Approaching his 60th birthday after having just come through a life threatening illness, Chris Muth a Professor of Management at a High School of Engineering in Geneva decides it’s time for a change. However he’s not thinking about a conventional retirement to a cottage by the sea, or even taking a World Cruise like other senior citizens, Chris wants to become a woman. Or more specifically as he puts it he wants to ‘align his outside appearance with the person he has always been inside’.
In his 20’s whilst at University Chris lived in a Commune in Zurich and joined a club for Transvestite Women and started to cross-dress for the first time in his life. When he met his future wife, life took a straighter and more serious conventional path, and he settled down and became a father and a successful businessman before morphing into a University Professor.
There is no mention in the documentary of the intervening years but we assume from the total shock of everyone in his life when they discovering Chris’s plans, that he had always lived as a man up to this point. In fact when he leaves from Geneva Airport for Thailand to have gender re-alignment surgery this is the first time any of his friends have seen him wear women’s clothes.
Filmmaker Laurence Périgaud had literally met Chris by chance at a Conference on Transexuality a few weeks prior to the start of filming this documentary. She started her movie with the surgery and stayed for the first year of transitioning. That isn’t the only unusual aspect of the film as Chris’s Swiss Doctor explains that in cases of people wanting to undergo hormonal or surgical transition to the other sex there is the Harry Benjamin Code of Practice recognised by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health which lays down the protocols that should be followed. In this instance the Doctor (presumably aided by Psychologists) has allowed Chris to fast-track the whole process as he has barely been on hormones for eight months, and far more crucially he has never had to live openly as a woman for some time as all other patients have to do. The Doctor justifies it by asking ‘is it fair to make a person this old wait any longer?’
The Thai Doctor gives Chris a new softer more feminine face and alters his genitalia too. When he’s recovered he flies back to Geneva to face the world, but only piece meal. At home she is Christa a new woman, but at work and in society he is still Chris the man. Not difficult to carry off as he wears (the most unattractive) unisex clothes. He has a plan to ‘come out’ to his employers (he is also the Director of an Industrial Association) and his colleagues at the end of the semester, but the rumor mill beats him too it and he is forced to come clean much quicker.
Chris/Christa’s world is very conservative and his fellow professors and friends struggle to come to terms with the complete shock of his new identity, but to their credit the closest ones manage, even though it is with some reluctance. The School President offers her support, but the Industrial Association asks for her resignation. His ex-wife finally files for divorce and their daughter will have nothing to do with her father at all.
Apart from the three rejections the movie focused only on the positive side of the transitioning which felt a tad unreal and almost condones the very questionable decision to by-pass many of the crucial safeguards that are normally in place. Having said that, Christa Muth is extremely likable and personable with a penchant for sensible shoes and a fine sense of self deprecating humor that also takes aim at her atrocious taste in clothes. It is essentially a remarkable story of bravery and courage in recognizing that it’s never too late in life to become true to who you really are regardless of the consequences.
P.S. Two-Spirit is a native American term used to describe Indians who fulfill both roles of a man and a woman : almost like a third gender.
Labels: 2012, biography, documentary, Swiss, trans
