Born to Be is a documentary about the trailblazing work being done at the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery.   

The film’s central figure is Jess Ting, a plastic surgeon who studied music at Juilliard before making a career switch to medicine.   Scenes of him with patients are interspersed with domestic clips where he is at home with his children and playing the double bass.  Just a few years ago Ting had never even performed a single gender-affirming surgery.  He is the first to admit that he did not expect his career to take this turn: “Essentially, they just asked everyone else, and everyone said no except for me.  Everyone thought I was nuts.”  Be that as it may, Ting appears to have found his calling.  In a short time, he has performed well over a thousand gender-affirming surgeries, pioneered new procedures, and helped to start a fellowship training program.  

The stories of several of the Center’s patients are interwoven with that of Dr. Ting.  One client, Cashmere, is a retired sex worker.  Years of botched silicone injections have left her face chronically swollen.   Now in her 50’s, she hopes to have the effects reversed, and to finally undergo the vaginoplasty she has been dreaming of her entire life.  Another patient, Devin, 22, goes through a transition during the course of the film, renaming herself Garnet.  Not withstanding strong family support, years of bullying in school have taken their toll as she struggles with depression. 

Historical fiction, the artistic space that exists between actual persons and events and a writer’s imaginative ability to create a new story, is an established genre. The narrative usually is told by someone whose name does not appear in history books but who was a firsthand witness to events as they unfolded and the people who influenced their course. A variant are novels that are written from the perspective of someone who is in fact part of the historical record but is either unappreciated or overlooked. The extraordinary success of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of Elizabethan novels written in the voice of Thomas Cromwell, a chief minister to King Henry VIII, attests to the appeal of this format. Julie Orringer’s wonderful book “The Flight Portrait,” falls nicely into this category.

The novel is written through the eyes of Varian Fry. His name is not well known today. But he was a well-regarded journalist who wrote from Berlin in The Living Age and the New York Times about Hitler’s savage treatment of the Jews in Germany in the mid-1930s, well before most of the world came to realize the existential threat posed by the Nazi regime. After a brief period in the United States, he returned to Europe in 1940 and formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). Over the next year, with money that he helped raise, Fry was able to help over 2,000 embattled artists, scientists, philosophers, and writers to escape Europe and find safe haven in the US. Among those Fry saved were Andre Breton, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Hannah Arendt, Max Ophuls, Arthur Koester and Claude Levi-Strauss. It is hard to imagine the counterfactual, a world deprived of the contribution of these people because they perished in Europe. The novel details the complications, emotional and physical, that Fry, a non-Jew from a wealthy family, endured as he arranged for safe passage across the Pyrenees or by boat out of Marseilles for his anxious petitioners. The fraught negotiations with Vichy officials and the against the grain support he received from some heroic individuals in the US consulate, specifically Hiram Bingham IV, are played across the taut chapters. The title refers to a collection of unique artworks that the artists created to call attention to their plight and help raise funds for the ERC. The tension is palpable, the threat is real, and outcome uncertain until the end. It is an intelligent and engrossing read.