‘From This Day Forward’ is a new very personal documentary that adds yet another dimension to the whole transgender dialogue. Filmmaker Sharon Shattock’s very compelling movie is about her own father who began transitioning when she was still in grade school. The news absolutely horrified her and her younger sister, and she all but rejected her father from then on and she just couldn’t wait until she was old enough to leave home and go to College.

Now thirty-something and about to get married, Shattock a filmmaker who specializes in science based projects, essentially made this her first feature length documentary so that she could find some answers for the questions she never allowed herself to ask as a child.  It also turned out to be an opportunity for her father who, had not only resisted gender realignment surgery but still cannot make a definitive choice into living full time as a woman or a man, to share how she actually still comfortably fluctuates between the two depending on her mood and the circumstances.

Another extraordinary dimension to the story is that her father had not only remained married to her mother (his spouse for 35 + years) but admitted to still being sexually intimate with her too. 

The Shattock family are now in a place where none of them ever expected to be all those years ago.  After each of them struggled to accept the father ….. now known as Trisha ……. and the transition which entailed the stigma of dealing with the rejection and controversy in the local neighborhood, this journey of theirs has reached a stage when it has settled down to be the most gentlest of love stories.  Not just between Trisha and her patient and understanding spouse Marcia, but also between Trisha and her now fully accepting children.

Shattock presents her story evenly and with a great deal of compassion for both Trisha and Marcia.  There is after all a fine line between Trisha being observed as possibly self indulgent as she fluctuates between her feminine psyche and her masculine one, and of the whole family accepting the fact that they are onboard with her living her non-gender specific role.  In fact the film’s strength lies in the relatively normality of this rather nice middle-class Michigan family who are such a far cry from either the high-profile celebrity trans people on one hand, and the teenagers whose struggle with their own gender identity still too often ends in tragedy even now.

This rather excellent wee film is currently playing the Film Festival circuit, check http://www.fromthisdayforwardfilm.com/ for details. The really good news is that it will be broadcast nationally in the U.S. on PBS on October  10th, 2016 .