Pathos And Porn — Doris Wishman’s “Let Me Die A Woman”

Let Me Die A Woman, 1977

Let’s not kid ourselves, Doris Wishman’s Let Me Die A Woman is porn. But it’s porn with a shocking amount of earnestness and poignancy worth examining.

“What you are about to see is a true sex act performed by a man and another man who emotionally thinks and acts like a woman… the penis and testicles are clearly shown.”
— Narrator

I’ve had this movie sitting on my hard drive since before I had bottom surgery myself. I intended to do a review of it for my ongoing series of articles about trans representation I was releasing mostly in 2016, culminating in my Halloween 2016 article about trans horror tropes. It’s an infamous movie, one that took me a while to prepare myself to see with an open mind.

and not very subtle

It’s infamous for a few reasons. One is having a scene that is an early performance of porn star Harry Reems. It’s notorious for including actual footage of a sex-reassignment surgery. This footage gained further notoriety when it was inserted into South Park’s rabidly mean-spirited anti-trans episode to pad the run-time. The reason for this was, according to DVD commentary by episode writer-director Trey Parker…