In 2016, Mount Sinai Hospital opened its Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in Manhattan. The documentary “Born to Be,” directed by Tania Cypriano, follows the work of one of that center’s pioneering surgeons, Dr.
Jess Ting. Ting began as a general plastic surgeon; he only entered the field of transgender surgery 18 months before filming began. “Everyone thought I was nuts,” he says, when he stepped up to join the Mount Sinai center.
Unlike too many others, in medicine and the world, he seems to understand transgender people and their needs on an instinctive level.
Patient, good-humored and thoughtful, he’s always looking for ways to improve surgeries, none of which are depicted explicitly here.