Denton couple Amber and Adam Briggle had long been in the national spotlight because of their support for and affirmation of their transgender son, but that support put them in a harsher glare in 2022.
The Briggles have been involved in public advocacy for transgender equality for more than a decade. Their son, assigned female at birth, started telling his parents he was a boy as a very young child. Then their work as high-profile activist parents turned into a higher-stakes proposition. The family had made news a few years before by inviting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, now state Sen. Angela Paxton, to have dinner with them. Paxton took the family up on the invitation.
Six years later, Paxton produced a legal opinion that parents like the Briggles might be committing child abuse. In February 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott acted on Paxton’s nonbinding legal opinion and directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate families of transgender children.
Adam Briggle describes the investigation as “the upside down,” a term borrowed from the Netflix blockbuster Stranger Things to describe a nightmare reality mirroring our own.
Filmmaker Tanya Selvaratnam and The New Yorker released a short documentary last week about the Briggles in the aftermath of the CPS investigation. Titled “Love to the Max,” the 13-minute film shows the Briggles celebrating the Fourth of July on the downtown Denton Square in 2022. The crew also filmed the Briggles gathering with other local families raising transgender children in a local park. Eventually, the Briggles continue their tradition of leading Transgender Awareness week, where the front of a local bookstore is surrounded by a throng of supporters and activists who yelled through a bullhorn that the people inside were abusers and groomers and that transgender children don’t exist.
Finally, the film shows Amber Briggle participating in a 2022 vigil to remember transgender people murdered in the last year, saying their names, their ages and the cities where they were murdered.
“It’s about our lives and how this, what I call, like, ‘the upside down’ is part of it,” Adam Briggle said, describing the film.
The upside down is a shadowy alternate dimension in Stranger Things where the landscape is identical to the real world but unseen threats lurk and then attack, often in the form of monsters that look human but sport blood-chilling mouths crammed with ugly blossoms of wet, sharp teeth. And in Stranger Things, the portal between the real world and the upside down is opened by an adolescent who looks like the other kids, but is different.
“Love to the Max” is a short glimpse into the Briggles’ lives as they prepared for further government intervention in their family. What you see is mostly ordinary — the Briggles’ children decorating cookies, hugging church friends and hoping to catch red, white and blue treats thrown from floats at Denton’s Fourth of July Jubilee Yankee Doodle Parade.
If there’s any hint of the upside down in the documentary, it’s in the Briggle parents’ shaking voices as they talk through the possibility of losing the children they love. And, in one short moment, it’s in their eyes of their son, who notices an antagonist has entered the bookstore’s bathroom while protestors clash outside.
Adam Briggle said the film captures what it was like to keep living a normal life in the town they loved after the government investigated them for affirming their child’s transition.
“On one reality, life is humming along fine,” he said. “We’re doing great. School is wonderful. We love our community. But then you can take all of that and just twist it upside down, and there’s this darker version of it, you know? And then there’s these, like, portals where those two worlds connect, right? Like the investigation, or these laws that are passed, where that darker world creeps into and violates this world. That’s the way I’ve been thinking about them.”
Amber Briggle said she turned to a private online community of women and nonbinary leaders called TheLi.st when they got the call that the state would investigate them. The news would come with expensive lawyers, sleepless nights and attempts to keep their kids’ spirits up.
“I had posted there because, like, I am really scared,” Amber Briggle said. “I was really keeping quiet about it on social media for reasons, right? But I still wanted to talk, and it felt like a safe enough space to kind of share what was going on and and alert some really well-connected, important people that in a state that this ... is really happening. Like, pay attention. This is what I’ve warning people about, right?”
That message led to the documentary.
Tanya Selvaratnam, an author and award-wining filmmaker, saw her message. She urged Briggle to “document everything” about the CPS case.
“At the time, I was thinking more for her, as an individual, to write down every bit of pain that they were putting her through,” Selvaratnam said. “It comes from my own experience because I write books in addition to making films, and in telling my own story, I’ve learned the power of having documented what is happening to me.”
Another member of the group told Selvaratnam that she should consider documenting the Briggles’ clash with child welfare. She contacted Amber Briggle again and the family agree to be part of the documentary.
“I realized, after spending time with the family, that their story deserved to be told and that their story could help others,” Selvaratnam said. “And it was based on a rough cut of the material that The New Yorker signed on to release, which then gave us a lot of momentum. But it’s been two years in the making because I wanted to tell the story in as sensitive and complete a manner as possible in the short amount of time that we had.”
Selvaratnam, who co-directed the documentary with filmmaker Rose Bush, said her goal was to make a film that anyone could watch regardless of their political leanings. She wanted to let the Briggles tell their story and show how their fears were also lightened by the support of their church, their friends and Denton residents who want LGBTQ+ neighbors to feel safe and welcome.
“I wanted to show their regular life like what they normally do, like going to church, going to the Fourth of July parade,” the filmmaker said. “And I also wanted to show the aspects that amplify the danger that they’re facing through the scene with the safe folder, which a lot of people don’t know about.”
A “safe folder” usually contains pictures and documents that show how long a child has been transgender, as well as that the family supports their children’s well-being. Selvaratnam included the clash in front of Patchouli Joe’s bookstore in Denton because she thought it showed something a lot of people might not be aware of.
“You see how we have no idea that so many violent hecklers and bullies would show up outside Patchouli Joe’s,” she said. “It was really scary. And you see how not only the parents are threatened, but also the whole family. Like Lulu, the daughter, she has to deal with this heckling and bullying too.”
The film debuted at the Aspen Shortsfest, then screened in Denton during Thin Line Fest in April.
Selvaratnam said the Denton showing was a special screening with locals who ended up in the film thanking her for the work.
“There was crying and there was cheering, here, too,” she said. “That’s probably the most gratifying part of this for me.”
The Briggle children said they were glad to show how much like other kids and teenagers they are. Lulu, the youngest, is a serious dance student who loves expressing her thoughts and feelings through contemporary ballet.
“I just thought it was pretty cool because they had an idea for our family and they were supportive and stuff,” Lulu said. “And I thought that it was pretty cool that they were making a film on it, so more people can understand.”
Max, now a teenager, is ready to be known for more than his identity.
“It’s the least interesting thing about me,” he said in the film.
“Personally, I don’t want to be a movie star,” he said. “I don’t want people to recognize me.”
And he doesn’t worry about staying positive through Texas’ political churn around transgender youth.
“I don’t think about that day to day,” he said. “I don’t think that’s my responsibility.”
Adam Briggle said the family has considered leaving the state and heading for a more welcoming one. But he, Amber and their children love Denton.
“And the truth is, every state is an election away from being in this same situation,” he said. “Moving someplace else, it just isn’t necessarily the solution a lot of people think it is. Our lives are here. Our friends are here. Our church. Everything is here and this is where we want to be.”
Amber Briggle said she thinks about her family’s privilege.
“We’re a passing heterosexual couple. We have college degrees and I own my own business,” she said. “If the government can march its a — into my living room and threaten to take my children, what won’t it do to people who don’t have what we do?
“When the investigator came here, she was following orders. But terrible things have happened because people followed orders. Before she left, she turned to us and said, ‘You have wonderful children. You’re doing something right.’ At the time, I had the number of kids who had died in the Texas foster system, and I told her the number and said, ‘How many children could you be helping if you weren’t here in my living room?’ I don’t forgive her for following orders.”