Making The Law Respect Gender Identity After Death : Code …

Filmmaker Christopher Lee attends a 1999 film festival. Elizabeth Sheldon/Courtesy of Elizabeth Sheldon hide caption

Filmmaker Christopher Lee attends a 1999 film festival.

Maya Scott-Chung remembers one of the first times she met Christopher Lee. He was strutting down a red carpet at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Lee was emceeing the Transgender Film Festival, an event he co-founded in 1997. He commanded the audience in a shimmery black faux fur coat and sunglasses. "Christopher was fab-u-lous with a capital F-A-B," Scott-Chung says. "He always had beautifully shined boots and just an incredible look about him."

Lee made several films about transgender culture, including one about his own life. In Christopher's Chronicles he explains that he was born female, Kristina. Then in his mid-20s, he started asking his friends to call him Christopher and to refer to him as "he" instead of "she." The film opens with Lee looking in the bathroom mirror rubbing shaving cream on his chin.

"When I was a little kid, I used to have this plastic razor. It was a straight razor. I used to pretend I was shaving every morning, just like my dad," he says, rinsing his hands in the sink. "I guess this should have been my first idea that I felt a little different than your normal little girl."

Lee lived the rest of his adult life as a man. He committed suicide in 2012 when he was 48. His friends were left grieving not just his death, but what happened after his death.

This memorial slide show honors late filmmaker Christopher Lee, with photos provided by his friends Maya and Chino Scott-Chung and Bobby Chung.

They had explained to the coroner that Lee was transgender. They turned over his driver's license with his sex indicated with a capital "M." But when the death certificate came back, Christopher was listed as Kristina. Sex: female.

"It felt like spitting on his grave," Scott-Chung says. "When they put RIP on people's tombstones, it's rest in peace. And I just felt like Christopher's spirit will not rest in peace with a death certificate that says female."

Chino Scott-Chung, Maya's husband, was so close to Lee, they called each other brothers. "Christopher lived his life in all ways as a man," Chino Scott-Chung said. "Listing him as female on his death certificate is disrespectful to his memory and his legacy. It is deeply painful to me, to his chosen family, and to the community that he was so much a part of."

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Making The Law Respect Gender Identity After Death : Code ...

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero