Becoming Johanna

I was a gender nonconforming child who loved to play with both dollhouses and Hot Wheels, wear pants and dresses. Like any child, I wanted it all! Around second grade, I started to get teased and bullied for my “sissy” ways and decided to give up “girly” things in order to evade the harassment that I intuitively knew would only get worse as I grew older. But this also meant that I abandoned an important part of myself.

In the early 2000s I began to read about children who were gender creative and transgender and were living in communities that supported them. These children and their families were doing what my community hadn’t been able to do when I was a child. As a social change filmmaker, I wanted to document and help grow the movement that embraces rather than suppresses children with gender expansive identities.

In 2007, I began work on a film that eventually turned into the Youth and Gender Media Project, a series of short films about gender expansive young people and their families and communities. I’m happy to say that the films have screened in festivals around the world and are being used in hundreds of middle schools, high schools and colleges throughout North America to help make the world safe for youth of any and all manifestations of gender identity and expression.

I first met Johanna at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital when she was participating in Bamby Salcedo’s transgender youth clinic. Bamby, a fierce transgender leader, had overcome her own demons in order to support the troubled trans youth of color in her beloved city. When I asked Bamby which
 of her young clients’ stories could make a film that would build empathy and compassion for trans youth, she immediately suggested Johanna, the youngest member of her clinic. In her own way, Johanna was as fierce as Bamby, and I suspect that Bamby hoped that the spotlight of a film might convince Johanna that her life story of courage and determination would inspire other trans and gender expansive youth to be true to themselves. And this is exactly what has happened. Now Johanna and I screen the film for young people who inevitably come away with renewed hope.