Agnes's iconic story—the teenage trans girl who lied about being intersex to access gender affirming surgery in the 1950s—personifies how trans and gender nonconforming people are expected to produce a certain narrative of self to make their trans experience legible. Access to medical services and legal recognition are entirely dependent on performing legible narratives of trans experience. This was the experience of Agnes and other participants in Dr. Harold Garfinkel's 1958 sociological study at the UCLA gender clinic, one of the first clinics in the United States to treat trans patients with hormone replacement therapy and gender confirmation surgery.1 Spotlighting the complexities of trans lives in the 1950s, Framing Agnes stages a fantastical reenactment of these never-before-seen medical transcripts, bringing to life “a lineage of collaborators and conspirators who have been forgotten for far too long.”2 Talk-show-inspired segments feature director Chase Joynt as Dr. Garfinkel, who is reimagined as a talk-show host interviewing the study participants, who are reimagined as guests of the show. These scenes are sutured together with clips of coaching sessions and unscripted interviews between Joynt (as himself) and the actors, clips of quasi-narrator Jules Gill-Peterson, and footage of Gill-Peterson and Agnes (played by Zackary Drucker) aimlessly haunting the abandoned UCLA campus. The constant transition between sets and scenes produces the effect of flipping through channels.Described as a collaborative, communally driven project, Framing Agnes features a talented team of mostly trans creators, including the director, screenwriters, research team, and cast. This fact alone would be enough to excite a trans viewer about the film's potential, but it is that Framing Agnes seems to be made for a trans audience that has me feeling seen in a way that feels like love.3 No doubt there exist numerous ways to frame a conversation on a film as beautifully complex as Framing Agnes, but t4t emerges as one mode for arriving at a deeper appreciation for the contributions this brilliant film offers. More than a remnant of craigslist personal ads that describes erotic intimacies between trans individuals, Hil Malatino describes t4t as a powerful political and conceptual framework. T4t is “a form of strategic separatism through which trans people might practice love, solidarity, and mutual aid between ourselves while actively decentering cis subjectivities, perceptions, and erotic economies, refusing assimilationist attempts at fixing the trans subject.”4 As a cinematic project created by trans people about trans people, and in a way that feels like it is actually for trans people, the t4t ethos of Framing Agnes stretches the collective imagination of what trans representation and visibility could look like in media and historical research.Too much of trans media is created by and for cis audiences, which results in at best boring and at worst violent representations, resulting in a flattening of the abundances and excesses of trans subjectivities. Meanwhile, Framing Agnes offers “a break from cis-centric optics and assumptions,”5 and proceeds under the assumption that the viewer can approach the conversation with a certain level of familiarity—sometimes even an intimate knowledge—of the discussions that unfold. In addition, the film's interview structure lends itself as an invitation to the viewer to be engaged as an active member of the conversations as they unfold on the screen. Framing Agnes engages the trans viewer as a thought partner through posing critical questions, such as what do we want out of trans visibility? What do we want to see when we see trans people on screen? In this sense, Framing Agnes is a film that exudes a t4t ethos because it is primarily created by, about, and for trans people, and is a rejection of stale, reductive trans narratives that most trans media plays on repeat.Oriented toward an ultimate un-scripting of trans subjectivities, Framing Agnes rescripts Dr. Garfinkel's clinical interviews with his six subjects, Agnes, Georgia, Barbara, Denny, Henry, and Jimmy, and reenacts and stages the interview series as a daytime television talk show. This clever reframing of medical transcripts as talk show interviews emphasizes the bitter parallel between the clinic and media culture: both may make space for trans visibility, but only and always at the expense of preserving trans vulnerability. Framing Agnes makes visible and critiques the desires of the clinic, media, and public for the “singularization of transness into a narrative of binary transition.”6 This plays out, for instance, in the following scene: HOST: “I have a hard question, do you have any regrets?”AGNES: “That's your hard question?”HOST: “How do you justify the lies?”AGNES: “How do you justify your questions?”7In this scene, Agnes refuses complicity with the demand that she reduce and confine herself to a fixed, legible trans subjectivity. Framing Agnes rejects the fetishistic attention paid to the trans subject by changing the frame and, in essence, turning the mirror around, to reveal “the people who are constructing when and where trans people can be visible . . . people who get to decide when we are visible and when we are not visible and what happens to us when we are in and out of frame.”8 Staged as a talk show segment, this reads as a moment of t4t solidarity between Agnes and the trans viewer watching at home as she utilizes strategic opacity as a trans survival strategy in the face of trans antagonism.A t4t ethos also surfaces in the film's nuanced discussions about truth, such as what it is, who is expected to tell it, and who demands access to it. Framing Agnes reveals the “ethical imperfection and complexity”9 that arises when there are multiple, subjective, in-tension, or outright contradictory truths, and how truth, like medicine, is always already mediated by culture. Rather than navigating a binary “between honesty and access,”10Framing Agnes suggests the trans subject as always in negotiation to truth, just as we are also always in negotiation with ourselves, our relationships, our needs and desires, and our survival. This is perhaps most poetically expressed in Gill-Peterson's closing voiceover, which plays over a clip of her on the shoreline, framed by the enormity of the Pacific Ocean: “I still need to know . . . that there is something within the impossible, or in between a truth and a lie, where life takes place.”11Framing Agnes shows us where the impossible happens, whereby the impossible is trans life itself, thus demonstrating the power of a t4t praxis of love which renders impossible lives possible, and which renders trans lives as livable ones.In blurring the binaries among the (un)truth, the (im)possible, and the (un)livable, Framing Agnes stretches the collective imagination of how trans stories are told by reaching toward a transness that is rescripted as a strategy toward un-scripting. Framing Agnes is a critical reminder we are allowed to demand more from trans media, and more from trans history; it is also a reminder that sometimes asking for more looks like asking for less, as the film reminds us that sometimes being invisible isn't a bad thing. When done critically, engaging a t4t ethos in media creation and historical research makes possible a kind of trans representation or visibility that foregrounds trans solidarity and commitment to mutual survival, trans difference and trans love. I hope Framing Agnes becomes widely available soon. It is a necessary watch for those who seek media that is made by, about, and for trans folks and with an ethos of t4t. Framing Agnes is a must-see for those who are haunted by transgender archives, and for those who haunt them still.