|
 The suggestion gave her a "sinking feeling," she recalls. "I
didn't ever want that day to come."
Two decades later, Shattuck tells her family's story in a
documentary, "From This Day Forward," to be broadcast on Monday,
Oct. 10, for the first time in the United States.
The film follows Shattuck and her family as they come to terms
with the coming out of her father, Trisha, as transgender,
tackling issues of marriage, commitment, tolerance and coping
with the unexpected.
Shattuck, who lives in New York, said she set out five years ago
to make a film about other people with transgender family
members, mentioning but not planning to focus on her own.
"I felt really uncomfortable about putting myself out there,"
she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
She said she soon realized her own family was engaging, open and
would make a better movie.
The movie describes Trisha Shattuck's years of hiding her
cross-dressing, the embarrassment Shattuck and her sister felt
in school and their treatment by neighbors and teachers.
It exposes their father's dark moments contemplating suicide and
her parents struggling to decide whether to stay together.
Her mother, Marcia, was the most reluctant to appear on camera,
and it took about two years until she was willing to speak out,
Shattuck said.
In the film, Shattuck says many children are as much in the
closet as their LGBT parents might be until they can come out
and talk about it.
"When I was a kid, I was trying to hide it," she said. "As an
adult, it's been very powerful and affirming to tackle it head
on.
"This is what my family is," she said. "I'm not ashamed."
[to top of second column] |
Nevertheless, stepping out in public as the child of a transgender
parent and promoting her film has been disquieting and at times
frightening, she said.
"I don't know if somebody's going to stand up and say, 'Your family
is disgusting,'" she said.
Despite the popular U.S. series "Transparent" and high-profile
transgender celebrities such as Caitlin Jenner, "a lot of people in
America are still very uncomfortable around the idea of transgender
people," she said.
The film will be shown on Monday on POV, a long-running showcase of
independent non-fiction films on the nation's Public Broadcasting
Service (PBS).
In February, "From This Day Forward" will be available on Netflix
and SundanceNow, an online streaming service, she said.
"I think there's some sort of universal lesson to be learned about
accepting or embracing other people or other families and just
seeing us as any other family," Shattuck said.
"But I understand that it's still interesting for people," she
added. "That's why I made the movie."
(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Alisa Tang. Please credit
the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson
Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking,
land rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
