Login / RegisterVancouver Queer Film Festival: Austin Unbound celebrates a deaf and transgender man's journey
Meet Austin, an Oregon man who is deaf and transgender. In Austin Unbound, filmmakers Eliza Greenwood and Sel Staley follow the funny and charismatic 31-year-old as he travels from his home in Portland to a hospital in San Francisco in order to have a double mastectomy. Austin has been dreaming about having this milestone surgery for most of his life. He has known that he was born in the wrong body since the age of three.
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Luckily for Austin, he is surrounded by loving and supportive family and friends. For his mother, who raised Austin and his sisters as a single parent, raising a deaf and transgender child was difficult. She says that Austin began dressing like a boy from an early age, and she thought it was “just a phase” until he insisted on having his name legally changed. Meanwhile, Austin’s girlfriend Lola quietly struggles with her identity as a queer person because Austin considers himself to be a straight man.
While the double mastectomy only marks the beginning of Austin’s transformation—he plans on getting a hysterectomy in the future—Austin is a proud and self-assured man and so obviously a role model, not only to the deaf and transgender communities, but to everyone he encounters.
Vancouver Queer Film Festival presents Austin Unbound on Saturday (August 18) at 5 p.m.
Watch the trailer for Austin Unbound.
