Educational Media Reviews Online

From This Day Forward is filmmaker Sharon Shattuck’s heartfelt look at the ways in which transgenderism can impact families, as seen through the lens of her father Trisha’s transition. Through a series of interviews with her parents and her sister amidst preparations for her own wedding, Shattuck revisits her parents’ marriage and their decision, ultimately, to remain together. Shattuck also focuses on the impacts of Trisha’s transition on her and her sister at a developmentally crucial time, and she finally is able to ask Trisha the questions she couldn’t ask when she was younger.

Trisha’s story is fairly typical of those who come out as transgender – there is talk of depression, suicidal tendencies, and a sense of things being “not quite right” as she attempts to straddle the fence between worlds. What is perhaps most impressive in the film, however, stems from a different kind of typicality – specifically, the ordinariness of this family portrait. Without doubt, coming out as transgender can present a range of difficult issues for families to face, and there are still real risks to individuals making those transitions. And yet, Shattuck chooses to highlight the small things – the day-to-day, the process, the work of living. We see how Trisha has used art to help herself transition, and we see how her artwork becomes a metaphor for her relationships and emotions during the process. But there is no neat ribbon to tie everything up, no punch line, no final mark of punctuation. Shattuck’s strength in this film is showing the extraordinary that lives within individuals by sharing the ordinary elements of everyday life.

From This Day Forward is appropriate for courses in gender studies, family studies, psychology, and sociology and is a good accompaniment to other films that focus on transgenderism or gender identity issues, such as Gendernauts: A Journey through Shifting Identities (1999), Becoming Me: The Gender Within (2009), and Coby (2017).