Never get your facts from Hollywood. Remembering that it is an entertainment, not an information medium, we should never confuse the two. Hollywood has a long and storied history of getting the facts entirely wrong.

I discovered the truth about one of Hollywood's time honored propaganda films as I read the Aphrodite Jones story of the life of Teena Brandon, which was allegedly chronicled in the movie "Boys Don't Cry", which netted worthy actress Hillary Swank her first Oscar. Jones is sympathetic to the whole transgender cause, as evidenced in her dedication, but she pulls no punches in detailing Teena Brandon's story (although the subtitle refers to "Brandon Teena", a name also used by Hillary Swank in her Oscar acceptance speech, and an entirely inappropriate label, as Teena Brandon didn't use that name in her real, but all to short life). While Hollywood lionizes Ms. Brandon as a champion for the transgender cause, she was anything but the sort.

While I stand on the far conservative side of the transgender debate, I notice that almost every man and woman that describe themselves as being the other sex trapped in the body of their biological sex, has "issues" that date back to early childhood. Those "issues" are notably absent in Ms. Brandon's biography, although there is a repeated and typical pattern of dysfunction in her upbringing. Ms. Brandon was a con artist, basically, and her "generosity" for which she was remembered, came at the expense of the numerous individuals from which she stole to support her lifestyle.

Perhaps one of the most glaring omissions in the death of Ms. Brandon was the death of Philip DeVine, a Job Corps student from Iowa, who had come to visit the sister of one of Ms. Brandon's friends over the Christmas holidays. Perhaps the producers felt that the color of DeVine's skin would confuse viewers over the issue they were trying to convey (DeVine was black). For whatever reason, however, he remains irrelevant to the PR version of the story.

Ms. Brandon never married (but was, in fact, engaged, an engagement that terminated when Ms. Brandon's true sex was discovered). She never held down a job. She never was an activist for any political cause. She was, in fact, a hedonist who lived for the day, and her death, while certainly tragic, should never have been used as the basis for any political cause.