Original subtitles

♪

NARRATOR: We all think we know what's normal

when it comes to sex.

ANDY COHEN: Normal is such an antiquated term.

DAN SAVAGE: You ask people what is normal sex,

and people will say,

'A man and a woman married to each other,

missionary position, the lights are off.'

And that's actually freakishly rare.

DR. RUTH WESTHEIMER: There's no such thing as normal.

NARRATOR: If normal doesn't exist,

why do we cling to it so tightly?

CHRIS FREEMAN: There are all kinds of stories

that just show us the simplicity

of male, female, masculine, feminine.

That's a simplicity that just helps us think.

It's not anything connected to any kind of reality.

DR. DREW PINSKY: There's a lot more to sex

than just the biological act.

It's who we are.

And as a result, it's intense, and so it's hard to talk about.

RuPAUL CHARLES: People feel threatened by change,

and they're gonna fight it tooth and nail.

[pounds gavel]

NARRATOR: So what is the new normal?

MAN: We also should have the basic constitutional right.

KEVIN STEA: It's a bold statement

to come out and declare who you are.

JULIE VU: My boobs have

been growing for real.

PENN JILLETTE: All bets are off, ladies and gentlemen,

and that's beautiful.

BRITTANY: We had a really awesome threesome.

ANN COULTER: The sky has fallen. What's next?

♪

NARRATOR: Think you know what's normal?

WOMAN: A normal girl has sex urges and emotional desires.

These urges can become difficult to control.

NARRATOR: The new normal is that we're all making our own rules

in the game of life

when we're talking about sex and gender.

DR. DREW PINSKY: I think there's much less rigidity

and much less judgment

and much more acceptance of individual choice.

NARRATOR: When it comes to changing

our most basic assumptions about sex,

the story starts with a biologist

who set out to collect hard scientific data

about human sexual desires.

HELEN FISHER: Alfred Kinsey did for sex

what Christopher Columbus did for geography.

He opened up this whole world,

and he was part of this whole sexual revolution.

He really, in many respects, began it.

ALFRED KINSEY: Today, we are going by film to the campus

of Indiana University in Bloomington,

where the Institute for Sex Research is located.

FISHER: Sex is a very powerful human experience.

And here came a man

who really wanted to study it scientifically.

Much of the world was fascinated.

Much of the world was terrified.

JOHN D'EMILIO: In 1948, Alfred Kinsey,

a biologist in Indiana, published a study

called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

AUDREY BILGER: The Kinsey study set up a scale

that identified one as either straight on one side

or homosexual on the other side,

and then there was a range across that scale.

And that's a pretty radical idea,

because what it suggests is that maybe many people

could be just a little gay or not entirely straight.

And those could be problematic ideas for some people.

For other people, though, it might be completely liberating

to imagine that you can act out your identity

however you see fit.

NARRATOR: According to Kinsey's research,

37% of American men had reached orgasm with another man

at least once.

Fully 10% were more or less exclusively gay.

The findings shocked America.

FISHER: He was very controversial

because a lot of people are scared

of any indication that they may be gay.

MARGARET NICHOLS: He never viewed

non-standard sexual practices as abnormal.

All sexual variation is normal as long as it's consensual

versus anything that's not geared towards reproduction

is abnormal.

NARRATOR: Not satisfied with blowing apart

traditional ideas of male sexuality,

Kinsey set his sights on another unexplored subject.

D'EMILIO: Five years later, he followed it up

with the study about the human female,

in which he collected their sexual histories.

TRISTAN TAORMINO: When Kinsey published the report

on female sexual behavior,

it really was a kind of a bombshell.

TAORMINO: What it ultimately conveyed

was women have sex as much as men.

Women have desires.

It just totally flew in the face of what we thought,

which is that women are chaste and pure,

and they have sex only in marriage

and only for procreation.

WOMAN: Intercourse should properly be reserved

for expressing love in your marriage

and for creating children.

TAORMINO: And Kinsey blew that wide open.

D'EMILIO: There was a tremendous gap between the official norms

and the way that Americans

were actually living their sexual lives.

WOMAN: Uncontrolled sexual behavior usually is a sign

of an immature and insecure person.

ANDREA SCOTT: It surprised a lot of people

how free people were with their bodies,

including the neighbors that you didn't think were messing around

as much as they were.

TAORMINO: And there isn't this great divide

between what men want and what women want.

That actually we're a lot more alike than we are different.

MAN: We are not all alike in what we like.

Some of us have one like.

Someone else has another like.

We differ in our desires.

NARRATOR: By applying science to a previously taboo subject,

Kinsey's study pulled back the curtain

on the fact that people were having sex

for pleasure and pain.

PENN JILLETTE: There's no person I've ever met

that doesn't like creepy sex.

NARRATOR: As a new kind of normal emerged,

people gradually began to acknowledge

sexual ideas and fantasies that had been thought of

as too deviant for civilized society.

And many were turned on by what once frightened them.

TAORMINO: In our sexual fantasies,

there's almost always a power dynamic.

Someone is at the mercy of someone else.

NARRATOR: The French aristocrat Marquis de Sade

first brought to light the world of sexual sadism

in the late 1700s

with his novels Justine and 120 Days of Sodom.

GIULIA SISSA: In Sade's scenarios,

pain is part of the pleasure.

NARRATOR: The works were quickly banned in France

for their graphic cruelty and sexual violence.

In 1957,

four years after Kinsey's second study was released,

the French ban on the Marquis' works was lifted,

and he and the practices named after him

began to become more accepted around the world.

SARI LOCKER: BDSM means

Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, and Masochism.

The sadist is the dominant.

Doing the tying up or inflicting some kind

of physical or psychological pain.

Dominants are also called tops,

and submissives are also called bottoms.

NARRATOR: As people explore their sexual selves,

some are discovering that for them

sex isn't an act between equals.

It's an exchange of power.

Some like to be in control.

Others like to be controlled.

MAN: The degradation of these people are so complete

that their sex satisfaction and climax come

only in being tortured themselves,

of inflicting torture on others.

CAROLINE HELDMAN: Most people in the general public

would say that BDSM is about violence or about deviance.

TAORMINO: But people who do BDSM can practice this whole spectrum

of different kinds of activities,

different kinds of power dynamics,

different kinds of role playing.

ROXANE GAY: If you are going to use power over someone else,

you have to be ethical about it.

You have to listen to them when they use their safe word.

You have to make sure that you're not abusing

the power that you've been given.

LOCKER: People's interest in BDSM may be on a continuum.

There might be people who like a little love bite

or maybe a little scratching here and there.

And then there are gonna be some people who really enjoy

much more pain or psychological exchange of power.

DITA VON TEESE: I like to wear a lot of corsets,

leather gloves, seam stockings, very high heels.

I feel like I have this power in that.

That imagery really influenced my fashion style

because it made me feel like I could have

that dominatrix attitude

but it could be done in a very stylish and sophisticated way.

Showing people sex in a glamorous way

gives them permission to explore it

and play with racy ideas, fetishism, bondage,

things like that.

NARRATOR: Then in 2012, a trilogy of books about BDSM

bedded down on the New York Times Best Seller list

for an amazing 100 weeks.

Fifty Shades of Grey took BDSM into the mainstream.

WESTHEIMER: Fifty Shades of Grey makes me smile

because it proves that women do get aroused

by sexually explicit material, but they want a story.

WOMAN: Even though it's for a mature audience,

like, the story just makes you turn page by page.

GAY: Fifty Shades of Grey did a lot to bring BDSM

into the mainstream.

The sex is hot, and the sex is very woman-centered.

VON TEESE: You can buy pink ropes now, you know.

And girls are like, 'Yay, I'm gonna buy the pink rope

and I'm gonna have my boyfriend tie me up

or I'm gonna tie my boyfriend up with the pink ropes.'

NARRATOR: Whether you choose to indulge in a little pain

or a lot of pleasure,

the new normal is all about choices.

BRITTANY: We had a really awesome threesome.

JILLETTE: All bets are off, ladies and gentlemen,

and that's beautiful.

NARRATOR: The new normal of the post-World War years

has seen radical reevaluations of sexuality.

Experts are starting to rethink another basic assumption

about our sexual lives.

There is a theory that a long-accepted social norm

might not be natural for the human animal--monogamy.

WOMAN: In the close love relationship of marriage,

that's when the sex urges

achieve their ultimate and finest expression.

ANN COULTER: I think the main purpose of monogamy

and monogamy within marriage

is for raising children into civilized beings

and not become savage beasts.

PINSKY: We fashion ourselves civilized,

yet in reality we're sort of like

the rest of the animal kingdom.

CHRISTOPHER RYAN: Homo sapiens evolved as a species

that mates promiscuously.

We have animal urges, animal appetites.

MAN: Now, in a small town, there's a mate-swapping club,

and the people are furious about it.

RYAN: Human sexuality is not designed

for maintaining a relationship.

It's designed by evolution for starting a relationship.

DAN SAVAGE: Monogamy is like snowboarding.

You're gonna fall.

MAN: We're really in love.

MAN: Uh-huh.

And you were really in love with Betty and Mary and Alice,

and there'll be others, I suppose.

RYAN: People are expected to be married for decades.

And they're told that if they love each other,

they will remain sexually passionate

throughout their lives.

That's not true.

Look at how many marriages are based on sexual attraction,

which fades out after a few years,

and then you're left with this person

you don't even necessarily like

and have very little in common with.

LOCKER: There are many couples

who feel dissatisfied in their committed marriage,

and they start thinking that maybe monogamy

is not the way that they want to live.

WOMAN: There's such thousands and millions of people

in the world.

How can we be sure that we are really meant for one another?

NARRATOR: Talk about polyamory,

and you'll hear some schoolboy snickers.

But today, 5% of Americans are trying their hands

at multiple-partner relationships.

BRITTANY: We had a really awesome threesome.

LOCKER: Is polyamory successful

for people who want to stay married?

I think that's very individual.

I think it's wonderful

for people who can navigate complex relationships.

And there really is a great supportive community

of people who are enjoying polyamory.

CONOR: We were equal that night.

BRITTANY: Yeah.

CONOR: We could both get our needs met.

MARGARET CHO: I think polyamory can work, but it's a lot to do.

Myself and my ex-husband

had a great time together and with others.

CONOR: We have absolutely no shame about it.

In fact, like, I think we're really proud

of the connections that we make.

NARRATOR: Breaking away from those monogamous values

is harder than it seems.

FISHER: They don't tell you

how much time they spend being jealous.

We are a jealous animal.

WESTHEIMER: If you do go with another partner,

later on there is jealousy,

and a lot of unhappiness results.

CHO: It's hard to manage the feelings

of more than one person.

It's something that I really failed at doing.

Sort of need to be like Jedi relationship skills

to have the ability to be polyamorous.

FISHER: There are certainly are people who want to stick

with a long-term, deeply attached partner.

COULTER: It does seem kind of crazy to me

that for thousands of years it's been one man, one woman.

Now, we're saying there can be two men, two women.

But three men?

Absolutely not.

We're drawing the line at two.

It doesn't seem like we're leaping to polygamy,

but you do kind of wonder,

'What's next?'

NARRATOR: What's next is that our traditional definitions

of gender expression are being blown apart.

It's no longer just men and women in the conversation.

ANDREA JAMES: One of the exciting things about this time

and our place in history

is that the idea that gender roles

are rigid, binary things

have really been challenged in the last 40 or 50 years.

NARRATOR: How we express our gender

goes right to the very core of who we are.

And it's normally the very first thing

anyone wants to know about us.

♪

MAN: What's it gonna be, a boy or a girl?

FORTUNE TELLER: What would you like?

MAN: Boy, of course.

CHRIS FREEMAN: Is it a boy or is it a girl?

This is the first question that's asked

from the time of conception, practically.

For some reason,

binaries are the way people make sense of the world.

So we have male and female.

D'EMILIO: From the colors that parents dress their children in,

from the toys that they receive on their birthdays,

from the very beginning of life,

we are learning how to divide humanity

into two kinds of human beings, male and female.

MEN SINGING: ♪ G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe

♪ Fighting man from head to toe ♪

BOY: G.I. Joe attacks!

Boom, boom! G.I. Joe!

FREEMAN: Boys like sports.

Boys like playing with trucks.

If you're a little boy,

you're gonna get a truck for Christmas

whether you like it or not.

WOMAN: Her name is Chatty Cathy.

DOLL: Let's play house.

FREEMAN: Girls like dolls.

Girls like playing dress-up.

Your sister is gonna get a Barbie doll

whether she likes it or not.

They were telling you how to behave,

not describing how you would have behaved

if you had been given a little more latitude.

JAMES: Everyone is assigned a sex at birth,

and it's usually based

on just a simple glance at our genitalia.

For some people, they're fine with that,

but for other people, they don't feel that that binary

expresses who they really are.

NARRATOR: Though society may tell boys and girls

to conform to the current gender norms,

some people will always feel the need to express themselves

by thrusting beyond the limits set by the society.

ESTHER PEREL: Transgression is an essential ingredient

of the human spirit.

♪

Creativity lies in transgression.

Imagination lies in transgression.

And sexually, transgression takes us to a place

that is sometimes beyond the limits of our body,

beyond the limits of the ordinary rules of our life.

♪

NARRATOR: What we think is normal

when it comes to sex and gender is influenced by everything,

from who we know to what we hear,

and sometimes it's the music that sets us free.

KEVIN STEA: There were straight people there together.

There were gay people around.

Everything was okay.

CHARLES: That kind of freedom

scared the [bleep] out of people.

NARRATOR: Our understanding of normal

when it comes to our sexual and gender identity

has come a long way.

But the jump from man and woman meet, marry, and procreate

to understanding that people can live outside those lines

isn't really a jump at all.

It's a series of small steps that gets us to the new normal.

Some of those stepping stones were laid down

by a musical genre and a gender-bending rock star.

♪

Glam Rock was born in the UK,

and it brought forward new ideas of gender

and covered it with glitter.

DAVID BOWIE: I used to be able to stop traffic quite easily

by just walking down the street.

NARRATOR: Performers like Marc Bolan of T. Rex

and the stage production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show

presented audiences with the playful dissonance

between a guitar-driven masculine rock sound

and performers who played with ideas of camp and beauty.

It was from this new rock aesthetic,

mixing masculine and feminine, that a new musical icon emerged

and forced us all to reexamine our concepts of gender.

CHARLES: David Bowie was such a genius.

The music, the talent, it's all there,

but what he represented had never been seen before.

BILGER: He wore wild colors and makeup.

What did that mean?

[crowd cheering]

COHEN: Bowie comes out on stage to stadiums of people

in drag, basically.

You have all these straight guys just so confused.

BILGER: Artists like David Bowie

were playing around with gender presentation.

BOWIE: I've always found that I collect.

I'm a collector.

And I've always just seemed to collect personalities,

um, ideas.

NARRATOR: Bowie tapped into the desire

of an underrepresented generation

to play with norms and rebel

against the establishment's concept of gender identity.

And because of the pioneering work of artists like Bowie,

ideas of how men and women

should present themselves to the world

came to the center of the pop culture conversation.

BILGER: When you can see cultural figures

who are coloring outside the lines,

that gives you some license

to shift your own way of being in the world.

CHARLES: And that's why people like me

and so many of my friends

gravitated towards David Bowie.

♪

NARRATOR: Popular artists like David Bowie

refused to play by societal norms.

And by the late 1970s,

pop culture was shaken to its very core.

♪

A brand new style of music

highlighted by the hit movie Saturday Night Fever

brought with it a mainstream cultural shift.

STEA: I remember these topics of sexuality being discussed

and around this world of dance, and like it was all about sex.

The sexuality behind the disco was power.

Like it was like taking it for your own.

DAVID EISENBACH: This is Studio 54

and cocaine and disco.

It's the Me Decade.

It's a free-for-all of sexuality.

INTERVIEWER: Why do you feel there's more freedom in New York

to express oneself than anywhere else in the world?

MAN: Because there's so much of everything in New York.

It's sort of like a Mecca.

Everyone comes here to do whatever they want.

NARRATOR: On the surface, disco appeared to be

a flashy movement in music and fashion,

but what disco really did was subvert mainstream ideas

of gender identity and sexuality.

CHARLES: Disco was a beautiful window in our culture.

It was so open.

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think people come here?

MAN: When they see what we do publicly,

they do it behind their closet doors.

♪

STEA: Disco seemed like this unbridled freedom.

There were straight people there together.

There were gay people around.

Everything was okay.

♪

NARRATOR: Pop culture has played a huge part

in reshaping our views.

LOCKER: We're in a time like no other,

where everyone knows a celebrity who is transgender.

NARRATOR: Pop culture has played a big part in preparing us

for the way we think about gender today.

Many people now have the confidence

to express who they truly are,

even changing their bodies to match their identity.

BUCK ANGEL: For transgender people,

it is not just about your body,

it's about how you feel and how the rest of the world sees you.

NARRATOR: And the transgender identity conversation

has become centered around one seemingly unlikely individual.

LOCKER: We're in a time, like no other,

where everyone knows a celebrity who is transgender.

JAMES: Whatever you think about Caitlyn Jenner,

it is an absolute watershed moment

in the history of trans people around the world.

MERV GRIFFIN: Can anything you do today or have done since 1976

ever top that moment?

BRUCE JENNER: No, I'll never be in another situation like that

the rest of my life.

There's no arena for that.

FREEMAN: Bruce Jenner won the decathlon gold.

He was the quintessential masculine man

in American culture.

STEA: He was a hero of millions, Wheaties Box boy.

FREEMAN: Cut to 40 years later.

We have Caitlyn revealed as this kind of glamorous woman.

STEA: Poof!

How do you deal with that?

This is the man who is now a woman,

and the LGBT community is saying, 'Look, we're everywhere.

We're on your Wheaties box, you don't even know it!'

MARCI BOWERS: This is about someone

who we knew and we trusted as an American hero

who, all this time, was never happy with who he was.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your first date.

JENNER: God, ooh!

The first girl I kissed, oh, I was so scared.

JERRY SPRINGER: Imagine having to keep that private

must make it horrible waking up every day

knowing that you can't be who you are.

JENNER: It was the quickest little peck in the world.

I mean, I went over there, boomp, gave her a kiss,

hey, I was out of that car and I was gone, man.

I was running to the front door. It was terrible.

JAMES: It's absolutely unprecedented.

It has opened up so many hearts and minds

to the possibility of this.

GEENA ROCERO: I think she's done an amazing job

in creating the bigger conversation.

NARRATOR: But Caitlyn Jenner wasn't the first trans celebrity

to capture the world's attention.

♪

REPORTER: Christine Jorgensen, who used to answer to George,

creates quite a stir

as she returns home to New York from Copenhagen.

Christine hit the headlines

following the series of operations in Denmark

that transformed her from a boy into a girl,

all of which made her a celebrity to meet and talk to

when she stepped off the plane at International Airport.

NARRATOR: In 1952, the world was fascinated to learn

of a World War II veteran named George Jorgensen

who had gone to Denmark and returned as Christine Jorgensen.

D'EMILIO: Christine Jorgensen is the first person

to have a gender reassignment surgery

in the 1950s in the United States.

She received a great deal of publicity for it.

REPORTER: Christine, are you happy to be home?

CHRISTINE JORGENSEN: Yes, of course.

What American wouldn't be?

And I thank you all for coming, but I think it's too much.

D'EMILIO: The fact that Jorgensen

had served in World War II

gave added meaning to the story

because GIs who had served in World War II

were American heroes.

JAMES: The fact that she had been a military person

and was now sort of this chanteuse, you know, showgirl,

really captured the imagination

of repressive early '50s society.

REPORTER: In the news once again is Christine Jorgensen,

shown being honored

by the Scandinavian Societies of Greater New York.

BOWERS: Christine Jorgensen was

the number one news story of the year.

It was something that people

had never even considered possible before.

JORGENSEN: The ones that are really responsible

for my success

are my doctors and my friends.

Thank you again.

FREEMAN: She presented as a very attractive, lovely woman.

BOWERS: She was put up on the stage,

and that literally became her career,

but in the public's mind at that point,

it didn't really seem like it,

the boy next door could become the girl next door type thing.

MAN: Miss Jorgensen, are you a woman?

JORGENSEN: I am more of a woman than I am a man.

BOWERS: She was a puppet caricature

but also a product of the miracle of science in an era

where Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus

came to every town.

And in effect, that's what she became.

But today, with Caitlyn's emergence,

we're starting to say, 'Wait a minute.

This is about someone's happiness.'

NARRATOR: Caitlyn Jenner and Christine Jorgensen

are very public faces of the trans visibility movement,

but they represent only the tip

of the struggle trans people experience today.

TED CRUZ: Grown adult men should not be alone

in a bathroom with little girls.

BOWERS: Every civil rights movement

somehow goes through the restroom.

NARRATOR: The traditional definition of gender identity,

being only male or female,

is undergoing change in the mainstream.

This is in part because some brave individuals

are challenging the idea of what is considered normal

in the modern world.

Historically, many cultures already acknowledged

a much wider range of sexual and gender diversity.

That was until they made contact with the Western world.

ROCERO: In the Philippines, we've had this long culture

of understanding of gender fluidity.

And when I would talk about that,

it's also important to talk about colonization,

and colonization has a lot to do

in influencing and introducing rigid identities.

NARRATOR: Most modern civilizations

have adopted strict male and female gender roles,

a very European construct.

But many older cultures were more open to ideas

that go beyond this accepted view.

For example, gender was much more nuanced

to the native people who inhabited the Americas

before Europeans arrived.

RUCHIRA GUPTA: There is such an understanding of gender fluidity

in all original cultures.

RICHARD LAFORTUNE: The masculine and feminine together

are sometimes reflected in the body of one person

as if they have two spirits.

Explorers and missionaries and academics

and anyone who encountered us was not prepared for the fact

that we have complex gender systems

expressing not only gender identity but sexuality,

where sexuality is not a sin,

where sex is not a bad thing, it's a human thing.

GUPTA: In Native American cultures,

the body is seen as something which houses spirits,

which houses sexuality, because what is sexuality?

It's sexual desire, and desire is something intangible.

NARRATOR: Ancient cultures around the world

recognized multiple genders and sexualities.

It was only when they crossed paths with Europeans

that they were forced to conform

to strictly male and female roles.

JAMES: The fact that we have these very rigid binaries

probably arose out of building a society around reproduction.

So, weddings and births and things like that

become the things around which all of society builds up.

GUPTA: Because they needed to have label,

any kind of sexual act which did not lead to reproduction

was made illegal, so they got rid of things

which were natural to Native American cultures.

JAMES: Because of that, it almost starts to seem

like these two binary categories are natural.

NARRATOR: The need for Western society

to categorize people as strictly male or female

has placed those who live

outside what has been perceived to be normal

in harm's way.

GUPTA: In India, we have whole communities of the third gender

who are called Hijras.

NARRATOR: In India, Hijras are a caste

that are not considered citizens

and are often shunned from society.

RAVI PATEL: I've gone to India so many times

since I was a little kid.

My memory of the Hijras is that they looked like gypsies,

sexually ambiguous,

and I was never allowed to interact with them.

GUPTA: Because they suffer from so much stigma,

the Hijras are often abandoned by parents,

and because they were not seen as citizens,

they could not access any of the welfare measures

we have in our society for poor people.

They have to live on the edges of red light areas,

and they're sexually exploited to get an income.

PATEL: I remember always thinking, 'Are they lonely?

Why aren't we talking to them?'

They're clearly right there

on the one road going into this village.

NARRATOR: As terrible as things are for the Hijras today,

it wasn't always like this.

♪

GUPTA: Traditionally, the Hijras were not considered bad people,

they were given the jobs of being guards of harems

and cooks for kings, and they were also worshipped.

But over the years, people who wanted to colonize our countries

got rid of things which were natural to us.

NARRATOR: Under British rule,

both homosexuality and being Hijra were criminalized.

And after India's independence,

both groups had no real place in society.

[shouting in protest]

GUPTA: There has been a movement to free us

from laws which were created under British colonialism.

GUPTA: The fact that the Supreme Court ruling

has given them documentation

that now they are citizens of India,

they can access all the services due to marginalized people.

NARRATOR: Despite the Supreme Court ruling,

homosexuality is still illegal in India,

and there is a long path to the acceptance

of India's gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens.

HIJRA: Whatever Supreme Court has given,

it is only on the papers,

it is not translated into an action.

NARRATOR: And much like the Hijras,

transgender people all over the world

are fighting for their civil rights

and their place in society.

CRUZ: Have we gone stark raving nuts?

Grown adult men, strangers, should be not be alone

in a bathroom with little girls.

SPRINGER: You can't go in this bathroom

because 30 years ago you were a guy?

She's a woman now.

CHARLES: People feel threatened by change.

They don't want to change their identity

or their perception of who they think they are,

and they're going to kick up a lot of dust,

they're going to fight it tooth and nail.

SPRINGER: And if I felt I was really a woman,

I'd want to be able to do whatever changes are necessary

to fulfill what I feel I am.

And why should someone tell me I can't do it?

DONALD TRUMP: People go, they use the bathroom

that they feel is appropriate,

there has been so little trouble.

CHO: There has never been an occurrence

of a transgendered person

endangering people in the bathroom.

SPRINGER: When I see the stuff we get upset about,

it's embarrassing.

NARRATOR: Why has the question of which bathroom someone uses

become such a hot-button issue?

BOWERS: Every civil rights movement

somehow goes through the restroom.

We witnessed this in the last century

with blacks being denied use of white restrooms,

and now, we're seeing an echo

of the same sort of civil rights issue.

CHO: It's just a made-up thing that is used

to sort of harness the homophobia

that a lot of the country feels.

BOWERS: People are there to pee, they're not there to pry,

or probe, or exploit some sort of sexual fantasy.

COULTER: And how many transgenders are there

in the country?

There can't even be that many.

NARRATOR: The U.S. Census Bureau

does not list transgender as an option for gender identity.

Estimates show there are at least

1.4 million transgender people living in America,

but the numbers shouldn't matter.

GLORIA ALLRED: Every individual deserves to be treated equally.

NINA HARTLEY: There are plenty of laws left to be passed

that support human dignity on an individual level.

NARRATOR: The fight over transgender bathrooms

shows us that we're not fully accepting of the new normal;

there's still a long road to travel.

BOWERS: Life for transgender persons

is by no means easy even today.

Ask a trans person how hard it is to find a job.

The increased visibility has allowed

a more subtle and difficult-to-fight

kind of discrimination.

ROCERO: What we see in the media does not represent

what is happening within our communities.

Last year, there's more than 20 trans people

that has been murdered.

It's a long road ahead.

FREEMAN: Difference does not mean perversion,

difference does not mean abnormal,

difference is the reality.

We're all different.

NARRATOR: The fight for transgender rights

is an ongoing part of our evolution toward a new normal.

It's a fight with many faces, names, and stories.

D'EMILIO: In the last handful of years,

the issue of transgender rights and identity

has become part of discussion.

ANGEL: So Caitlyn Jenner, her thought process comes

from a more Republican, very wealthy,

money-oriented way of thinking.

This is why she doesn't represent me

or a lot of my friends in the trans community.

NARRATOR: All of the discussion

about sexual orientation and gender identity

in the last 70 years

has led us to a breakthrough

in understanding people who don't identify

with what has been traditionally defined as normal.

JULIE VU: Mwah.

D'EMILIO: In the last handful of years,

the issue of transgender rights and identity

has become part of discussion.

The year 2016 may very well turn out to be

a transgender moment,

and the implications of that are profound.

MAN: For interactions with the transgender community,

refer to the person by the appropriate pronoun.

All people are to be treated professionally, courteously,

and respectfully.

D'EMILIO: It challenges the notion that who we are,

what we must look like, how we must behave

has to correspond to the body that we inhabit.

NARRATOR: A unique celebrity like Caitlyn Jenner

is an entry point into a larger conversation

about trans identity,

but she doesn't necessarily represent all trans people.

ROCERO: Most trans people is not Caitlyn Jenner.

Most trans people does not have access to surgery.

Most people can't change their name and gender marker.

ANGEL: Her thought process comes from a more Republican,

very wealthy, money-oriented way of thinking.

This is why she doesn't represent me

or a lot of my friends in the trans community.

FREEMAN: In terms of how much Caitlyn helps trans people,

not maybe that much.

How much Caitlyn helps a public conversation about trans issues?

Maybe a lot.

JAMES: There have been conversations in households

that had never spoken about transgender issues

before in their lives,

and that's really exciting.

NARRATOR: While Caitlyn Jenner may be a divisive figure

in the world of trans politics,

she's only one member of a movement

where more people feel comfortable

revealing themselves publicly as transgender.

TRANSGENDER WOMAN: My sex assigned at birth is male.

I am nevertheless a woman.

What I'm in the process of doing is making my body match my mind,

because I can't change the mind.

TRANSGENDER WOMAN: My driver's license was changed,

my name was legally changed.

I've been on hormones for several years.

I've grown breasts.

COULTER: The sky kind of has fallen.

Suddenly, it's everything is about transgenders.

COREY PARAMOR: I felt masculine

and I felt like I was a little boy,

but my body wasn't.

JILLETTE: When I talk to my transgender friends,

it's a little bit like talking to my African-American friends.

I just don't have any sort of grasp on the pain.

VU: I've always been myself,

just trapped in the wrong body.

NARRATOR: Today's stories of transgender people

are as varied as the individuals telling them.

Each is on a journey to feel normal in his or her own skin.

ROCERO: Transitioning is something that is very broad

and something that is very varied for different people.

ANGEL: I wanted to be a boy, and I said, 'I'm a boy,

and I'm a boy, and I'm a boy, and I'm not a girl.'

And so Buck was this sort of masculine cowboy name.

VU: I didn't know what transgender meant,

I just thought I was a very feminine boy

that loved pink and dresses.

PARAMOR: So I cut my hair off

and I started wearing boys' clothes,

and my dad taught me to tie a tie.

VU: One day, I just came up to my mom

with the full face makeup on,

and she was a little bit shocked.

Her son John wasn't going to be anymore.

WOMAN: Ready?

[ding]

GIRL: Oh.

PARAMOR: I realized that I couldn't continue

to not be my true self.

ROCERO: I've transitioned

from the very moment I identified

that I am different than the gender I was assigned at birth.

I knew at a young age

that I want to be the woman that I want to be,

and I'm still going into my transition.

NARRATOR: But only a third of people

who identify as trans

actually go through sex reassignment surgery,

either due to the cost of the procedures

or by personal choice.

VU: My hair has been growing pretty long now, actually.

My boobs have been growing for real.

I really wanted to get sex reassignment surgery,

Adam's apple surgery, and then my breast augmentation.

ANGEL: We're going through an evolution,

but I think this evolution is gonna take a long time

to get to a point where we no longer say,

'I'm male or female or I'm gay or straight.'

Your body is yours,

and you can define your body however you want to.

ROCERO: It's not just about the surgery,

it's not just about changing name and gender marker,

it's just really the constant journey

of affirming the person that you truly are.

And that also applies for everybody,

not just for trans people.

♪

I think there's a lot more people now

that are sharing their stories, and that's important.

Any trans person sharing and owning their narrative

in a very empowering way

is changing a person's mind

somewhere all over the world.

VU: Bye.

NARRATOR: These very personal stories

are working to reshape mainstream perceptions

of who trans people are

and how they can contribute to society.

And the effects can be seen today.

On June 30, 2016,

the United States became the 19th nation in the world

to allow trans individuals to serve in the military.

ASHTON CARTER: I'm announcing today that we're ending the ban

on transgender Americans in the United States military.

Effective immediately, transgender Americans

may serve openly, and they can no longer be discharged

or otherwise separated from the military

just for being transgender.

Going forward, we will apply

the same general principles, standards, and procedures

to transgender service members as we do to all service members.

NARRATOR: For an institution like the US military

to accept people on their own terms

is a huge step forward.

PARAMOR: I feel like as a country

we're headed in the right direction

for trans acceptance and positive visibility.

And I think the more visible we become and are,

the better things are going to be.

NARRATOR: The very idea of normal is constantly evolving.

What was once narrowly defined by Western culture has grown

to include individuals, genders, and sexual practices

that the mainstream didn't acknowledge

just a few short years ago.

The new normal that we're headed toward

is a world that accepts everyone for who they believe they are

and how they want to be seen.

STEA: The more we talk about this,

the more we understand that this is normal,

we are normal, you are normal.

JAMES: What we're starting to see

is the possibility for people to be more themselves,

and that's the promise of the future.

COHEN: I think the world is becoming a different place.

Categories are being broken down.

As this younger generation grows,

it's only gonna get better

and people are only going to be free to love whoever they want.

CHARLES: The truth is, we are one thing,

we're not separate from one another.

It just looks that way.

Don't be fooled.

Don't get it twisted.

If you do, baby, you're just playing yourself.

[laughs]