In “Born to Be,” Tania Cypriano’s moving and fascinatingly forward-looking documentary about the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City, we meet a hand…
,” Tania Cypriano’s moving and fascinatingly forward-looking documentary about the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City, we meet a handful of eager, at times desperate folks who are engaged in the existential medical conundrum of doing everything they can to become the people they are.
Making the person you are on the outside match the person you are on the inside is the mission of the Mount Sinai CTMS, the first hospital center of its kind in America. In 2015, New York State passed a law requiring health insurance to cover transgender-related services; it’s the ninth state in the country to have such a law.
“Born to Be” gives you a glimpse of what’s coming: a time when, in all of America and the rest of the world, trans people, and the medical care and procedures they need, cease in any way to be exotic. But that’s not where we are now. Most of “Born to Be” takes place in the fluorescent-lit corridors, examination rooms, and operating theaters of Mount Sinai, where Dr. Ting and his associates are cultivating the science of trans medicine as we speak.
What the Mount Sinai center represents is a paradigm shift, if not a revolution: the normalization of trans care. As the movie captures, however, few of these procedures are time-tested. At one point, Dr. Ting explains how he got a sudden inspiration to create a new technique to perform a vagioplasty, using the soft tissue that lines the abdomen. At that moment, his spirit hearkens back to that of Dr. Christiaan Barnard in the late ’60s inventing the heart transplant.
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