We are invited to witness the victory, to watch the part where they’ve each arrived at a greater acceptance and understanding of one another. In their 41-minute documentary, “my heart and i finally met: between my chest,” storyteller J (Jasmine) Jackson shares part of the process of the transition in their top surgery in 2022, and the conversations and relationships with the important and significant people in their life.
Early in the film, we see a familiar scene: a child sitting on the floor, between their mother’s legs, as the mother parts their hair, slides product on their scalp, installs individual braids, and burns the ends. This is all happening while the pair talks about the road they traveled together to arrive at this better place, and how it was littered with a lot of baggage that, ultimately, helped them begin to heal the issues at play around gender identity.
“My job is to love you, with all my heart. You guys are a blessing, you’re not a burden,” Jackson’s mother says in the film, in reference to them and their siblings. “And, loving you partially is not acceptable for me because you chose different.”
They hope their film helps people believe in possibilities for intergenerational conversations. Sure, some people will choose to be rigid, and those people aren’t owed grace on someone else’s journey; but sometimes, there’s an alternative outcome where another generation is willing to learn and question things they may not have thought deeply about before.
“It was a journey to be where we are, presently, with my parents. This film is like a continuation of these conversations. I think it’s endless,” said Jackson, who uses the pronouns they/them. “It’s ideal, in a very utopian way, to think that this is kind of ‘one-and-done,’ that we’re never going to have to speak about this again. We get each other. But, it’s endless.”
Their film is being screened as part of UC San Diego’s Otherwise Film Festival, taking place Wednesday through Saturday at locations on campus. The festival highlights voices and stories from marginalized communities, broadening representation. The lineup includes films about cultural identity, colonialism, and familial connections. There will be question-and-answer sessions following the screenings, and “my heart and i finally met” is part of the “TRANScending Expectations” lineup, beginning at 1 p.m. Friday at the campus’s SME (Structural and Materials Engineering) Theater. Jackson, who identifies as nonbinary and is based in Portland, Ore., took some time to talk about their film and the ongoing journey toward liberation. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/author/lisa-deaderick/.)
Q: Your company, Intersecting Pictures, Inc., deliberately produces vulnerable stories through video with a focus on challenging peoples discomfort. What is it about vulnerable stories and that discomfort that compels you in your creativity?
A: I like to think of my existence as killable in more ways than one; some people dont view it like that. Theyre like, Youre telling these great stories, you seem so happy and so euphoric and all of the great buzzwords that come with the happiness parts, but then theres this other disjointed piece of, Yeah, I am all of these things, but also, my experience of reality may not be like yours, but that doesnt mean it doesnt exist.
Since 2020, I was just dumbfounded because I was seeing a lot of people in my community making really jarring statements that I felt like added value to my life, for once. It really put a distance between my understanding of my own existence and how visible I was to other people. I was like, Wow, its kind of weird that I feel like the statements that are being made are adding value to me. What was our relationship before you thought this now? Saying things like, We should be prioritizing Black voices, Black artists. We should be propelling these folks and giving resources, giving our time, giving our ears, learning very basic, human needs. So, just hearing things like that was really odd. I remember putting out this project called The Scary Truth and the idea was like a Black ghost coming and haunting you; it was a call out for a whole bunch of things. Like, I dont need you to tell me that Im valuable because, socially, people are telling you that thats what you need to be doing. Im also not being dismissive of the fact that you are just now saying this, which is saying much more about the context of our relationship that preceded 2020, that preceded any of the other deaths (of Black people killed by police officers) that have been talked about and yelled about, screamed about. You decided, now, to make your pivot point for your social justice advocacy…Im not going to be the catalyst for your understanding of anything regarding Blackness and injustice, and your only means of exposure to that. But, if I am, prepare yourself; Im not preparing you. And, thats kind of the tone, that youre going to learn something from your own discomfort because Im not going to do a Q&A about it after.
Q: We see this in action in your film. What inspired you to tell this story? Why was this a part of your life and experience you wanted to share in this way?
A: What inspired me to tell the story was just a lot of the nuanced experiences, particularly between Black nonbinary and Black trans folks, and the intersections between generational differences and having that discourse. A lot of Black trans or Black nonbinary folks journeys, that Ive been told, have been very familial based. I felt like mine was very nuanced in that way. In the film, I only covered the (after) experience of my moms and dads acceptance, if you will, of my gender identity. I wanted to emphasize that youre seeing the end of this, youre seeing the now. This was by no means an easy journey. What wasnt included was the timeline of before coming out as nonbinary, and before getting my top surgery, there was a journey of talking about being Black and queer. Growing up with a mom who was like, How do I set myself apart from something that is not about me? Doing that with a Black mom, no less, and not coming off as disrespectful. How do you own your autonomy at your own big age and have that conversation with two people who want relationships with one another? A lot of what inspired me was that I wanted to show folks that was a possibility, there was a mutual desire to have that, so there was some release that had to happen on both ends. I worked on that project for a whole year, a whole year of documentation.
Q: What is meant by the title choice of “my heart and i finally met: between my chest”?
A: I felt like there was always a desire for what I had imagined when I thought about myself. Like, it has always been with a flat chest. Growing up and attaching a sense of self that I knew to having, visibly, what I now have. I felt like getting top surgery and journeying through that, I felt like I was aligning myself, and my heart’s truest desire was aligning with my most inner self and who I am. That’s my heart. The second part that was “between my chest,” just happened to be that, through this tangible thing that is top surgery, and my chest, I felt like they had finally met in the middle through this affirming surgery.
Q: You also mention, in the film, how you wrote a letter to yourself before your surgery. Are you comfortable talking about what you said in that letter, and why?
A: For context, I mentioned in the film that my therapist, who is also Black and nonbinary and queer, they encouraged me to write an affirmation letter to myself. I think anything that is exciting, or even very happy for people, can also still be anxiety inducing. A lot of anxiety was going on under what was my first surgery ever, so I had a lot of anxiety around that and they just encouraged me to write affirmations. It was also around the holidays, with Thankstaking and Christmas. It’s a time I usually am visiting my family, and a lot of my family didn’t know about my surgery. I felt like I was trying to prep myself before getting there because I felt like I would get lost in my recovery and just be really down about it, while also so happy. So, my therapist told me to write affirmations so that when things come up that aren’t so great, I’d have something written about what I wanted to come out of all of this. It was very simple, like, “You get to walk around your house shirtless. At home, on the beach, in public” or “You did this to feel at home in your body, and how often are you selfish like that? Doesn’t it feel good to make yourself happy? To have your own agency and feel in control of your life?” There were other little things, like, “Now, you get to lay on your stomach without your boobs in the way. … Running with no knockers swinging and flying up.” Just things like that. I continued to write outside of the affirmation letter. I wrote during my recovery, too, and was reliving dreams I’d had about the fear of visibility and feeling happy, but also feeling very visible. I think I pointed out in some parts of the documentary that it doesn’t make me any more or less killable, it’s just weird to have this new sense of liberation in this way.
Q: In the segment when you talk about why you wanted to interview your parents, part of what you said that stood out to me was that you realized that living as intersectionally, unconventionally, or in any way that requires me to think beyond the many binary systems in place, that many arent afforded that privilege or even the space to deconstruct systems and question what it means to think of themselves or others expansively. Theres so much in this statement, but the first thing I want to ask is if you could talk about how you came to see this as a privilege that has come from living beyond binary systems.
A: This comes from so many places. This comes from being in a different sense of community than my parents. Not even in a way thats specifically LGBTQ or specifically Black, its just that I think I grew up around a lot of people I gravitated toward. Even now, most of my circle is very intersectional and they expand my understanding of a lot of things; a lot of things that my parents just werent afforded the space to think about. A lot of their growing up was on survival and where was the space for What does it mean for me to be a woman? What does it mean for me to be a man? What am I dissecting and dismantling in my own masculinity? Things like that can be very frustrating on a generational level and that sort of creates the gap. It wasnt that I didnt have a relationship with my parents that was willful enough to have the conversation, it just didnt mean that it didnt have rigidity or that it was any more or less hard; it definitely was those things.
I also had to realize that I was their first kid to (bring up) a lot of things that they know exist, but have never questioned themselves. So, I realized that was a privilege, in a sense, because I could say that so many things were a turning point for this. In Black feminist theory (class) with a Black, queer professor, dissecting my own (stuff) and then coming home from college and being like, Oh, Ma, I need to talk to you about how you need to be living your life. And her, being a very resistant person, she was also like, I never thought of it in this way. Then seeing, in small ways, her inner child being taught something through her youngest child, those were moments that were kind of part of the transformation for me. I was like, Oh yeah, a lot of these things, shes hearing for the first time. Shes being asked about for the first time, shes being affirmed about for the first time. So, trying to meet that gap of how do we meet each other with our current needs, now? I felt like it was just a privilege to have been afforded the space to be a thinker, an action-taker, without some restrictions (my parents had). In knowing my mom and dads upbringings, they definitely werent afforded that.
I went through periods where things were definitely off between us, we needed a couple of months to not talk and visit each other. It was a hot mess. The beauty that has come out of the documentary is that no one saw what preceded that. My mom and I talk about that a bit in the film and now, I can believe her a lot more than in the beginning where it was coming from a disjointed place. You could still feel the tension of her applying her own self to her childs journey. Were really just trying to see each other as individuals outside of each others titles to each other, which is such a hard (expletive) thing to do, especially with motherhood, right? My mom has only known motherhood for the last 28 years, and shes just now learning to live for herself. Shes also just now being empowered to do that by her youngest kid and it should not take her youngest kid to empower that, but shes been positioned in that way by her mom, and her moms mom. Also, just societally how folks look at Black women and their subjection to the role of caretaker, in so many forms. So, there were so many things where I was like, I dont think my mom is trying to be hardheaded, I just think she was trying to work with was she was subjected to and show me that she really does want this relationship, too. I can work with that.
Q: I know that as you and I are having this conversation, it hasnt even been 24 hours since learning that Donald Trump is again President-elect of the United States. Your website says that anything intersectional, makes things a little uncomfy for the white majority but that you embrace that discomfort and want people to feel it so as to evoke growth and change for the betterment of Black & Brown folks. Im wondering how that fits in with any thoughts you may have about what another Trump presidency might mean for folks who live intersectionally?
A: A large part of me has so many things to say, a large part of me has nothing to say. I think, a few things that Ill say is that I always tell people that my leading identifier will always be my Blackness, preceding any part of my identity. I say that because, in some of the results that weve seen, theres been a lot of discourse around non-White voters voting in ways that are very telling about the unspoken anti-Blackness they feel. For that, I will always say that this identity precedes the other existing identities. I think theres a sense of this melting pot of all people of color thats not really serving all of us, as we see.
In the poll results that we saw, Black women, especially, are the exact reason why feminism has to be intersectional. It is no longer about just womanhood, at face value. Its telling what America feels about Black women. I never want it to get lost that, as I identify outside of the binary and as I talk about gender-adjacent topics, that I will always have the experience of that of a Black woman, whether I grew a beard or still had titties or not. This election is not changing anything that I didnt already know about being in a Black body, but especially that of a Black woman. Its doing nothing more than just reminding me of the already existing systems at play that remind us of our disposability.