I Don't Wanna Be a Boy

Directors: Alex Behrens and Marijn Muijser
Release Year: 1994

The 1994 documentary I Don’t Wanna Be a Boy by Alex Behrens and Marijn Muijser captures a raw slice of New York City at a time when the meatpacking district was both a workplace and a battleground for trans women who survived through sex work. It is only 28 minutes long, yet it lingers like a full-length portrait because of the intimacy with which it presents its subjects and the bleakness that underlies their everyday lives.

 

Unlike polished media portrayals, this film was passed around mostly by word of mouth, never meant for wide distribution, yet it became a haunting record of the realities trans sex workers faced in the early 1990s. The women who appear on screen are not anonymous figures. They are ballroom legends, names still remembered with reverence in LGBTQ history: Liyah Richards, Vanessa Mizrahi, Bangie Angie Infiniti, and others. Their voices carry the film. They speak candidly about identity, survival, and danger while their surroundings echo with the constant threat of violence, poverty, and policing. What emerges is not just a film about prostitution but a broader meditation on gender, desire, stigma, and the human will to live as one truly is, despite everything standing in the way.

 

The documentary does not shy away from harsh truths. The women talk about the transformation of their bodies with hormones and surgery, sometimes pursued through unsafe methods like shared needles, sometimes abandoned because of the costs and risks. They describe the painful limbo of wanting to transition fully but lacking money or medical access, and the way dreams of modeling or stardom intersect with the harsh grind of survival sex work. The camera listens as one woman explains how hormones softened her face, how breasts grew, how nails and clothes became armor against the world’s judgment, while another admits she once thought castration might solve everything, only to learn later it could jeopardize her chance at proper gender-affirming surgery. The tension between longing for transformation and enduring bodily danger runs throughout the film. 

 

Violence hangs over every story. The women recount being assaulted, arrested, and threatened. They speak of police officers who both harass them and secretly solicit them, of Johns who turn on them when confronted with their identities, of friends murdered in circumstances too painful to recount without trembling. The specter of Venus Xtravaganza, killed only a few years earlier and immortalized in Paris Is Burning, hovers in their fears and warnings. One young woman, only sixteen, talks about guns to her head, being thrown out of cars, and her refusal to hide her identity from clients because she knows deception could cost her life. The bleakness of this world is not abstract; it is narrated through lived scars.

 

And yet there is also resilience. Between the tales of violence are glimpses of pride and defiance. A woman smiles at her breasts in the mirror, another insists that gender exists in the heart and the head, not in genitals. They talk about the glamour of icons like Wonder Woman or Madonna and about the confidence of walking down the street, even while insults and whispers sting. There is tenderness when they talk about boyfriends, about the fantasy of love that feels always out of reach, and there is a recurring chorus in the film’s music: “I don’t wanna be a boy.” That refrain becomes a kind of anthem, expressing both pain and liberation, a line shouted into the city that refuses to accept them.

 

The film also places their lives in the context of society’s double standards. Clients are often middle-class men in nice cars, men who could easily find partners elsewhere, yet they seek out trans women in the shadows of New York. Politicians and police seek to “clean up” neighborhoods while ignoring the systemic poverty and discrimination that push these women into sex work. The hypocrisy is clear to the women themselves, who laugh bitterly at the fact that the same cops who arrest them are sometimes their customers. The film refuses to sanitize any of this, showing instead the contradictions and corruption surrounding their criminalization.

 

At its core, I Don’t Wanna Be a Boy is about the courage to exist in a world that constantly tells you not to. The women in the film are not presented as tragic caricatures but as complex, resilient, and vulnerable human beings who dream, love, suffer, and fight to be recognized. Their words move between poetry and confession, between the harsh reality of the street and the fantasy of a future where being a woman is not punished. The film’s bleakness lies not in their identities but in the society that confines them to danger, addiction, and marginalization. 

 

Though only a short documentary, it remains a historical document of a community often erased or misrepresented. It shows ballroom icons outside the glamour of the runway, navigating the night streets of New York with a mix of strength and fragility. It offers a glimpse into a time before broader conversations about trans rights entered the mainstream, when survival meant hustling, fighting, and hoping that the next day would come without violence. The refrain of the title carries through like a prayer, a plea, and a declaration all at once. I Don’t Wanna Be a Boy is not just a documentary about sex work but a mirror held up to a society that fails those who are most vulnerable, leaving them to carve beauty and dignity from the shadows.

 

via: youtube

Image credits: YouTube