Like Ray in 3 Generations — Gaby Dellal’s controversial new film about a trans boy (Elle Fanning) and his family — I came out to my mom as trans when I was 16. I was scared, confused, and inarticulate. ”We’ll figure it out,” she said.

After the shock subsided, my mom went to the library, a musty, quiet safe haven. She was looking for a book about people like me. That day, my mom checked out a memoir called Just Add Hormones and the 1999 Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry, the only relevant movie she could find in the library's extensive DVD section. She came home, excited and relieved to have something to show me. After she sat down with me on the couch, we waited to see what this whole transgender thing was all about.

But we didn’t make it very far. After the “getting ready” scene — Brandon (Hilary Swank) gets out of the shower, binds his chest tightly with an Ace bandage, then turns to look at himself in the mirror to decide whether to pack with a prosthetic or a rolled up pair of tube socks — my mom turned the TV off. “I don’t want this to be what it’s like for you,” she said, her eyes welling. “That looks like it hurts.”

I laughed. “Don’t worry. Even I know you can’t use Ace bandages to bind.”

That aborted attempt to watch Boys Don’t Cry with my mom showed me that we still need mainstream movies about trans people — even imperfect ones.

In the wake of the so-called transgender revolution, portrayals of transgender people in popular media are still rather rare. Most are Oscar-winning tragedies where the transgender character is played by a cisgender actor and doomed to an untimely demise, like Boys Don’t Cry (the dramatic retelling of the events leading up to the murder of Brandon Teena, a transgender man), Albert Nobbs (inexplicably, Glenn Close plays a transgender butler named Albert Nobbs who dies after sustaining a head injury in a fight), Dallas Buyer’s Club (Jared Leto plays Rayon, an HIV-positive transgender woman, who helps smuggle non-FDA-approved drugs into the US before she dies), and The Danish Girl (Eddie Redmayne is Lili Elbe, the transgender painter and one of the first identifiable recipients of sex reassignment surgery — she, too, dies). Otherwise, we are deceptive villains: Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs; Lois Einhorn in Ace Ventura.