In 2021, Jordan Bryon took major steps to physically realize his identity as a transgender man, opposed by a society that often looked upon him with hostility and a government that neither understood nor respected him. As he started hormone injections in preparation for gender-affirming surgery, he soon found himself embroiled in a political firestorm over his basic right to exist. His precarious position has grown all too familiar as barbaric anti-trans laws spring up around the United States like invasive weeds, but Bryon isn’t American. He hails from a small town in Australia, and he undertook the sensitive, undeniable work of transitioning while working as a journalist in Afghanistan just as the Taliban – a group not known for their policies of tolerance – seized control of the country.
“[I was] making this transition without any idea of where it was going, or how to plan for it,” Bryon tells the Guardian over Zoom. “And yeah, it was just too hard, doing it myself. I couldn’t continue living and doing all the shooting at the same time, and then, the Taliban took over. I gave up and stopped, then these guys convinced me to keep going.”
The guys in question are Bryon’s co-director Monica Villamizar and her crew, collaborators on the new documentary Transition, which premiered this past weekend at the Tribeca film festival. Bryon had embedded with the Taliban for an assignment from the New York Times, all the while keeping a separate video diary of his personal path through those fraught and formative days, when he met fellow reporter Villamizar. (“I heard about Jordan long before meeting him,” she says.) She convinced him to redirect course and mission-drift into a more intimate, subjective view of the topic he’d come to cover. Bryon’s own rocky path cuts an entryway into a complex portrayal of the Taliban, a reactionary terrorist organization nonetheless capable of individual acts of empathy toward a determined assimilationist. Transition wedges itself inside the tension between the body and the state, between the need to be seen and the fear that demanding as much could pose a life-threatening risk.
Villamizar wanted to place enough focus on “Jordan’s day-to-day – living, working, being himself” to humanize his extraordinary circumstances, but his movements inevitably led back to hazardous territory. With the help of local contact Teddy, Bryon had ingratiated himself with the local officers to the point of sitting in on their meetings and amicably breaking bread in off hours, their mostly cordial manner something of a surprise to him. An obvious paradox presents itself: how and why did an organization reviled worldwide for its doctrine of repression open their door to a trans man? As Bryon explains: “The Taliban is not one homogeneous organization. There might be some Talibs open to media, who welcomed the opportunity to retell the narrative of the Taliban … They can also be very hostile. We were lucky, the only reason we got the access to this Taliban unit is because the commander is more of a savvy guy, not even media-savvy, but in general. He wanted to re-tell the Taliban’s narrative, show this particular unit in a different way.”
Villamizar and Bryon had no plans to do PR for the Taliban, and so they tasked themselves with weighing their handful of positive impressions against the campaign of conflict waged all around them. Bryon and Teddy got roughed up by intelligence agents a few times at protests, taking gun butts to the back of their heads and nearly losing their equipment. (The camera took on a charged significance in Afghanistan after an assassin used one to conceal the bomb that killed the commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. “There’s a lot of paranoia,” Villamizar says.) They were also arrested at the regional airport for taking non-permitted video, and detained for hours by officials who confiscated their phones. “They deleted the footage, but luckily, this was without realizing it just goes into the trash folder, where you can still un-delete it,” Bryon recalls with a laugh.
He also found, however, that the mechanics of passing worked to his favor when playing stranger in a strange land. “Everything I say about Afghanistan needs to be contextualized by the fact that I’m a white person, a white man, and a white trans man,” he says. “For me, the best thing was that Afghanistan hasn’t developed to the extent of understanding LGBTQIA+ issues or communities. So when I was living there, I became anonymous. My whole life, I’ve had this label on my forehead because I’ve been identified as a dyke, or a butch lesbian, or as a trans man. These labels followed me everywhere, but in Afghanistan, they didn’t have an awareness of these things. I was just Jordan, blank slate. From there, I was able to become the person that I wanted to be without being affected by these labels. I come from a small Australian country town in the 80s and 90s, and it wasn’t always pretty. I’ve got scars on my back from having rocks thrown at me. There was graffiti in the school about me. This all came with a lot of shame. The blank slate in Afghanistan didn’t come with that shame.”
“To really accentuate the white-person lens of all this, I was able to find myself through this experience,” he adds. “Of course, Afghans in the LGBTQIA+ community have a drastically different experience than this. That’s bold and italicized.”
As the Taliban continued to make Afghanistan an inhospitable place for queer people of all stripes, Bryon nonetheless developed a deep affinity for the nation he’d come to think of as home. The process of coming to grips with this contradiction emerged as the core substance of the film, with no easy resolutions offered to a thorny interior conundrum. “Teddy and I lost months of sleep dealing with this ethical dilemma of ‘How do we like these guys? These guys are awful, we hate them. No, we like them. No, we hate them. No, we like them. Should we not do this?’ It was the most confusing experience of my life … That conflict is the most interesting thing about the film, for me. I feel very strongly about this aspect of it. As the character, I don’t have a resolution for myself or an answer to these questions. It didn’t feel right to make the film answer when I don’t personally have an answer.”
Bryon and Villamizar share a firmer certainty about the paramount importance of protecting those still subject to persecution by the Taliban. For all the hardship they powered through while making Transition, the co-directors also enjoyed a handful of advantages that many others aren’t fortunate enough to have. More than a tribute to Bryon’s tenacity in the face of steep opposition, the film honors anyone with the conviction and courage to live honestly in conditions that seek to punish or erase any sign of difference.
“We’re both minority film-makers, you know?” Villamizar says. “There’s so much hatred everywhere. We’re appalled by what’s going on, in terms of persecution against the trans community. But we wanted to approach everything from a nonjudgemental point of view. We hope to have some social impact with this. There are a lot of Afghans who’ve stayed behind, we’re worried about them – the refugee and trans communities.”
Transition premiered at the Tribeca film festival and will be released at a later date
