End of 2018 Update; WontBeErased
I’m riding this year out slowly, on social media anyway, with just a few more good articles I found and some “best of” lists and nominations during awards season.
I’ve been plenty creative and social offline though, and I’ve been having a pretty good time just talking into the camera, explaining my ideas, instead of writing all the time.
(And I’ll be posting more videos and less articles in general from here on in.)
I’m covering similar things in the videos, mostly to do with queer identity and independent filmmaking, and the videos will include an actual manifesto and real solutions for sustaining independent filmmaking as an art form and be able to make money from it.
It will cover anything from the meaning of filmmaking as an art form, the meaning of art as a real psychological function in our human existence, the need for and function of authenticity, and it will offer practical creative and technical ways of keeping the artistic and human integrity high and the financial costs low.
And it will also cover solutions for strengthening and widening of offline networks, besides focussing on online branding and marketing and distributing and exhibiting solutions.
It is high time for those of us who are still living and working and paying rent in Los Angeles to appreciate our geographical privilege while it lasts and come together in person again and try to make this city the vibrant and creative community that it really could and should idealistically be.
(And I will also go over a few things I wrote about in my more philosophical essays, making the case for individual rights.)
But these last weeks have also been way too much to comment on in general and I just had to take a social media break, and stayed busy filming multiple videos to launch the new film organization Queer Female Filmmakers Los Angeles.
(And more footage for the feature-length documentary The Queer Case for Individual Rights as well. I’m filming more than I anticipated, so also editing more, and am doing a lot of this on my own still.)
The videos will be up early 2019, and the fundraising campaign for the film organization Queer Female Filmmakers Los Angeles will launch in the Spring of 2019.
Most of my writing exists on medium.com/@gabriellabregman, and will be self-published as a book in early 2019, titled The Queer Case for Individual Rights and Other Essays.
The book will include some material previously unpublished online as well, (including a film manifesto, a narrative feature screenplay excerpt and some philosophical articles,) and will be part of the fundraising campaign for the film organization.
Several film organizations have offered me partnerships, and I will need a few good people to sign on as business partners to my nonprofit film organization Queer Female Filmmakers Los Angeles to really make it happen.
Despite my complicated immigration situation I have all the legal paperwork for myself, (and have been paying business income taxes over my film production company Bregman Films for 5 years now,) but nonprofits need partners, and so that is what I will need very soon.
I have one creative partner at the moment but will definitely need more help.
Film production company Bregman Films, which exists specifically for the production of the feature documentary The Queer Case for Individual Rights, and the new nonprofit film organization Queer Female Filmmakers Los Angeles are run out of several creative offices in Hollywood and I own all the computer and film equipment and production vehicles necessary to run these projects.
I will provide more details later but there will be opportunities opening up soon to be a business partner in a nonprofit film organization for and by Queer Female Filmmakers in Los Angeles.
But from the proposed transgender/ gender nonconforming erasure by the current administration and the string of shootings, to the California fires, which have been particularly devastating this time around, and with the Democrats taking the House and the Cohen verdict, things have just been very intense.
(And at times like these it definitely doesn’t feel good to not be able to partake in the voting process. It makes one feel guilty and incompetent and even resentful of those can vote and choose not to, and specifically because they are “not political.”)
My own life is still and always in considerable danger under this current immigration system in general, and this current administration in particular. The intended federal transgender-erasure, despite the fact that I don’t intend to transition nor even am a US citizen, hit me pretty hard, both psychologically and pragmatically, because it echoes exactly what I have experiencing all along at the hands of certain US Citizens under this American immigration system, but would now be potentially completely legally sanctioned, again.
And so I am very realistically concerned about my own wellbeing, under my own particular set of circumstances as a trans-masculine, gender nonconforming lesbian and foreigner in the US, still without permanent status and still no actual guarantee of one, even though still officially married to a US Citizen.
(One the other hand government erasure of one’s identity would constitute official discrimination, just like DOMA has worked in my defense eventually.)
On a SIDE NOTE I am very troubled by the way the media, particularly the supposedly pro-LGBTQ left-wing, still covers transgenderism and freely mixes it up with gender dysphoria.
This is actually extremely dangerous for transgender people with or without gender dysphoria alike, as it can make it harder for transgender people to have access to medical treatment they might really need, as well as being boxed in by legislation forcing transgender people to undergo medical treatment potentially against their will.
Gender dysphoria, previously called gender identity disorder, is a potentially uncomfortable feeling of having one’s own sense of gender, which is operated by the brain, and one’s biological sex not match up, in binary terms anyway. For anyone having a hard time understanding the word dysphoria, it is basically a form of anxiety, in this case over one’s gender being misread by people or not “matching” one’s body.
Gender dysphoria can be experienced in at least two ways, as social dysphoria, discomfort and fear even at people reading one’s own sense of gender wrongly, or body dysphoria, discomfort at one’s body not “matching” one’s own sense of gender, as experienced by the brain. And only the latter might really need medical intervention, as one should not have to change one’s physical appearance medically to please society.
Gender dysphoria therefore includes both social dysphoria and body dysphoria, which are not one and the same thing at all, and can, but do not have to, coexist.
And gender dysphoria is not the same thing as transgenderism itself. Transgender people do not require to be gender dysphoric in order to be genuinely transgender.
It is the dysphoria itself, and very specifically the body dysphoria over the social dysphoria if one is even aware of the difference at all, which generally speaking makes transgender people seek out medical help, and which they actually get diagnosed with. Transgender people get diagnosed with gender dysphoria to undergo medical treatment. Transgender people do not generally speaking get diagnosed with actual transgenderism itself. This is a very important distinction to make!
Transgenderism is a hormonal condition, primarily caused by prenatal hormonal distribution. It would require a brain scan to be diagnosed, probably reserved for top athletes accused of doping, or research subjects. Transgender people do not get brain scans but psychological evaluations, based on feelings interpreted generally as dysphoria.
But transgenderism itself is not gender dysphoria and does not in and of itself require medical treatment. Let me repeat this to really make it clear, transgenderism itself is not gender dysphoria and does not in and of itself require medical treatment.
So the prevailing narrative would have you believe a person like myself is not necessarily transgender, although could be upon profession medical diagnosis only, but definitely experiences gender dysphoria.
I do not in fact experience gender dysphoria, at least not body dysphoria, at most a disconnect but not a discomfort. I do experience social dysphoria but I should not have to medically alter my body just so other people can clearly read me as male or female. I look androgynous, especially by Western society’s standards, and am more than happy with my androgynous appearance, even if it has subjected me to harassment and violence my whole life.
But I am in fact transgender and do not personally experience body dysphoria, and I feel no need for medical transitioning myself. And this is my personal experience only and in no way a judgment on transgender or gender nonconforming people who feel differently.
The fact that I choose not to transition does not make me less transgender or less male gendered.
The prevailing narrative would have you believe I am currently living my life as a woman, unless/ until I would transition, after which I would live my life as a man. Scientifically transgenderism doesn’t work that way. My masculinized brain, having been prenatally exposed to excess testosterone, cannot live as a woman.
So I have never lived exactly as a woman, since that would be hormonally impossible and would amount to psychological torture. Instead society has often misidentified me as a woman, based on legal documentation, and female biological sex, and treated and mistreated me accordingly.
And so the prevailing narrative would have you believe that I could only legitimately be considered transgender after professional medical psychological evaluation, of gender dysphoria, and according medical treatment, that is transitioning.
I say I am not transgender only after professional evaluation, and professional evaluation in the eyes of the legal systems in place meaning the requirement of gender dysphoria, rather than a a proper diagnosis of transgenderism as a hormonal condition through a brain scan.
Nor am I a woman who experiences dysphoria, and so wishes to be a man. I do not experience body dysphoria and have never even explicitly wished to be a man. I have only experienced myself as male my whole entire life, and have dressed and behaved accordingly my whole life as well. That is, I identify with things generally associated with men, and do not relate to things generally associated with women. And this also does not mean I dislike or disrespect women, and I am most definitely a feminist.
I am transgender because the male sex hormones in my brain dictate my preferences towards masculine things, rather than feminine things, some of these things of which are socially constructed and some of which are biological.
I only state myself to be female on legal identification because that is how the doctors identified me at birth in 1973 and I will not legally transition, as I will not medically transition, so it wouldn’t make any sense and only cause more problems for me.
I have since years socially transitioned, starting already with me being allowed by my parents to pick out male clothes by age 6, after several years of me throwing tantrums over it, and continuing with male clothes and haircuts ever since, and eventually the gender nonconforming pronouns ‘they/ them/ theirs,’ and for me that has proven satisfactory enough. I sometimes go by Orlando, as in Gabriella Orlando Bregman, in a nod to Virginia Woolf.
And I have to use female public restrooms because I won’t legally transition, because I won’t medically transition, because I experience no personal discomfort at being male-gendered while having a female but not very feminine body. I see no reason to change my body to please society.
That said, even though I have experienced myself as male throughout, I have also experienced having a female body throughout, with all according bodily consequences, and being treated as female throughout my life as well, and almost inevitably also with misogynist attitudes of course. Misogynist attitudes, from mostly heterosexual men, towards me are more transgender/ lesbian antagonistic than female-objectifying.
I have ultimately settled on identifying as a trans-masculine, gender nonconforming lesbian, and consider my androgyny and my difficult and complex experiences to have become an enormous asset in my overall understanding of all genders.
The legal systems in place want people to conform to gender roles, created by these very legal systems, and specifically for the purposes of procreation and labor division based on inequality, of biological bodily differences. These legal systems do not want a fair and functioning society of free individuals of different genders/ sexes, based on equality of brain capacity, of equal intelligence between the genders/ sexes.
Intelligence is not measured purely in brain volume or organizational strength, and it does not matter that there are in fact biological differences between the brains of the different sexes. That is male and female brains do exist, and are so largely by hormonal design.
Female brains have other dominating strengths, like communicational skills and emotional maturity, and and can be equally rational in crucial decision making, and so these biological differences are never a legitimate basis for legal inequality.
Transgenderism is a scientifically provable hormonal condition. Gender dysphoria however is to a large extent created by a misogynist society. It is based on the false Western and colonialist idea that there are two distinctly different and strictly separate genders/ sexes only, with no room for biological overlap, and no otherwise philosophical and psychological interests in common between these different genders/ sexes, almost as if we are two different species entirely, and must even consume and destroy each other in order to survive.
Highly civilized people however, of whatever civilization ultimately, but intelligent people, as it is intelligence that civilizes people, recognize the common need for an equally dignified life, free from coercion and persecution, for all the genders/ sexes that humanly exist.
I know for myself a brain scan would prove my case, but would be extremely expensive and hard to obtain, and so I have to make do with my own medical research and deductive reasoning instead.
Different genetic and environmental factors determine prenatal sex hormone distribution, and I basically was able to narrow my own condition down to my mother having excess testosterone in her body during pregnancy, after prying into her birth control and hormonal supplements and medical history.
I am transgender, not because Western society has determined people with hormonal conditions must somehow be anxious and uncomfortable and must therefore want to change into their “desired gender.”
I am transgender because my brain, in my female-formed body was masculinized by an excess of testosterone distribution during prenatal development.
The body of a fetus forms faster, and so earlier, than the brain does. The brain of the fetus can still be affected by hormonal distribution after the body of the fetus is formed, and this causes the brain, which ultimately operates functions of gender and sex, to identify with the hormones it is dominated by, and not with the biological sex, hence transgenderism.
Needless to say but of course I feel the need to say it anyway in a mostly uninformed and miseducated society, transgenderism is not a choice, and therefore not a moral decision.
And therefore no moral judgment can be passed on it neither, it is a hormonal condition which in and of itself does not harm a transgender person, and which certainly does not make a transgender person harmful to others.
Gender dysphoria, in the form of social dysphoria, is an anxiety largely caused externally, by society, and which can be alleviated by society at large adapting a comprehensive understanding of all of human sexuality.
Simply learning about different forms of sexuality and gender expression and treating a person according to the gender with which they identify, and not being a misogynist in general, alleviates a lot of anxiety and fear in transgender and gender nonconforming people.
It is often times not even the genuine misunderstanding towards trans-people that makes us anxious but rather the malicious insistence of cis-people to prove our real identities as immoral and invalid in order to unconsciously cover for their own overall sexual ignorance that makes us fear for our lives.
And gender dysphoria, in the form body dysphoria, is an anxiety largely caused internally, by experiencing hormonal imbalances, and which can often be alleviated to a large or full extent through a variety of physical and medical solutions, and which also need not to be met with hostility but instead should be understood for what it medically and biologically and scientifically is.
On a final note, just as any person could want to alter their body to improve it, especially health-wise, a transgender person without dysphoria should have the right to transition as well.
Other medical conditions have been treated without a person necessarily having discomfort, so it shouldn’t be any different for a transgender or gender nonconforming person.
And so of course despite not having body dysphoria, and only social dysphoria, I reserve the right the change my mind regarding transitioning myself as well.
End of SIDE NOTE.
But there are people in my life still, who are legally immediate family members and US Citizens, who have been trying to actively erase me, my gender identity and sexual orientation as well as the truth around my immigration situation (as former legal film student from the Netherlands) for a very long time, and who have had the US legal system back them up all along, through one policy after another, (particularly DOMA.)
They have been using every newly instated policy as a threat against me, to imprison me and to live off of me. And so they have been able to continuously erase me, legally, (though not constitutionally.)
Again, I am (by US immigration’s own definition) a Legal Entry Immigrant. I moved to the US legally in 1992, at age 19 and by myself, on a 5-year Student Visa, after having applied to, and having been accepted into, the Film Program at Los Angeles City College.
(And as I have explained many times in my articles, for international students this is a costly, lengthy and complicated “immigration” process, involving financial, educational, medical and criminal tests and background checks, references, and fees, etc.)
And I had started the Adjustment-of-Status to Legal Permanent Resident process through marriage to a US Citizen, in a coerced opposite-sex marriage, while I was openly gender nonconforming and lesbian, and however inadequate I was in the early 90s to clearly define identify as LGBTQ.
I “officially came out” as a lesbian in 1994, and as trans-masculine and gender nonconforming in 2012, even though I actually have lived my whole life according to these identities, and as openly as one could be without adequate information on these identities at all at the time.
In 2015 I came out publicly about my “undocumented” immigration status, because as a former film student from the Netherlands, studying in Los Angeles on a legal Student Visa, and as someone who lost my legal status in the US due to legislation instated after my legal arrival and legal stay, in other words due to circumstances beyond my own fault, in this case the LGBTQ-discrimination policy DOMA, my specific immigration case is one of federal LGBTQ immigration-exclusion.
Of course the Defense Of Marriage Act Article 3, instated in 1996, (4 years after my legal arrival,) prohibiting the same-sex marriage of US Citizens and Foreign Nationals in the US for immigration sponsorship under US immigration family law, was proven to be unconstitutional and struck down in 2015 by the US Supreme Court.
So I consider myself to be a DOMA victim, (which thus made my permanent legalization through family law immigration, in this case same-sex marriage sponsorship, impossible from 1996 to 2015,) and as I since 2015 “all of a sudden” do qualify for family law immigration sponsorship through same-sex marriage to a US Citizen, and only because the Supreme Court deemed same-sex marriage constitutional in 2015.
I both qualify for Adjustment-Of-Status to Legal Permanent Resident (necessary first step to US Citizenship,) through the Violence Against Women Act, (and which just expired for a second time since its’ existence in 1994, the first time was in 2012,) and while also a victim of Defense Of Marriage Act, and I am eligible for US Citizenship sponsorship through same-sex marriage.
That is exactly why all my documenting of my life, (on this extreme level anyway, and through mostly writing so far,) has been taking place for years already as well, and I am writing this also, and again, for my own protection.
I identify as a Gender Nonconforming Lesbian, (“non-op” Trans-Masculine,) and am Bi-Racial, from the Netherlands, and Los Angeles-based.
My pronouns are: they/them/theirs.
I sometimes go by Orlando, as in Orlando Gabriella Bregman, (in a nod to Virginia Woolf.)
Some people have known me as Gabie, and some people just claim to have known me.
WontBeErased!
Thank you for reading.
Happy holidays and to a better 2019.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
If you enjoyed this Article, please Recommend it by pushing the Clap Button at the bottom of the page, or share in your Social Media, or both.
My name is Gabriella Bregman, I am a Hollywood-based Writer, Filmmaker and Producer, currently in production of a Feature Documentary about LGBTQ US-Immigration Exclusion-Policy, including my personal story of US immigration discrimination during DOMA, (Defense Of Marriage Act, of 1996–2015,) titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights,’ through my film production company Bregman Films.
The 2001 John Cassavetes Film Retrospective ‘Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective’ at the Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles is a Bregman Films Production.
I am also the Founder of a Nonprofit Film Organization Queer Female Filmmakers Los Angeles — A Media Site & LA Film Mixers (2018.)
In 2018 I am publishing my story and essays in a book, titled ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights & Other Essays.’
I identify as a Gender Nonconforming Lesbian, “non-op” Trans-Masculine, and Bi-Racial, from the Netherlands, Los Angeles-based.
My pronouns are: they/them/theirs.
Please check out my other articles on LGBTQ- and Immigration Issues, the State of Women and LGBTQ People in Film, and Lesbian/Queer Film as well as Queer Female Sexuality and Gender Identity at medium.com/@gabriellabregman
A few titles:
Resume/FILM BIO: Gabriella Bregman (2018) (2018)
2018 Update on Documentary ‘The Queer Case for Individual Rights’ (2018)
A Note on the State of Women in Film (2016)
A Few Notes On LGBTQ Filmmaking (2017)
Some Thoughts on the State of Lesbian Filmmaking in the US (part 1 of 5) (2018)
John Cassavetes Film Retrospective (2001) (2018)
On ‘Moonlight’ and the Subject of Positive Representation (2017)
My 2018 Oscar Pick for Best Picture (2018)
In Defense of Rationality (2018)
In Defense of Individual Rights (2018)
A Few Notes on US Immigration Exclusion Policies Towards Women- and LGBTQ Immigrants (2014)
The Root Cause Of Misogyny, And The Necessity Of Free Will (Gender Binary System notes, part 1 of 7) (2016)
The Male And Female Brain, And “The Cause” Of Transgenderism(Gender Binary System notes, part 2 of 7) (2016)
The Gender-Binary System Was Created For Population Control And Slavery, Including Sex Slavery (Gender Binary System notes, part 7 of 7)
All Articles Written by Gabriella Bregman (TM). All Pictures Owned by Gabriella Bregman (TM). All Rights Reserved (2018)
