Michelle Rodriguez will play a male assassin who is trying to kill the surgeon responsible for his sex change in “Tomboy,” an upcoming thriller.
In the movie, Rodriguez’s character starts out as a male hitman who is betrayed and winds up under the knife of a rogue surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) who slices off more than he bargained for. In his post-operative state, he seeks to enact revenge on the surgeon.
Even though news of the film broke just hours ago, critics are already upset that a transgendered character is being played by a “cisgender” actress (i.e., an actual woman). The film’s storyline doesn’t appear to be all that favorable towards transgenderism, as an angry, post-operative, she-male seeking to avenge the loss of his you-know-what isn’t exactly the stereotype the transgender community is looking to promote.
The plot does raise a valid point about transgenderism, though, regardless of how much the transgender community wishes it didn’t exist: sex-change regret is real and has serious, irreparable consequences. According to the New York Times, a recent Swedish study found that “starting about a decade after gender reassignment surgery, transgender people were still more than 19 times as likely to die by suicide as the general population.” A 2014 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA echoed those findings and showed that post-operative transgenders were more likely to attempt suicide than transgenders who had not undergone so-called sex-change surgery.
“Tomboy” is scheduled to begin filming on November 9.
