Filmmakers Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos journey across the United States to understand their own trans boyhood through the legacies of two young trans men, while exploring what community healing means.
This intimate and urgent documentary asks why the transmasculine community is particularly vulnerable to living briefly and dying quietly, and asks ultimately what will we become as a society?
Moving between activism and reflection, Bean and Rozos trace how abuse, stigma and exclusion take root in everyday life, from playground bullying to online hostility. Bean and Rozos weave archive footage, community engagement and personal testimony, resulting in a tender, intimate and tactile piece, rooted in care and compassion.
Created by two trans filmmakers with their own experience of suicide attempts, What Will I Become? is also a story of survival. Increasingly forced to navigate grief, resistance and discrimination, it shows how urgent resources like therapy, creativity, parents, peers and role models are as lifelines and sources of hope.
Includes a Q&A with co-director Lexie Bean. Co-presented with LGBT Youth Scotland.
As we honor the lives of the two trans boys at the heart of this film, Blake and Kyler, we untangle how navigating masculinity, transphobia, and other forms of oppression affects our community. What Will I Become? is a film for people who escaped one limiting form of gender expression to find themselves being shut into another one, whose imaginations were forcibly limited and so couldn’t find their own futures. It’s for those who didn’t know how or where to give voice to their experiences, and who have been failed by systems that at once degrade their sense of safety and mental health and pathologise them.
Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos
When I saw What Will I Become? for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the tender creativity and heartfelt honesty with which the first-time directors Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos approach the issue of high suicide rates amongst trans male adolescents. What an encouraging commitment to young queers in a world where the only recognized way of being accepted as a man seems more and more defined by dominant appearance and violent and toxic behaviour. A documentary full of love and kindness that turns statistics into personal stories, a film that made me see the trans men in my life with different eyes.
Dr. Tobias Dietrich
Researcher, Curator and Jury Member
