Review of Disclosure
I don’t remember the first time I saw a transgender person portrayed on screen. Probably my first memory of someone crossdressing is Mrs. Doubtfire, a movie which, like so many movies in our childhood, I enjoyed as a kid and now look back up with a cringey awareness of how problematic it is. So, for as long as I can remember, I only knew that the representation of trans people in TV and movies was very problematic. I didn’t learn about transgender people and issues from TV, or even from books—I learned about it from the Internet, mostly from Twitter. And it makes me wonder: if portrayals of trans people had been more numerous, and better, when I was a kid, would I have come out to myself sooner?
Disclosure is a documentary that premiered at Sundance and was recently picked up by Netflix and is about transgender representation on screen. The format is simple: numerous trans people of all genders share their thoughts in interview format, and in between, we get clips from specific TV shows or movies. The simplicity of this format really appealed to me and made it easy to dip in and out of the…