Have you seen Transamerica? It’s a low-budget, independent film about a pre-operative transgender woman named Bree who learns, on the eve of her gender-reassignment surgery, that she fathered a son eighteen years ago.

It’s an amazing little movie, made more so by the lead performance. As Bree, Felicity Huffman imbues the character with humor and a brainy sort of awkwardness as she flawlessly inhabits the speech patterns and awkward gait of a woman learning to unlearn years of learning to speak and walk like a man.

Before I go any farther, there’s something I should get out of the way—yes, Huffman was robbed at the Oscars. Reese Witherspoon played a marvelous June Carter in Walk the Line; it was probably the finest performance of her career thus far. All of this is true, AND…Felicity Huffman’s work in Transamerica is one of the two best film performances of the 21st century thus far. She was robbed. But that’s okay; as the other performance I allude to was Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain, and he didn’t win either.

But I’m not writing to go into raptures over Ms. Huffman, as marvelous as she was in the role. Instead, I’m writing to sing the praises of a woman named Eve Battaglia. If you’ve never heard of Ms. Battaglia, there’s a good reason. She wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award for her work on Transamerica; indeed, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hasn’t even created a category for the work she does in Hollywood. And yet, Ms. Battaglia is the reason that Transamerica is a revolutionary film.

"Revolutionary" might be a strong word. After all, we’ve had films about transgender people before. Boys Don’t Cry, the true story of Brandon Teena, comes to mind. There was a great movie on Showtime called Soldier’s Girl, a true story of a soldier beaten to death by his bunkmates after falling in love with a transgender woman. Hedwig and the Angry Inch was a rock-and-roll transgender black comedy, and Almodovar’s Bad Education featured Mexican hottie Gael Garcia Bernal looking more like Julia Roberts than himself at times. The first time I can remember seeing a transgender character on film was in The World According to Garp in 1982, featuring Robin Williams, Glenn Close, and John Lithgow as Roberta Muldoon.

All these films were important in the history of transgender identity and popular culture. Some were more sympathetic to transgender characters than others, but at a time when visibility is often the biggest hurdle, they all contributed to our collective understanding of what it is to be born into the wrong body.

And they all had something else in common: in each of them, the part of the transgender character is played by an actor of the character’s gender of origin, not his or her destination gender. Brandon Teena was a young transgender man, still living in the body of a woman. In Boys Don’t Cry, he was played—brilliantly, I might add—by actress Hilary Swank. In Soldier’s Girl, the real-life transgender actress Calpernia Addams (who incidentally has a cameo role in Transamerica) was played by actor Lee Pace.

Before Transamerica, I could only recall one feature film that included a transgender character played by an actor who shared the character’s destination gender, and it was played for laughs as a surprise ending in the final minutes of Soapdish, a slapstick comedy about the cast and crew of a daytime television drama.

Which brings me back to Eve Battaglia, the casting director of Transamerica. If she had depended on the history of film to narrow the scope of performers to be considered for Bree—a pre-operative transgender woman in a funny yet authentic rendering of her life—she would have probably been rifling through piles of headshots of men with lithe bodies and the ability to walk in heels without falling over. And it’s very possible that she would have found a very talented man to bring Bree to life.

But whoever this man was, he’d have been a man in a dress. What makes Transamerica more than a great film, even a revolutionary film (it’s not too strong a word, I’ve decided), is that its audience experiences Bree as the woman that she is. Somehow, in the core of our understanding, we know that this person, even when she sits like a trucker, even when she stands up to pee, is a woman—because she’s played by a woman.

What we, as a collective human society, need to understand about transgender people, is that their gender is not determined by their parts, but by their soul. Felicity Huffman is a woman not because of her vagina; rather, her soul is the soul of a woman. Bree has the parts of a man for the majority of the film’s running time, but her body houses the soul of a woman for the entirety of the story. This, in addition to her incredible talent, is why Felicity Huffman succeeds so brilliantly as Bree where a man would have surely failed: she can show us Bree’s soul in a way that a man simply couldn’t.

You must see Transamerica, which will be released on DVD May 23. Let’s hope that from now on we see transgender characters played by actors who share their destination genders. Let the revolution begin!