?There?s a lot of blook in this, but that?s what the public wants, and if you?re in the business you have to give them what they want, if you have the courage?- Doris Wishman

Doris Wishman claims this to be the most outrageous gimmick she ever used for a film, but felt justified in showing the transsexual?s plight as a ?lonely one?. Let Me Die a Woman (35mm, 1978, 78 min) is shockingly hard to watch at times for its explicit images. This bizarre documentary relates the ?terrible anguish? faced bby transsexual before the ?trial by knife?. Starring Dr. Leo Wollman, who is introduced as ?uniquely qualified as a doctor surgeon, psychologist, minister, medical writer and pioneer of sexual identity?, this cross gender expose undertaken by Wishman?s inquiring camera transcends all boundaries imaginable.


Bill Stamets, Chicago Reader September 22, 1995

?Women auteurs are rare among the directors of ultra cheap sleaze flicks. But starting after her husband died in 1960, self-taught filmmaker Doris Wishman wrote, directed, edited, and produced over two dozen charmingly crude films with names such as Bad Girls Go to Hell and Keyholes Are for Peeping. Unlike camp icon Russ Meyer, whose big-breasted features have long been championed by Roger Ebert, Wishman has only recently been treated to retrospectives.

Beneath her outlandish plots lurk a crypto-feminist critique of the male gaze. In Double Agent 73, made in 1974, Chesty Morgan plays secret agent Jane Genet, whose left breast is equipped with a surgically implanted camera for documenting her hits. Men are the victims here; they die with eyefuls of blurry flesh. Let Me Die a Woman, a 1978 documentary on transsexuals, includes a lurid castration scene. A doctor is interviewed while holding a pointer to his patient's penis and saying, "His one and only all-consuming thought and desire is to get rid of his hated penis and testicles." Nude on the Moon, filmed in 1962, is about two young rocket scientists--one smokes a pipe with Hugh Hefner urbanity--who travel to the moon, where they obsessively photograph a matriarchy of nude moon maidens. But they're deprived of their photographic trophies when they leave their camera behind.?