RENE'S STORY
2004








May 18, 2004
Showtime
English
77 minutes
Directed by Josh Aronson (Sound And Fury)

Imagine waking up each day and seeing that you had a mermaid's tail instead of the legs that you thought you'd wake up with. That is sort of the thing that Rene goes through each morning when he wakes up with a vagina instead of a penis. This documentary looks at Rene, who was born a girl, but rejected his biology as soon as he was conscious of it. He didn't want to ever wear a shirt, he cut his hair short. He began taping his budding breasts down in High School. His mother was dead-set against the deception and with the help of her son, pulled off Rene's shirt in front of a high school girlfriend to prove Rene's femaleness. So sad. As a reassignment surgeon states late in the film, "Rene was born a male, but with a bad birth defect" which was his sexual organs. Rene is nothing if not brave, letting us in on his entire ordeal, in shockingly intimate detail. I realize I'm using the "male" pronoun as I believe you are what you feel, not what you biologically are. But if there is one person more brave, it is Rene's wife of 12 years, Wona.

This young woman is bright, understanding, incredibly beautiful, but almost shockingly naive. They met when she was 16 or so, before she could have any serious sexual contact with a biological male. So as Wona and Rene took their relationship to deeper and deeper levels, she didn't know any better. Rene claims several times that he's never been fully naked in front of anyone in his life. This claim makes our quick glimpse of him in all his naked glory all the more remarkable. His poor wife, who under California law is not his actual wife as they are both female, is thrust into the limelight of being a spokesperson for the transgender community without her consent.

Things were going along pretty well until their church all but screamed from the rafters that Rene had ovaries. They were kicked out of the church even though they were both active believers. They are still not over it.

I've seen a lot of documentaries like this, but never have I believed more fully that a person was born with the wrong equipment. Rene is such an outspoken lunkhead, that he must internally be a male. He is a homophobe, which is strange because pre-surgery he was a female looking to screw other females. The language is frank, we learn about strap ons and orgasms. During a particularly bad period for the couple, an attractive male friend of the wife's apparently had some form of sexual contact with her. She is so curious as to how "normal" couples have sex that she couldn't resist him. Who could blame her. She claims to be in love with Rene as a person, but imagine how curious she must be as to how a penis works, having never seen one.

Rene is made more compelling because he is such a dickhead. I mean seriously. It's like he read the Book of Male Stereotypes and tried to follow each one. As I mentioned, he's a homophobe. He puts this aside when he realizes that he needs the gay community as they are the only ones accepting of his situation. He inspects men in the locker room to sort of window shop his different penis options for when he has surgery. He keeps talking to people about the huge dick he will someday have and how he'll be just like every other guy when he's fucking his wife. He is led to believe by someone that he can have a large unit that experiences pleasure just like a biological male. This is something I knew not to be true, but watching him come to the realization was compelling. Rene tries out as a Chippendale's dancer, but he doesn't have the body for it. He has the typical fat distribution of a female, no matter how much he works out. He swears a lot, he dominates his poor wife, he brags about himself, he even drives a semi-truck as a job. He constantly wears tank tops from his gym, he spars with boxers.

If you believe, as I do, that sexuality is on a continuum and not an either/or proposition, then Rene shows complete proof of this. He is angry in every frame of this film. I don't remember ever seeing him smile. He is as much on the male, homophobe side of the continuum as a gay-basher. But he has a vagina. His anger is palpable. He's like a tasmanian devil. It is both humorous and sad to see him, at barely five feet tall, boxing his amazonian-in-comparison wife, trying to assert his manliness. God has played a trick on him. He is pissed about it.

He is someone that I wouldn't want to spend ten minutes with. But this makes the film much, much better. Heroic documentary subjects are a dime a dozen. But this one is flawed. It makes him just another guy, except for that whole having a vagina thing. He is something of an asshole. But who could blame him. He's a macho man without a penis. Imagine the frustration.

But more than being a dickhead, he is extremely brave to let us into his world. I'm afraid that he will be disappointed beyond belief when his reassignment surgery is completed. He will never be the huge-penis man he has always dreamed of. But then again, none of us are.

He is so devoted to maleness that he actually says that if he dies on the operating table, while having his penis attached, his family should know that he died while finally happy. It would have been worth it. He simply cannot have any kind of personal satisfaction without a penis.

Well done and explicit. I've always been interested in people who are born in the wrong body. Finally a film shows us in intimate biological detail what the surgeons are up against when performing the operations.