear and their words about the irreversible medical harm they endured are compelling.

The expert testimony provides gravitas to the recreated drama, anchoring the emotionally-charged film. 

Friday, in the film, ponders: “When did parents suddenly become enemy #1?” 

She says she’s spoken to “hundreds if not thousands” of moms and dads who have found themselves navigating this problem alone and frightened. “Our stories are all the same,” she adds. Today she works with Our Duty-USA, an advocacy group and international network of parents who wish to protect their children from gender ideology. 

Increasingly, public institutions, especially schools, are thwarting parents who question the prevailing cultural narrative about their child’s so-called “gender identity.” Social services departments and law enforcement are weaponized against loving parents; they are often called “abusive” for merely disagreeing with gender ideology and their child’s embrace of a new identity.

Friday recounts how, in her case, not long after she fiercely objected to school officials referring to her daughter by a new, opposite-sex name, the authorities – both the cops and CPS on separate occasions – showed up at her door. She believes they did so to intimidate her. 

Martinez describes how a family who is supportive of trans ideology kidnapped her daughter to facilitate her transition. Yaeli had secretly communicated with this family and they then came to her house in the dead of night and carted her off so that a social services agency could more easily remove Martinez’s legal custody and place Yaeli in an LGBT-friendly group home for youth. This family went so far as to remove the license plate from their car so that Martinez could not determine who it might have been as they drove off.

Time after time this struggling mom is straitjacketed by ideologically captured entities such as the family court system. A judge signed off on Yaeli’s experimental medicalization against Martinez’s objections. Martinez’s impassioned pleas that Yaeli undergo a psychological evaluation before taking the hormones are ignored. The cross-sex hormones, being at odds with her biology, caused Yaeli tremendous mental and physical pain to the point where she was constantly miserable.

When Martinez appears at an Our Duty USA-led demonstration outside the annual conference for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which took place in Anaheim last fall, trans activists hurl cruel jeers at her as she speaks of her deceased daughter.

Interestingly, the screening of “Gender Transformation” went off without a hitch, without violence or pushback. But it joins a string of other films aiming to convey a similar message including the indie documentary film “Dead Name” which was released in December, “The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters” by the Center for Bioethics and Culture, and “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care” (formerly titled “Affirmation Generation”), a film made by lifelong leftists.

Films such as these face opposition in high places. Streaming platform Vimeo scrubbed “Dead Name” from its platform amid accusations of “hate speech.” The film was soon re-homed on a platform of its own. AMC Theaters recently pulled “No Way Back” from being shown in its venues, caving to activist pressure.

Not every family with children declaring a trans identity deal with the dire consequences of death, though there are plenty of other devastating stories. Even so, parents caught up in this dystopia often despairingly speak of symbolic deaths as their children transform into something beyond recognition, both physically and emotionally.

Many parents indeed feel as though their lives are a train wreck. This is the main story, moms and dads whose disrupted lives embody the docudrama’s subtitle, “The untold realities.” Now that they are finally being told more widely, here’s hoping that parents such as Martinez and every affected family find some relief from their otherworldly suffering.