Hope Giselle Wins Best Documentary at ESSENCE Fest & Makes History Doing It

Hope Giselle-Godsey just added a new line to her resume. At the 2026 ESSENCE Festival of Culture, her documentary Not Your Average Girl won Best Documentary Film, making her the first openly transgender person to receive that honor at the ESSENCE Fest Film Festival, which runs each summer at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

Giselle’s documentary tour has already sold out screenings in Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. Gaye Magazine caught up with Giselle to discuss the award, the film, and what she hopes people take away from it.

Giselle didn’t start this project with much. A few thousand dollars, a cameraman who knew how to find a story, and a small circle of people who believed in her before anyone else. There were moments when she wasn’t sure the film should exist at all, and she almost didn’t submit it to ESSENCE.

We asked what the woman who started this film would say to the woman who had just won the award, Giselle didn’t hesitate.

“Girl, I knew you were going to do something, but I didn’t expect you to do all this,” she said. “That younger version of me would be proud, but she would probably laugh, too, because she always had a certain audacity. Even when I didn’t know how I was going to get somewhere, some part of me always believed I belonged there.”

She doesn’t take the “first” lightly, and she’s clear that the source of the honor matters as much as the honor itself.

“This is an institution created for Black people, Black women, and Black culture,” Giselle said. “As a Black trans woman, I find something profound in having my story not merely tolerated or included, but celebrated as part of our culture. For years, Black trans people have been made to feel as though our stories sit outside Blackness, as though we are a footnote to the culture instead of people who have always helped shape it. This award said something bigger to me: you are not outside the culture. You are the culture, too.”

She added, “I don’t take being the first lightly, but I also hope I’m not the last for very long.”

Giselle created Not Your Average Girl so people could see trans women, especially Black trans women, beyond headlines, legislation, and tragedy.

“So much of what the world knows about trans women, particularly Black trans women, comes through tragedy, legislation, violence, or death,” she said. “I wanted to make a film where I could live. Where I could be funny, complicated, ambitious, wrong, loving, angry, glamorous, afraid, and sometimes absolutely ridiculous. I hope people leave asking themselves whether they have actually known a trans person or only known a political argument about us. Those are not the same thing.”

The hardest part of making the film wasn’t the footage. It was what the footage demanded of her.

“Survival does not always make you soft. Sometimes it makes you difficult,” Giselle said.

“I had to accept that I wasn’t always the hero in every story I was in. There were moments when my hurt affected others. There were relationships I didn’t always handle perfectly. There were versions of myself I had to forgive without pretending they were flawless. That was probably the most difficult part of making the film: allowing myself to be seen as a whole person rather than trying to present a perfect one. Because perfection is just another cage, and I didn’t spend my entire life breaking out of other people’s boxes to build a prettier one for myself.”

Giselle sees her film as one entry in a much longer record kept by the women who came before her.

“Long before there were documentaries about us, there were Black trans women saving photographs, telling stories in beauty salons and living rooms, keeping letters, creating chosen families, and making sure somebody remembered that we were here,” she said, naming Marsha P. Johnson and Ajita Wilson among the women who built that archive simply by refusing to disappear. “Not Your Average Girl is my contribution to that lineage. It says that I was here. That we were here. That our lives were bigger than the laws passed against us, bigger than the headlines written about us, and bigger than the tragedies people so often use to define us.”

The recognition at ESSENCE follows another major moment on the tour. At the April stop in Washington, D.C., the screening sold out three times over, prompting organizers to move to a larger venue to meet demand. Giselle was formally honored there by Japer Bowles, director of the D.C. Mayor’s Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Affairs under Mayor Muriel Bowser, on Mayor Bowser’s behalf, for her advocacy and leadership in Black, trans, and queer communities. Giselle has called D.C. one of the places that raised her, having lived and worked in the region for more than a decade.

Fifteen years into her advocacy work, Giselle isn’t interested in taking credit for a shift she says was already underway.

“Awards don’t create the work. They grant permission for some people to finally pay attention to it,” she said. “What has shifted is that people who may not have understood the vision before now have a language to articulate its value. I’m grateful for that. But I also know exactly who I was before I walked onto that stage, and I know who I’ll be when the lights aren’t on me anymore.”

 

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Getting into the room isn’t the finish line for Giselle. That’s why the tour includes the Hopeful Legacy Grant, a $1,000 award presented at each stop to a local trans or gender-expansive leader.

“Representation without investment is incomplete,” she said. “I can be invited into every room in America, but if those who come after me still lack resources, access, protection, or opportunity, my visibility becomes a performance. I don’t just want to be the Black trans woman who got into the room. I want to hold the door open, question who built the room, ask who is being paid in the room, and make sure somebody else leaves with more power than they had when they walked in.”

Watching eight years of her own footage taught Giselle something she hadn’t set out to find.

“I have been loved far more than I realized,” she said. “When you grow up having to fight for yourself, it can be easy to believe you did everything alone. But watching eight years of my life back forced me to see all the people who stood beside me. The friends who showed up. The family who tried, even when they didn’t always understand. The people who believed in me before there was any evidence that their belief would pay off. I thought I was making a documentary about my survival. Somewhere along the way, I realized I had also made a film about all the love that helped me survive.”

She hopes young Black trans viewers take away one thing from the film above all else.

“They do not have to become extraordinary to deserve an ordinary life,” Giselle said. “Yes, I have an award now. I’ve written books. I’ve stood on stages. I’ve done things I’m incredibly proud of. But a young Black trans person should not have to accomplish any of those things to deserve safety, love, softness, family, joy, and a future. I hope they see possibility in me, but more importantly, I hope they see permission. Permission to become whoever they are, even if that person looks nothing like me.”

After six cities and one national award, Giselle and her team aren’t calling the tour over. Rochester is next on Friday, July 17, 2026, and she says more stops are planned.

“We thought the tour was over, but apparently the people have other plans,” Giselle said. “After six cities, thousands of meaningful community touchpoints, and direct investment in emerging leaders, we’ve now won the 2026 ESSENCE Film Festival Award for Best Documentary Film. People keep asking us the same question: ‘When are you coming back?’ So we’re answering. Soon. Because if this film has taught me anything, it’s that representation without investment is incomplete.”

As for what comes next, she’s stopped trying to answer it in advance.

“I think I’ve learned not to put a ceiling on that answer anymore,” she said.

Fifteen years into her advocacy work, with collaborations that include the Human Rights Campaign, NASA, and the National Black Justice Coalition, plus a Webby Award earlier this year for her viral protest against anti-trans legislation, Giselle isn’t slowing down. She’s decided she doesn’t have to explain where she’s headed to keep moving.