Transamerica

Plots: A transgender woman takes an unexpected journey when she learns that she had a son, now a teenage runaway hustling on the streets of New York. Southern Californian Bree Osbourne has finally received the news for which she has been waiting: she has been approved for male-to-female sexual reassignment surgery. But before Margaret, her therapist, will allow her to go through with the surgery scheduled in a week’s time, Bree has to deal with an unresolved problem from her past. Bree gets a telephone call from a seventeen year old man named Toby Wilkins, who is looking for who he thinks is his father. Toby is in a New York jail, having been supporting himself by petty crime and hustling. Bree knew nothing about Toby before the telephone call. Toby apparently is all alone in the world, with his mother having committed suicide and being estranged from his stepfather in Tennessee. Masquerading as a Christian social worker, Bree (not telling him either of her true identity or her transgender status ) bails Toby out of jail and tells him she will take him to Los Angeles, where Toby has aspirations of becoming a porn actor and reconnecting with who he thinks his his father. As Bree and Toby take their trans-American journey which includes some interesting encounters along the way, Bree has to decide what is best for Toby while having the foremost goal of making it back to Los Angeles for the scheduled surgery. Bree, a pre-operative, male-to-female transgender, holds down two jobs and saves every penny so that she can pay for one last operation that will make her a woman at last. One day, however, she receives a strange phone call. It appears that on the other side is Toby, apparently her son, who must be the product of a somewhat clumsy sexual encounter years ago when she was a man. He is staying in New York, incarcerated. Bree flies from Los Angeles to New York in order to get the boy out of jail. At first she is reluctant to do so, but her therapist persuades her to face up to her past. The boy is handed over to her without a word of explanation and Toby believes the woman to be some Christian missionary determined to convert reprobates to Jesus; Bree sees no reason to clear up the misunderstanding. However, she finds out that the boy just wants to escape from her and hitchhike to Los Angeles. She persuades him to accompany her back to the west coast–secretly planning to leave him at his stepfather’s along the way. Toby is happy to take her up on her offer.