Metamorphosis: Man into Woman

Director: Lisa Leeman
Release Year: 1990

Lisa Leeman’s 1990 documentary Metamorphosis: Man into Woman stands today as a remarkably intimate, patient, and emotionally complex portrait of a transgender woman’s transition at a time when public language, medical frameworks, and cultural understanding of trans lives were far more limited than they are now. Filmed over the course of three years, the documentary follows Gary, a 39-year-old transsexual woman, later known as Gabi, as she undertakes the arduous, deeply personal process of transitioning from living as a man to living as a woman. Rather than presenting transition as a neat before-and-after narrative, Leeman’s film insists on showing it as something slower, messier, contradictory, and profoundly human, a lived experience shaped as much by fear, faith, work, and family as by medicine or surgery.

 

At the heart of the film is gender dysphoria, described early on as a condition affecting as many as 60,000 Americans at the time, people who feel profoundly uncomfortable with the sex they were assigned at birth. For Gary, this discomfort is not a fleeting feeling or a passing curiosity but a constant presence stretching back to early childhood. She recalls praying from the age of five that God would turn her into a girl, a private plea carried in silence and fear for decades. This sense of secrecy, of living with an identity that feels both undeniable and forbidden, shapes much of the emotional landscape of the film. Gary does not present herself as confused about who she is, she presents herself as painfully aware of who she has always been, and equally aware of the risks involved in finally telling the truth. Leeman’s approach is observational and compassionate without becoming sentimental. The camera does not rush to reassure the viewer, nor does it flatten Gary’s experience into a single explanatory framework. Instead, the film allows contradictions to exist side by side. Some people who know Gary are unsurprised by her transition, even relieved, while others are shocked, skeptical, or openly uncomfortable. These differing reactions are not smoothed over. They are given space, sometimes uncomfortably so, and in doing that the documentary mirrors the broader social tension around gender nonconformity, especially in the late 1980s.

 

One of the film’s central structures is the requirement imposed by medical gatekeeping at the time. Before being approved for sex-reassignment surgery, Gary must live and work as a woman, twenty-four hours a day, for at least one year. This so-called real-life test becomes the backbone of the narrative. It is during this period that, as the film suggests, the most significant transformation takes place, not in an operating room, but in daily life. Gary must consciously unlearn certain masculine behaviors while attempting to adopt what she understands as feminine ones. This process is not presented as natural or effortless. On the contrary, it is filled with self-doubt, anxiety, and moments of painful self-scrutiny. The film documents Gary’s medical transition in detail, including facial plastic surgery, electrolysis, hormone therapy, and psychological counseling. A particularly striking early sequence shows Gary hosting a “goodbye nose party” before undergoing facial surgery, a moment that blends humor, fear, and ritual. The nose, which Gary associates strongly with her male appearance, becomes a symbol of the compromises and losses involved in transition. She knows she could have lived her entire life with that nose as a man, but as a woman she believes it will prevent her from being read correctly, from being seen as herself. This is one of many moments where the film exposes how deeply social perception shapes the trans experience, how survival often depends not just on self-knowledge but on how strangers interpret a face, a voice, or a body.

 

As the months pass and Gary begins to introduce herself as Gabi, the film shifts subtly in tone. Gabi speaks openly about the strange in-between state she inhabits, breasts growing too fast and not fast enough, masculine traits fading before feminine ones feel fully formed. She describes looking in the mirror and seeing a woman, only to step outside and be addressed as “sir.” These moments capture the psychological toll of transition in a way that statistics or medical explanations never could. The viewer is invited into a daily cycle of hope and discouragement, validation and erasure, all experienced at an emotional intensity that rarely lets up. One of the most compelling aspects of Metamorphosis is its attention to community, both supportive and hostile. Gabi attends a transsexual support group where people share practical milestones, opening bank accounts under new names, navigating bureaucracies, surviving breakups, and holding onto sanity. These scenes ground the film in collective experience, reminding the audience that Gabi’s story, while individual, is part of a larger, largely invisible community. At the same time, the documentary does not shy away from showing conflict within supposedly safe spaces, including religious environments that oscillate between compassion and condemnation.

 

Gabi’s Christian faith is a recurring and deeply painful thread throughout the film. She struggles to reconcile her sense of being called to live as a woman with teachings she has absorbed about gender, sin, and obedience to God. In one devastating sequence, she recounts attending a prayer meeting where her identity is framed as a spirit to be cast out, her transition dismissed as incompatible with divine will. The camera does not sensationalize this moment. It simply lets Gabi speak, her voice carrying the exhaustion of someone who has offered herself up to judgment in the hope of finding peace, only to be left alone again when the prayers end and everyone goes home. These scenes underline how spiritual violence can be quiet, well-intentioned, and deeply wounding. Workplace dynamics form another major arena in which gender expectations are tested. When Gabi begins presenting as female at her job, her coworkers respond with a mix of warmth, curiosity, discomfort, and outright skepticism. A lively discussion among them becomes one of the film’s most revealing sequences. Some see Gabi as a woman learning to inhabit her gender, no different from any other woman negotiating femininity. Others insist she is merely a man in women’s clothing, overdoing stereotypes, playing dress-up. These conversations, often blunt and sometimes cruel, expose how fragile and socially constructed ideas of masculinity and femininity really are. They also reveal how much pressure is placed on trans women to perform gender “correctly,” to neither fall short nor try too hard.

 

Leeman’s camera does not intervene to correct these voices. Instead, it allows them to coexist, forcing the audience to sit with their own reactions. Watching Gabi carefully choose how to sit, how to walk, how to speak, raises uncomfortable questions about how all gender is learned, rehearsed, and policed. The film subtly suggests that what is often dismissed as artificial in trans women is simply made visible, while similar performances by cisgender people are taken for granted. As the years pass, the film widens its emotional scope. Gabi is laid off from work and wonders, without ever being able to prove it, whether her transition played a role. Financial insecurity threatens to derail medical plans. Doubt resurfaces. Faith and identity continue to clash. Yet there are also moments of joy and expansion, such as Gabi taking dance classes, learning to move her body with a freedom she never allowed herself before. These scenes are quiet but transformative. They show embodiment not as a destination achieved through surgery, but as a relationship slowly rebuilt through movement, attention, and self-permission.

 

The film’s emotional climax arrives not in a medical milestone but in Gabi’s reconciliation with her mother and her decision to attend her high school reunion. For years, her mother had refused to accept her transition, framing it as the loss of a son. When Gabi finally returns home, the tension is palpable. The reunion itself is fraught with vulnerability, nostalgia, and courage. Walking into a room full of people who knew her only as Gary, Gabi confronts not just others’ memories but her own unrealized dreams, cheerleading skirts never worn, identities postponed. The scenes are awkward, tender, and unexpectedly affirming. They suggest that recognition, when it comes, often arrives imperfectly, but still matters deeply. By the end of Metamorphosis: Man into Woman, Gabi has not yet undergone sex-reassignment surgery. The film is explicit about this, emphasizing that transition is not a single act or guaranteed outcome. Only a small percentage of those who begin the process go on to have surgery, and Gabi remains in deliberation, needing money, medical approval, and personal peace before taking that irreversible step. This refusal to provide a tidy conclusion is one of the documentary’s greatest strengths. It resists the narrative demand that trans stories end in surgical completion, instead honoring the ongoing nature of self-understanding.

 

Watching the film today, more than three decades after its release, it is impossible not to notice how language and frameworks have changed. The term “transsexual” is now often replaced by “transgender,” medical gatekeeping has evolved, and public conversations around gender are broader and more nuanced. Yet the emotional truths at the center of Gabi’s story remain strikingly current. The fear of being seen as ridiculous, the hunger to be addressed correctly, the ache of family rejection, the exhaustion of constant self-monitoring, these are not relics of the past. Ultimately, Metamorphosis challenges its audience not by preaching but by witnessing. Watching Gary consciously choose what feels like appropriate behavior for a woman, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes with joy, forces viewers to confront their own assumptions about what men and women are supposed to be. The film asks whether authenticity is measured by conformity or by honesty, and whether discomfort says more about the person feeling it than about the one who causes it. In tracing Gabi’s journey with patience and respect, Lisa Leeman created not just a document of one woman’s transition, but a lasting meditation on identity, courage, and the cost of becoming oneself.

 

via: video.alexanderstreet.com