To better contextualize our screening of The Wrong Body, the Film Fetsival conducted a virtual interview with Zachary Nataf, current director and curator of the International Transgender Film & Video Festival. Listen in on part of the exchange:

TILGFF: What was the impetus for the Channel 4 production, "The Wrong Body"?
Did it come from the transgender community? Was it part of Channel 4's "Queer Street"?

Zachary Nataf (ZN): The Wrong Body came out of a proposal for a series on ethical, medical decisions, a project conceived of by the production company Windfall Films and Ch.4's Commissioning Editor for Science, Sara Ramsden. The programme ended up being two parts of the six part series, The Decision, which also included programmes on such issues as cervical cancer and pregnancy, a father wanting to give both his kidneys to two sons who needed transplants requiring him to go on a kidney machine, as well as pulling the plug on patients in vegetative states.

The main subject of the piece was 13 year old Fredd, (who is now 16 and has finally been given hormone treatment by the doctors), and the ethical issue was whether or not the doctors should treat a transsexual who was so young. The Producer Oliver Morse and Director/Camera operator Nichola Karatjitis followed Fredd and his family, myself and a third FTM (female to male transsexual) Jared around for just over a year.

I met Oliver at a national conference for the UK transgender community and an annual Get-Together for the UK FTM Network. I told him my story and a few months later he got in touch with me to, in the first instance, advise Fredd and then to participate in the documentary myself.

TILGFF: In Japan, transgender and transexual visibility is very low. For that reason, some in our audience may not understand the difference between "transsexual" and "transgender."

ZN: Transsexuals whose gender identity is in conflict with their natal gender assignment usually want to achieve congruence of identity, role and anatomy through living full-time in the desired gender role and having sex reassignment surgery. The word transgender was originally used to distinguish full-time non-surgical cross-dressers from transsexuals and
from transvestites who cross-dress part time.

TILGFF: Do you think the broadcast had a positive effect?

ZN: The impact was incredible. Because FTMs compared to MTFs have been virtually invisible, this was a landmark in terms of media representation. The shows had viewing figures of 2.9 million for the first episode and 3.5 for the second. People of every race, class, age, gender and description and walks of life came up to me during the months after broadcast to wish me luck and to tell me that they understood for the first time that transsexualism wasn't about sex or sexual perversion but gender ... There was also a huge impact on the lesbian community with a number of dykes deciding to come out as transgendered and others as transsexual.

TILGFF: Why did you want to participate in the programme?

ZN: In The Wrong Body, I simply talked about why I had decided to make the transition. The documentary shows my everyday life and the process up to my first surgery.The reason I agreed to do the programme was that I had seen two Monika Truet films in the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival which were the first representations I'd seen of FTMs.

These films helped me make my decision to transition after putting it off for so many years. I wanted to help other FTMs who had been isolated and/or unable to act and to go
forward constructively in their lives including transitioning if they needed to.

I wanted people to see a healthy, happy, proud and articulate representation of a transsexual, instead of someone who was a sad, pathologised victim of circumstances and social marginalisation.

TILGFF: The films that influenced you were ones you saw at a Lesbian and Gay Film Fetsival? How do you see the role of visual media for transgender individuals and the transgender community as paralleling or differing from the needs of lesbian and/or gay individuals and communities? Do you see tensions in a Lesbian and Gay Film Festival as a venue for screening transgender-related films?

ZN: The tensions that do arise if transgender is collapsed into lesbian & gay are that the differences are erased. Some TG people are lesbian or gay or bisexual, but a significant percentage are not. Transgender issues are primarily about gender not sexuality-- although, of course, they are linked.

But the majority of lesbians and gays, like their straight equivalents who cannot fathom the transgender subjectivity, do not believe transsexuals exist. For them, we are repressed homosexuals. They think transsexuals should change society, not their bodies, and they think that transsexuals are reactionary in regard to concepts of gender or that transsexuals are
upholders of the binary gender paradigm themselves.

TILGFF: Why did you organize the world's first transgender film festival?

ZN: I set up the TG film festival in order to do for TG audiences, what lesbian and gay film festivals had done to de-pathologise lesbian and gay subjectivities and to empower that audience by giving them representations which were not offensive or oppressive as those which had been made by non-gay filmmakers in the not so distant past. We are empowered as an audience now who wants to see itself represented accurately and diversely.

The representations of us as psychopathic serial killers or the pathetic drag queen prostitute used for comic relief assume that we are not members of the cinema audience but are objects of the exotic underworld of the non-TG filmmakers dark fascination. The fact is most of us are just ordinary people coping well or otherwise, with our special circumstances. Some of us are very courageous.

There are stories about our real lives that we would like to see ... Representing transgender people is political for the general public as well as for TG people ... The result of this increased activism and visibility are bringing us employment protection rights now in the UK via the European Court of Human Rights.

TILGFF: What are the Transgender Festival's goals? And your goals?

ZN: We hope to go on eventually to archive, distribute and produce transgender work and films by trans filmmakers, videomakers, installation, new media and performance artists. One of the first things we will produce will be HIV/safe sex material for the transgender community. I would like to make films myself and am working on scripts. I will continue to write about trans issues and work as a political activist and educator.