A new season of Documentary NZ launches with the unusual pregnancy journey of a gay couple.
To casual acquaintances – and even to some of their wedding guests – Rāwā and Frankie Karetai Wood-Bodley were just another couple of gay men in a loving relationship. When they talked about their desire to become parents, people assumed they would be searching for a surrogate mother. But Rāwā is a bisexual man and Frankie was born a girl and is now a trans-man. They wanted Frankie to carry their baby.
Trans and Pregnant, which launches this season of TVNZ’s Documentary New Zealand, follows their progress towards that goal (spoiler: they do have a baby) and the tight focus on the pregnancy journey does mean that the documentary relies heavily on Rāwā and Frankie to tell their own story. They do a lot of talking over the four years spanned by its narrative.
They readily acknowledge that they live in a supportive “queer bubble” in Wellington, but the culture war raging outside is referenced only obliquely and there are no glimpses of evangelical tub-thumpers or opportunist politicians, because it is not their story. It’s the story of two men who desperately want to have a baby together. (That said, it might be amusing to hear a politician argue that the bearded, shaven-headed Frankie should be forced to use women’s toilets.)
We meet their parents: Rāwā's mum is a hard case who loves them both and Frankie’s dad has progressive Parkinson’s disease and desperately wants to hang on long enough to be a grandfather. We learn about them as children – Rāwā was a feisty kid who spent a year immobilised by injuries from being hit by a car. Frankie was certain that his gender didn’t match his body from the age of 4 or 5 but didn’t transition until after he left the family home to attend university – but almost nothing about their lives now. What do they do? How can they afford to attend a fertility clinic, or buy a house, even in rural Canterbury, to share with Rāwā's mother?
It’s not exactly a secret: they both have a background in public sector management, mostly in health and disability roles, and they now run their own consultancy business. At the Department of Internal Affairs, Frankie oversaw “operational implementation” of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021, a magnet for moral panic. Rāwā has a long history of rainbow advocacy and they both campaigned a decade ago for marriage equality. So they’re no strangers to the frontlines – that’s just not what the story is about.
Director Ramon Te Wake told the Listener that while “keeping each other safe” was integral to the makers’ approach, “we also wanted to tell their story – about two humans who are on a journey to parenthood. What does that look like? What does that feel like? We made that our north star and we just kept checking in and we just kept going.
“We were very aware that the premise would create a lot of conversations around trans people and their bodies, so in those initial stages we made sure that we talked about all the concerns and how we were going to work through them.”
There are choices involved. When Frankie decides to first reduce then cut out his three-monthly testosterone injections to improve his chances of conceiving, he frets about the likelihood that the fat in his body will redistribute and he will “slowly over time go to a more female shape”. This happens, but it’s captured in quite a subtle way: in a series of shots, over time, of the pair walking hand in hand away from the camera. Pregnancy, when it comes, is as obvious as it is for anyone.
It’s a kind of triumph that in a time when simply being trans is owning a fight, whether it’s bought or not, Trans and Pregnant is overwhelmingly about love, rather than hate. No one talks about genitals and there’s no scolding over language. By the time we arrive at the birth, which comes with the same pain, exhaustion, relief and ecstasy as any other, you’d need a very hard heart not to be moved.
If there’s a public conversation to be had about new understandings of gender, Te Wake and his subjects have done that kōrero a great service by shifting the focus away from difference and on to the universal, to make it not only about what it is to be trans, but what it is to be human.
DNZ Trans and Pregnant, Monday, November 11, 7.30pm.
A broad church
Jude Callen, TVNZ’s Commissioner premium factual, says the guiding kaupapa for this season of Documentary New Zealand is the same as the one before: “We wanted each documentary to tell a contemporary New Zealand story, to be relatable to a broad, diverse range of New Zealanders and to have relevance to their lives, whether the subject matter was directly within their own life experience or the lives of those around them.
“The play order of the strand was decided upon once we’d seen all the stories. Trans and Pregnant was chosen to lead as it is a beautifully made, heartwarming human story about a Kiwi couple who wanted to start a family. The couple happen to be two men. It’s thought-provoking, emotionally moving and very powerful. A great way to start the DNZ season.”
It’s not the only episode in the season to find its story at the edges, or behind the headlines. The 501s: An Inside Story follows “the efforts of long-term deportees to meet, train and mentor recent arrivals in an attempt to curb the ‘plane to prison’ pipeline”, and Ram Raid Mums goes into a Papakura community initiative to get kids on “a better path”. ADHD: Not Just Hyper was made by a largely neurodiverse production team and looks “beyond the negatives to highlight the positives of diverse thinkers”. Predict My Future is a follow-up to the Why Am I? series about the findings of the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, with a focus on ageing. The darkest of the titles, Unmasking the Monsters, is an inside view of the work of Objectionable Material and Child Exploitation teams “as they work alongside an international taskforce to uncover online child abuse offenders and rescue young victims”.
“Exploration of social issues” is a key part of the purpose of the series, says Callen. “We wanted the subject matter to be challenging, to spark conversation and debate.”
