LAVERNE COX'S DOCUMENTARY DISCLOSURE LOOKS @ TRANSGENDER REPRESENTATION ON FILM

Laverne Cox serves as executive producer in the Netflix documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen.

The documentary takes a look at transgender representation in film.

According to Indiewire, the film's creative team, cast, and crew were “almost exclusively transgender.”

Cox, who is best known for playing transgender inmate Sophia Burset on the Netflix dramedy Orange is the New Black, said that she identified with Barbra Streisand in Yentl.

“Here was Yentl, a woman, a girl, who had to pretend to be a boy or a man to become a Rabbi, and falls in love with this guy and wants him to see the woman that she is, but he only sees the man that she is presenting,” said Cox. “And that just felt like me, I was like – 'that’s me.’ I didn’t have words for it and I didn’t fully understand why, but that’s what it was.”

Director Sam Feder added: “That’s what’s so particular about a trans lens – when she told me that story, that just so crystallized a trans way of seeing, right? That we never look through. We never look through that lens as society.”

Disclosure premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

In addition to Cox, the documentary features Jen Richards, Marquise Vilson, Tre'vell Anderson, Angelica Ross, Brian Michael Smith, Yance Ford, Zeke Smith, Lilly Wachowski, Mj Rodriguez, Michael D Cohen, Chaz Bono, Jamie Clayton, Alexandra Billings, Tiq Milan, Nick Adams, Trace Lysette, Rain Valdez, Zackary Drucker, Chase Strangio, Sandra Caldwell, Candis Cayne, Susan Stryker, Alexandra Grey, Jazzmun, Ser Anzoategui, Elliot Fletcher, Bianca Leigh, Leo Sheng, Mickey R. Mahoney, and Hailie Sahar.

“The ways in which trans people have been represented have suggested that we're mentally ill, that we don't exist. Yet, here we are. And we've always been here,” Cox said in the film's trailer.

SOURCE: ON TOP MAG