Boys Don't Cry, an award winning film directed by Kimberly Pierce, tells the true story of Teena Brandon (Brandon Teena), a female who self identifies as male. From the start of the film, Brandon makes it clear that he is male. After getting into trouble with the law in his hometown, he goes to Nebraska where he befriends a group of people, with who later find out that is he not in fact biologically male, but female. After this discovery, the antagonists of the film, John and Tom, brutally rape Brandon and kill him after he reports it to the police. This film highlights the relationship between power, knowledge and violence. Pierce created this film to not only to raise public awareness about transphobia and violence against trans people, but also as a platform to challenge our culture’s restrictive and binary concept of gender, biological sex and sexuality. These binaries are created upon the premise that gender is essentially linked to biological sex.…show more content… The interrogation performed by the police after Brandon’s rape shows that the gender binary can have consequential legal ramifications. The interrogation was not only invasive and offensive, but can also be viewed as a re-rape. The officer is so engrossed with his sexual anatomy and getting Brandon to acknowledge that he is female and in doing so, Brandon faces the shedding of his identity and moves from being a victim to an