In the opening seconds of Orlando: My Political Biography, a shadowy figure in a quiet city street says: “Someone once asked me, ‘Why don’t you write your autobiography?’ And I replied, ‘Because Virginia Woolf fucking wrote it for me in 1928.’” The scene takes place in the dead of night, with the silence broken only by the swish of a brush as this speaker pastes up a large gold poster. “Orlando,” it reads, “où es tu?”
Moments later, this fly-poster apologises to Woolf for his profanity: “I say it with tenderness and admiration, because your writing seems impossible to surpass. But I also say it with rage, because you represented us – trans people – as aristocrats in colonial England who one day wake up in a woman’s body.”
There is nothing accidental about the slide from plural to singular in that last sentence, which is spoken – like most of the film – in French. The fly-poster with neatly cropped hair is its 53-year-old screenwriter and director Paul B Preciado, a writer, curator and activist who was mentored in philosophy by Jacques Derrida, and is only now making his first venture into film. In Orlando: My Political Biography, Preciado spends 90 minutes retelling Woolf’s centuries-spanning story of gender transformation through 25 different Orlandos. They are white, brown and black; male, female and non-binary; and they range in age from eight to over 70. Shot on a shoestring budget, the film is an improbable undertaking, one that could easily have been pretentiously academic, but it turns out to be funny and captivatingly humane.
It has taken several months to pin Preciado down for an interview, with several cancellations. When we finally settle for a video call, I am expecting him to be uncooperative, but I’m wrong. He answers every question candidly and at essay length, starting with his childhood in the “strongly Catholic, militaristic” city of Burgos in northern Spain.
From the age of four, he says, everyone knew he was different. “Even the teachers would refer to boys, girls – and you. But at that time – especially being from Spain at the end of Francoism and the beginning of democracy – it was very difficult to find words to name my condition, besides being just moody.” Preciado found his way to the US via a Fulbright scholarship for an MA in philosophy, returning later for a PhD at Princeton, where he wrote a dissertation, Pornotopía: Architecture and Sexuality in Playboy During the Cold War, in 2010. It later became an award-winning book in France.
In early adulthood, he says, he embraced the gay and lesbian community, publishing his early work under his birth name of Beatriz Preciado. “But I always thought my way of seeing gender was different to most of the people in that community. So when I was 35, because I was surrounded by other people using hormones, I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to try and see what is happening.’ And then, little by little, my body changed until I found myself with a passport that didn’t relate at all to it. Then I went into basically changing my legal identity in Spain, within a binary regime that doesn’t allow for anything else.” Only last year was Spanish law changed to allow people over 16 to change their gender.
In the book Testo Junkie, published originally in Spanish in 2008, Preciado recounted this experience, as part of a history of reproductive technologies that traced a “pharmacopornographic” line from the pill to Viagra and gender-change hormones. Did I know, he asks, “that the pill was invented at the beginning as a technique for regulating the expansion of what, at that time, were called black races in the US? Then women, through the feminist emancipation, started to use the pill differently. Well, it’s similar for trans and non-binary people, who reallocate technologies – such as operations and hormones, which were invented to normalise the bodies of intersex babies at birth – to emancipate themselves and construct all their genders. The body is not an anatomical object. It is a historical archive.”
In the film, Preciado translates the abstract language of cultural theory into a sequence of witty scenes that grant access to all areas – on stage and behind it – allowing the biographical musings of his Orlandos to merge with Woolf’s own words. They romp through woods in Elizabethan ruffs and modern leisure-wear. One marches into a weapon shop in half a suit of badly knitted chain mail asking for something that will make them a man, turning down a sword in favour of a large gun. Another recounts an encounter with a sexist sea captain on Orlando’s voyage home from Constantinople, while an assistant pins a model sailing ship to the top of their oceanic wig.
Preciado’s critique of the medicalisation of trans identity extends to psychiatry via a grimly amusing episode in which a waiting room full of Orlandos exchange black-market hormones while waiting to be called in for pointless consultations with a box-ticking psychiatrist who has no understanding that all they really need is to be recognised as having a legitimate case for changing gender.
In 2019, Preciado had his own bruising encounter with the psychiatric establishment in France, where he is now based, when he was invited to explain his thinking on gender to the École de la Cause Freudienne (School of the Freudian Cause), only to be heckled by 3,500 Lacanian psychoanalysts and hustled off the stage. Eighteen months later, he published the text of his lecture as a book, Can the Monster Speak?
The most potentially combustive aspect of the film is its fleeting inclusion of a trio of sweet pre-pubescent Orlandos. But so far there has been no pushback in either the US or Europe – much to his surprise, “given the way the extreme right and the conservative religious groups are using the notion of our childhood to basically implement right-wing policies”.
Away from the limelight and the academy, Preciado does a lot of work with the families of trans children, some of whom have been “extremely harassed by the media, or their school, or other institutions. So for me, the film was valuable not only to the kids but to the people around them.”
One encounter that didn’t make it to the screen – “because it was emotional and the children are fragile” – was between the film’s oldest Orlando, Jenny Bel’Air, who is a well-known trans actor in France now in her 70s, and her younger selves. “Jenny was telling her story, so the children were learning in the moment about a time that was quite different to their own, and it was so funny, because she was explaining to them, ‘You know, I’m just an Orlando like you.’”
Far from being too radical, Preciado says: “I’m always thinking I’m not radical enough. Because, if I think about the future and what is needed for there to even be one, I think we need to go farther: we need to stop this madness of destruction of the planet; we need to stop gender violence; we need to stop considering the nuclear family as the only system of possible reproduction of life; we need to stop considering the male European body as the only sovereign body that has to embody power. All these are basically models that we have inherited from patriarchal colonial history. And it has to stop.”
But he’s not going to let it depress him. “I’m basically a pathological optimist. Maybe that’s my only pathology – if I have to accept one,” he jokes, then turns serious, pointing out that it’s not that he wakes up every morning feeling optimistic. It’s a political decision. “My optimism comes from this feeling of need for the renewal of a collective system of thought. I don’t have the luxury of doing anything else because, as long as I am living on this planet, I feel responsible for it and the people living with me.”
The reception of his film, provocative and essayish as it is, is one serious reason to be cheerful. “In France,” he says, “there are people against transitioning, against everything I work for. But some of these people came to see the film. At the end, they said, ‘I still hate your work, but the film is OK.’”
• Orlando, My Political Biography is released in UK cinemas on 5 July
