Trans Studies and Trans History: Videos & Podcasts

- From the Sundance film Institute

- WGBH (Boston Public Broadcasting)

Welcome to the Fifty Shades of Gender project. We want to help create a world where we can all shine as bright as we are, and become beacons to empower others to do the same.

By sharing the stories of those who helped a despised minority take its rightful place in society as full and equal citizens, we aim to encourage connection, pride, and solidarity within the LGBTQ+ community—and to provide an entry point for both allies and the general public to its largely hidden history.

One From the Vaults, a trans history podcast by Morgan M Page. We bring you all the dirt, gossip, and glamour from trans history!

Shot over the course of 1997–2004, this documentary is an incredible snapshot of a vibrant array of butches, studs, and masc folks of color from the New York City ballroom and nightlife scene who are claiming their own space and identity.

A dramatization of the real-life story of Brandon Teena (played by Hilary Swank), an American trans man who attempts to find himself and love in Nebraska but falls victim to a brutal murder.

In the 1950s and ’60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed—dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalized for their self-expression. Told through the memories of those who visited the house, the film provides a moving look back at a secret world where the persecuted and frightened found freedom, acceptance and, often, the courage to live out of the shadows.

An eye-opening look at transgender depictions in film and television, revealing how Hollywood simultaneously reflects and manufactures our deepest anxieties about gender

The pseudonymous Agnes was a pioneering transgender woman who participated in an infamous gender health study conducted at UCLA in the 1960s. Her clever use of the study to gain access to gender-affirming healthcare led to her status as a fascinating and celebrated figure in trans history.

It chronicles Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, prominent figures in gay liberation and transgender rights movement in New York City from the 1960s to the 1990s and co-founders of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.

A look at the life and ideas of Pauli Murray, a non-binary Black lawyer, activist and poet who influenced both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall.

This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene.

story of the first known act of collective, violent resistance to the social oppression of queer people in the United States - a 1966 riot in San Francisco's impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood, three years before the famous gay riot at New York's Stonewall Inn. Screaming Queens introduces viewers to street queens, cops and activist civil rights ministers who recall the riot and paint a vivid portrait of the wild transgender scene in 1960s San Francisco.

Southern Comfort is a 2001 documentary film about the final year in the life of Robert Eads, a transgender man. Eads, diagnosed with ovarian cancer, was turned down for treatment by a dozen doctors out of fear that treating such a patient would hurt their reputations

When Director Kristen Lovell moved to New York City in the 1990s and began to transition, she was fired from her job. With so few options to earn money to survive, Kristen, like many transgender women of color during this era, began sex work in an area known as “The Stroll” in the Meatpacking District of lower Manhattan, where trans women congregated and forged a deep camaraderie to protect each other from harassment and violence.
Reuniting her sisters to tell this essential New York story from their first-hand experiences, Kristen’s intimate narration and interviews bring an astonishing array of archival material of bygone New York from the 1970s through the early 2000s to life.