Directed by Doris Wishman • 1977 • United States

One of the earliest films to explore the lives of transgender people, Doris Wishman’s controversial quasi-documentary is a difficult-to-classify hybrid of educational film and exploitation fare in which interviews alternate with staged scenes. Treating its subjects with an uneasy mix of sympathy and sensationalism, Wishman’s film profiles Dr. Leo Wollman, a specialist in trans healthcare, and a variety of transgender people who speak about their experiences with gender dysphoria. Though the graphic depictions of gender confirmation surgery have ensured its lasting notoriety, LET ME DIE A WOMAN stands as a rare historical record of the transgender experience in the 1970s—and features cinematography by trans photographer Andrea Susan Malick.