Yet another great piece from Salt! This exploration of deafness and CI is a great introduction. I think a great follow up piece could be about deaf culture and the evaporation thereof should CI become widely successful. Deaf identity, which the producer has so expertly indtroduced us to, is absolutely facinating and important for the hearing world to understand.

The strengths of this piece are in the great editing, music and of course, the facinating subjects. I think it would have been a better piece if we had gotten to know one of the collectors a little better, and followed them through some kind of dramatic arc. It was like a series of snapshots, very descriptive but not as deep as I would like. Super editing brings the package together.

This is actually a piece about an FTM, a female-to-male transsexual, not the "woman trapped in a man's body" the description lists it as. Justin is a really unique subject, a transgender individual living in rural America and negotiating gender. I would have liked to hear more about Justin's experience with the corrections system, because that seems like it would be a stressful place for gender variant people to live, yes, even more than everyone else. I was also disappointed that the producer didn't seem to do any research about FTMs and chose to focus on the idea of a "functining male organ" as the only determinant of gender rather than really thinking about Justin's day to day life. i.e. 99% of the time Justin's penis or lack therof is really not going to make a difference--what is really the issue with him living in rural Maine? That he can't pee standing up or that he can't walk around town without getting strange looks. The individuals to whom your story will really matter, to whom it isn't jsut some novel coffee table conversation, are going to be interested in hearing about what Justin thought about hormone therapy and top surgery and passing and his family. For those people, check out www.ftmi.org