In 2024, the filmmaker Hansen Bursic was at a film festival screening his documentary Trans Heaven, Pennsylvania, when an audience member came up and posed a question: “Have you ever thought about making a documentary about transgender truckers?”

The pitch stood out, according to Sowj Kudva’s telling. Kudva, who lives in Durham, is now collaborating with Bursic on the project as the film’s editor. Bursic’s past filmmaking projects have touched on queer and working-class stories, and his grandfather worked for many years as a truck driver and dispatcher. The story seemed ripe for the telling.

But first, the filmmaking team needed a subject.

“We’ve been doing preproduction,” Kudva tells the INDY of the process, “bringing on producers, cinematographers, [and] interviewing a bunch of trans people who are truck drivers, figuring out who is not only captivating and charismatic on-screen but somebody who’s willing to tell their story at this particular moment in time, politically.”

That person turned out to be 24-year-old Ashleigh, a third-generation long-haul trucker with wispy blond hair who has just entered the industry. The forthcoming documentary The Trans Trucker Project—a working title—will follow Ashleigh as she pilots her 18-wheeler to an LGBTQ+ trucker holiday party in Florida, stopping along the way to make one final delivery before Christmas. The film is expected to be completed by fall or winter 2026.

“People are making their lives happen in red states,” says Kudva, who teaches filmmaking at Elon University. A September 6 event at The Fruit, “Pumpin’ Gas,” is raising money for the documentary project; such fundraising efforts, Kudva says, are part of a larger drive to establish grassroots filmmaking communities outside of mainstream avenues. 

“Hollywood, especially with the administration right now, is not funding trans stories,” Kudva tells the INDY. “We’ve been told to our faces [that] they’re not funding trans stories because of what’s going on politically. I’ve also just felt it’s really important to recognize that talent exists outside of these big cities, especially queer and trans people.” 

Ashleigh, the subject of the forthcoming documentary The Trans Trucker Project. Photo courtesy of the subject.

According to 2024 data from the American Trucking Associations, there are 3.6 million truck drivers working in the United States. Historically, it’s been a predominantly male profession—Bursic’s description of the stereotype, in the project’s one-sheet, is of an “American cowboy, traversing the countryside, cargo in tow, with a stoic and hardened demeanor”—but the demographic is changing.

Around 8 percent of truckers are women, and according to historian Anne Balay, author of Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers, as many as 3 percent of truckers are trans. Kudva attributes this to the “autonomy and stability” that the job and time on the open road offer. 

With the Trump administration’s anti-trans crusade, however, things are shifting for trans workers across many industries, and Kudva says that the job has become more dangerous for truckers—some who drive an average of 500-600 miles a day, charting isolated routes and increasingly contending with the fraught “politics of bathrooms and truck stops” that vary from state to state. These new workplace complications reinforce the importance of telling the stories of truckers like Ashleigh.

For Kudva, the process of raising funds for The Trans Trucker Project has also underscored the continued need to bolster filmmaking in the South and, in particular, to tell stories that lie at the intersection of everyday queer and working-class life. 

“I was just at OutSouth [Film Festival] and on a panel about making film in North Carolina,” they say. “I asked the crowd, ‘How many of you are storytellers?’ And almost the entire crowd raised their hand. It blew my mind.” 

“People in the crowd were saying, ‘I just don’t know how to do it necessarily. I’ve got my people, but how do I raise the funds? How do I find the community?’” Kudva continues. “We are here—I just now want to bring us all together so we can continue this kind of storytelling and say ‘We don’t need to do it anywhere else.’” 

Follow Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Bluesky or email [email protected].

Sarah Edwards is culture editor of the INDY, covering cultural institutions and the arts in the Triangle. She joined the staff in 2019 and assumed her current role in 2020.