That isn’t conjecture. References to Jerry Springer appear all over the initial coverage of "Boys Don’t Cry." Reviewers made note of how the story of Brandon Teena, the trans man whose life and death inspired Kimberly Peirce’s film, was ready-made for an episode of that '90s relic of trashy daytime television. What other tools, these writers seemed to suggest, did audiences have to make sense of the tragic story contained in this little indie picture?

For the American film-going audience, at least, there were none. Human, sympathetic portrayals of trans people, especially trans men, were almost entirely absent from pre-millennium screens. Trans-related characters in the movies prior to "Boys Don’t Cry," with a few exceptions of course, are largely found in two kinds of films: cross-dressing comedies and trans killer horror films. There was no Chaz Bono and Caitlyn Jenner in the headlines. No Laverne Cox on television or Albert Nobbs at the Oscars. Rather, there was "Tootsie," "Ladybugs," and "Mrs. Doubtfire," putting movie stars in drag for laughs, and there was "Psycho," "Sleepaway Camp," and "The Silence of the Lambs," portraying transsexuals as unhinged psychotic serial killers.

Both of these genres use trans-ness as a plot device: a means for cis folks to achieve a goal on the one hand, a pathological cause of violence on the other. Neither are interested in the embodied humanity of actual queer people. They’re not about being queer. In "Boys Don’t Cry," Kimberly Peirce begins to build a visual language for how to be trans on camera. She’s interested in how trans bodies are looked at, and what it means to perceive trans people as people, not gags or murderers.

"Boys Don’t Cry" was the first mainstream, popular cinematic portrait of an actual trans person that I encountered. And despite its tragic outcome, the film became my personal empathy machine, to quote Roger Ebert. It offered me the chance to gain a deeper understanding of the transgender experience that I have now come to embody. It was the first time I encountered an argument—though it didn’t use these terms—that trans people deserved humanity. That a person in the real world might want to undergo a ‘sex change.’ These were truly radical claims in 1999.

Peirce's film starts with a haircut. “Shorter,” says a young man in a flannel shirt and blue jeans. “That’s short enough,” his friend replies. The young man, Brandon Teena, is all energy as he examines himself in the mirror, fixing his hair and packing a sock into his jeans. He radiates excitement and naivete, sensing the possibility of a future as a man, and seemingly unconcerned about the world will around him. “So you’re a boy,” his friend says, watching Brandon fuss over himself. “Now what?”