Thursday, 07 September 2006

A Journey in Diversity

Transgender filmmaker Dee McLachlan’s new DVD aims to counter sensationalist stereotypes of male-to-female trans people. She spoke with Katrina Fox.

Dee McLachlan has worked in the film industry for more than 20 years, having made documentaries and feature films internationally. Several of her films have had theatrical releases in the US, including Born Wild, which starred Brooke Shields and Martin Sheen, and The Second Jungle Book. However, after she transitioned from male to female, her career “hit a brick wall”.

“All emails stopped from LA; they didn’t particularly want to know about it,” she says. “A lot of the companies I worked with in the US, it was easier for them to work with someone else. I got offered a children’s film and it was going to be a studio picture. They always interview the director for these kids’ studio films and they said ‘come over but you’ve got to come as a man, because we don’t want any transgender story floating around the director on a kids’ film’. So I had to pass that up.”

South-African-born McLachlan, who emigrated to Australia from the US seven years ago, decided to start up her own company, Roseline Partners, to continueher work as a filmmaker. Her latest offering, made in co-ordination with researcher and producer, Patricia Church, is M2F – A Journey in Gender Identity.

Dee McLachlan

The 52-minute documentary provides an overview of transsexualism and transgenderism, including interviews with various trans people such as New Zealand’s Georgina Beyer, the first transsexual in the world to be elected to parliament; Captain Sarah Parry, who served in the Royal Australian Navy in Vietnam and Borneo; Julie Peters, a geneticist and politician; and Tracy Deichmann and Andrea Ross, a trans-lesbian couple. Expert opinions are featured throughout, including those of Professor Milton Diamond and the now-deceased Dr Herbert Bower from the Monash Medical Centre Gender Dysphoria Clinic in Victoria. Also on the DVD are 16 additional programs covering trangender history, transsexualism and the church and a partner’s perspective.

McLachlan and Church, who is also a transgendered woman, made the film to help people better understand those who have issues with gender identity. “We’d both changed gender but Patricia had more of a traumatic background because of her gender identity so she was keen to get something out there that portrayed some normality and didn’t sensationalise any of the issues,” McLachlan explains.

In addition to M2F, the pair have made The XY Factor, a multimedia teaching kit for companies and institutions to help employees understand gender diversity in the workplace.

Meanwhile, McLachlan, who is a parent and lives in Melbourne, is forging ahead with other projects, including The Jammed, a documentary about sex trafficking in Melbourne. “That will be coming out soon hopefully in cinemas – we are trying to get a distributor,” she says. “I’m also working on a medical training drama and a couple of comedy scripts. I like comedy and am trying to find investors for those. It’s a long arduous process getting a film off the ground.”

M2F: A Journey to Gender Identity is $20 for private use and $200 for corporate and government use, plus postage and packing. The XY Factor is $695 for corporate use. Both are available from Patricia Church at Roseline Partners, ph (03) 9773 1954 or visit www.m2fgender.com

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 06 September 2006 )