HOT SPRINGS DOCUMENTARY FF REVIEW: Meg Daniels and Manie Robinson’s PROPER PRONOUNS finds true faith in gender expression
As the title implies, Meg Daniels and Manie Robinson’s Proper Pronouns is indeed a movie about transgender issues. It is not, however, a movie that focuses much on actual pronouns, so anyone looking for a discussion on when to use “they” or “xe” needs to find it elsewhere. The topic comes up exactly once, when trans minister Debra Hopkins notes that it’s just a matter of respect to refer to her as she…though she later admits she cuts her mother some slack, as somebody too old to change.
But this isn’t a movie looking to present a debate. Refreshingly, it’s a hater-free zone. Filmmakers Meg Daniels & Manie Robinson simply follow the stories of four transgender ministers in North Carolina, out of a total of six in the entire state, we’re told. Two are black, two are white, two men, and two women (per their own identification). All feel a calling to serve God, but what does that mean in a part of the country where fundamentalist evangelicals reign?
Perhaps less of a problem than one might imagine. TV news and social media tend to pump things up to the extreme, but Proper Pronouns shows the positive side of this life. Masses out to protest anti-trans laws; accepting congregations draped in rainbow flags laying hands upon one another, and the worst we see is an occasional Confederate flag or some local country boy acting bewildered about these new-fangled “unisexual” bathrooms. That’s not to say there’s no danger – trans male minister Liam Hooper explains that he has to plan all his cross-country trips with stops at places where he knows the bathroom won’t become an issue. But for the most part, all four subjects seem to feel generally supported.
Hooper also expresses at one point how exhausting it is to debate Scripture with folks who clearly haven’t read the Bible cover-to-cover many times like he has, but theological interpretation isn’t the film’s focus either. In fact, at the risk of spoiling, it leaves us on what feels like a real-life cliffhanger with regards to the Methodist Church’s position on the T in LGBT. At 65 minutes, it feels like maybe it should be a pilot for an ongoing reality series; these preachers, befitting their chosen career, feel like they have a lot more still to say.
The toughest parts of the documentary are those moments delving into how the participants’ marriages were affected by transition. Hooper and his partner passed as a lesbian couple initially; now that he’s a man, she can’t bear to think of herself as straight but has trouble defining as gay lest it imply her husband is the same gender as her. Yet they stay together. Dawn Flynn, who got married twice and had two kids to try to feel manly prior to transitioning, remains best friends with her second wife Pam, who has no sexual attraction to her former husband now as a woman. Flynn would like to date a man, but feels it would be cheating; Pam still acknowledges their anniversaries and holds out hope they might be able to remarry as women someday. Hopkins looks for love but finds it more difficult with age, while 55 year-old Mykal Shannon doesn’t talk about his romantic side.
Above all, the viewer comes away with the sense that there is true joy in living one’s truth gender-wise, and that runs side-by-side with living one’s truth in faith. And any struggles that may come alongside all of that are secondary, so long as we can love and be loved.
As bisexual sci-fi erotica author Chuck Tingle likes to say, this is a movie that proves love is real. And pounds you in the heart.
