The first time I read Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, I was seventeen. I had found a small feminist bookstore in Montreal and had bought just about every piece of transsexual theory I could find, blowing the cover of effeminate maleness I was still using in public. Testo Junkie laid out the politics of the sex change. Where the sexual characteristics of my pre-transsexual body reflected the patriarchal society I grew up in, my transsexualized body could serve as an assertion of my autonomy, a resistance to the rigid order of sexual dimorphism.

Orlando, My Political Biography is Preciado’s answer to those asking him to write an autobiography. Preciado sees himself in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a damned prince who wakes up in the body of a woman, and has to adapt to a new world of roles and customs. This iteration of the work mixes Woolf’s story with the real-life experiences of various trans people playing the original novel’s characters. 

Interviews about the power of sex-changing hormones and surgeries blend seamlessly into accounts of Orlando’s new, troubling gender. As Orlando travels through the ages, through the bodies of multiple different people, her adventures reach their climax as she demands recognition of her new gender from the state.

Preciado poses a fascinating parallel between Woolf’s novel’s Queen Elizabeth, the figure of the cold and stern empire, and the film’s Dr. E. Reine, whose strict adhesion to patriarchal gender norms prevents the various Orlandos from accessing Hormone Replacement Therapy. The film celebrates the real life Orlando’s of history through trans people whose imagination and gendered creativity leads to their ostracization. 

Orlando, and the people playing her, reflect on the unique insights offered by transition. They come into new genders, shocked by the rigidity of the roles patriarchy ascribed as natural. Orlando, My Political Biography celebrates the unique power of transness, to see the violence that patriarchy has fought so hard to normalize, and to break the roles encoded into our very flesh.

Now, mere days away from celebrating one year of taking estrogen, I can relate to Orlando’s story, much like those who play her in this film. Like Preciado says, I can feel that what I am transforming is not only flesh, but also the political fictions that mold it. 

As bodies are made through stories that ascribe how they ought to be, their transformations challenge these stories, and they create new possibilities. 

Where Testo Junkie exposed me to the mythological construction of sex, Orlando, My Political Biography explored the power of its transformations, operating on the political fiction of sexual dimorphism, to open up new worlds of sexual possibility.

Several of the people who played Orlando throughout the film perform a surgical operation on a copy of Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography. Using a scalpel, they cut out drawings of the fictitious Orlando, replacing her with photos of real-life trans people, such as Marsha P. Johnson and Christine Jorgensen. In this final scene, Preciado melts political fiction into reality. This operation sheds light on real life people enacting the political myth of Orlando, real people using their real bodies to rip out the patriarchal fictions written into their flesh.

The 2024 ReFrame Festival runs from January 25th-February 4th. A list of films, tickets to events and screenings, and more information can be found on the Festival Website.