Let Me Die a Woman

Admittedly, I have not dug particularly deep into the exceedingly seedy, sleazy, and shitty sexploitation works of jaded Jewess ‘auteur’ Doris Wishman (Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls, Bad Girls Go to Hell), but Let Me Die a Woman (1977) aka Strange/Her—a quasi/pseudo-documentary about trannies, trannsexuality, and sex-change operations—is the only film she directed that I was actually able to finish without giving up due to sheer and utter boredom. Advertised as “A Hygiene Film” with the less than titillating tagline “It's about real people...,” Let Me Die a Woman is an X-rated exploitation film terribly disguised as a serious medical documentary narrated by a purported real doctor of medicine and featuring interviews with real transvestites, but also featuring sensationally contrived ‘docudrama’ pseudo-porn scenes of so-called chicks with tiny tits and flaccid pricks engaging in amazingly banal ‘erotic’ scenes with ostensibly heterosexual men. Directed by a wanton and artistically whimsical woman who was also responsible for marvelously mediocre hardcore porn flicks like Satan Was a Lady (1975) and Come With Me, My Love (1976) starring the supremely grotesque lesbo Jewess porn star Annie Sprinkle, Let Me Die a Woman goes so far as even featuring a cameo from Hebraic porn star Harry Reems of Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) infamy, thus making no bones about discrediting its own moral and scientific integrity as a film that was meant for selling tickets to perverted scopophiles and not as a sincere “how-to” guide on the phenomenon of transexuality and those rather unfortunate and seemingly biologically schizophrenic souls who are so dearly convinced they have the mind and soul of a woman that they become willing eunuchs and guarantee that they will never have a chance to receive a sexual orgasm ever again in their lives. Narrated and guided by a supremely shady Judaic fellow named Dr. Leo Wollman, a man described in the documentary as a “MD, PhD…doctor, surgeon, psychologist, minister, medical writer…A man uniquely qualified to help us understand this phenomenon,” Let Me Die a Woman features not only the unclad bodies of chicks with boobs and balls that are perversely prodded by the heeb Herr Döktor in question, but actual bloody and relatively brutal footage of penises being butchered and inverted during ‘sexual reassignment’ surgery. While describing Let Me Die a Woman as a disturbing piece of lowbrow ‘aesthetic terrorism’ would be too generous of a description for this bottom-of-the-barrel piece of accidentally eccentric exploitation sinema, director Doris Wishman certainly deserves backhanded credit for having the macabre gall to exploit some of the most deleteriously disturbed and self-destructive individuals that make up humanity.

 “Imagine if you can what it is like to be a woman imprisoned in the body of a man…or a man trapped in the body of a woman,” or so says the narrator of Let Me Die a Woman regarding the transsexual, a person, to once again quote the film, that must have had something along the lines of a “monstrous, biological joke played on him or her.” Our guide for the documentary is Dr. Leo Wollman (apparently a real doctor whose practice was in an urban ghetto), a supposed Renaissance man in regard to the postmodern tranny condition, and he has a special sensitivity towards speaking in detail about and exaggeratedly prodding his poor patient’s genitals in a most dubious manner. Despite the rather repulsive quack doc being the main narrator of the degenerate doc, a Puerto Rican ‘chick’ named Leslie who had her dick cut off is the true star power of Let Me Die a Woman. Indeed, Leslie is a real male-to-female transvestite who has natural looking breasts and had he/r penis cut off and surgically reconstructed into a vagina of sorts. Undoubtedly, Leslie is an extremely flamboyant individual who looks like she could be an extra from Paul Morrissey’s Mixed Blood (1984) and has an eccentric and intemperate Latina diva tranny essence not unlike John Leguizamo’s character “Ruby” from Danny Leiner’s Time Expired (1992), thus providing a bit of comic relief in an inane piece of pseudo-science.  Of course, what is most sensational about Let Me Die a Woman, aside from its real footage of cock-chopping sex-changes being performed, is the various exploitative sex and gore scenes based on ‘true’ stories, including cock-to-cock spooning between man and transwoman and an extremely absurd, Milligan-esque dramatization of a desperate military man turned carpenter stoically dismembering his own dick via chisel in desperation in a scene that looks like an outtake from the classic rape and revenge flick I Spit on Your Grave (1978). In making his argument for the importance of sex reassignment surgery, Wollman matter-of-factly states, “some transsexuals live their entire lives as men. They are ineffective sexually, socially, and are usually failures in all of their undertakings because they are so very insecure.” In terms of ‘hard science,’ one learns while watching Let Me Die a Woman that during a male-to-female sex change, the testicles are thrown away and the penis of the patient is simply inverted/turned inside out, thus acting as a pseudo-vaginal canal. Of course, as degenerate doc Wollman explains in regard to the man-made vagina, “one disappointing feature is the absence of lubricating fluid, because the glands that produce this fluid cannot be transplanted,” so naturally it is quite some time before a man-turned-woman can try their new genitals out after surgery. Wollman explains one rather disgusting story of a desperate dude who got a sex-change in Casablanca and was eager to use 'her' new beaver and did so too soon, thus she needed surgery to fix the damage done. When Leslie had sex for the first time as a new woman with a German fellow, she was lucky that her boy toy assumed he was the lucky one to pop her cherry due to the blood that came out of her designer vagina and never suspected that she was really born a he. In the end, the feisty faux-female Leslie, whose crudely charming character could not have been contrived by a filmmaker as innately talentless as Doris Wishman, seems like the only believable person in Let Me Die a Woman. 

 In German New Cinema master auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s highly personal (he made it after the suicide of his boyfriend Armin Meier) avant-garde masterpiece In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), one is exposed to a desperately perturbed protagonist named Erwin/Elvira Weishaupt who, although once a married man and father that was never even an active homosexual nor interested in becoming a woman, decided to get his penis cut off in Casablanca after randomly falling in love with a rich yet sadistic Jewish businessman/holocaust survivor. In the end, Elvira’s sex-change does nothing to change her would-be-lover’s mind and s/he ultimately commits suicide as a person who failed to find happiness both as a male and female, thus acting in stark contrast to the false hope that Let Me Die a Woman haphazardly attempts to offer in regard to sex-changes. According to one 2010 study, 41% of American transsexuals have attempted suicide, thus In a Year of 13 Moons does not seem all that extreme in its depiction of a butcher who had their genitals butchered in the hope of changing their lives and inevitably committed self-slaughter as a last resort after realizing what a drastic mistake s/he made regarding the sex-change. The reality is that no person born a man can ever truly be an authentic woman as males and females are innately genetically different in that men have one X and one Y chromosome and females merely have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosomes. While Let Me Die a Woman pretends, quite transparently, to be seemingly sympathetic to its mixed-up subjects, as gay far-leftist film critic Thomas Waugh wrote in a 1978 review of the film with regard the star Leslie, “a young Puerto Rican woman…tells an engaging story of growing up in biological “prison” within a large, poor family and a macho culture. But an offhand remark that if she had any children she wouldn’t want them to be gay suddenly explodes a mass of contradictions that the film is trying to avoid.” Indeed, if anything is learned while watching Let Me Die a Woman, it is that being a transsexual makes for a miserable existence, so much so that it pushes some to destroying their ability to experience sexual pleasure and sexually reproduce.  That being said, if Doris Wishman should be remembered for anything, it is for being the sleaziest and most parasitical female filmmaker who has ever lived and with Let Me Die a Woman being her odious magnum opus.

-Ty E