I Want What I Want is a moving and articulate film. Roy's problem is that he is physically a man but feels like a woman. He is unable to escape from an exaggerated devotion to the memory of his long dead mother, and is invariable at odds with his bluff, lecherous old father who thinks that all problems of Roy's kind can be cured by National Service or a good dose of boarding school. Roy runs away from home and shacks up in an obscure lodging house. It is here that he begins to train himself for the life of a woman.

The film is Fassbinder's last word on victimised innocence, a subjective response to the suicide of his lover and a sincere admission that life is messier than his earlier films acknowledged. Prompted by his love for Anton, Erwin goes to Casablanca for a sex change operation and becomes Elvira. On her return Anton has abandoned her and Elvira's life hereafter seems to consist of violent, humiliating relationships with cruel men and ends with her suicide. This is arguably Fassbinder's ugliest and most challenging film to date. On the surface, the film remains infuriatingly evasive: another manifesto generally testifying to the repression of differences, the immense destructive power of feelings, the fundamental deviousness of human nature, and the Fassbinderian conviction that all relationships are grounded in sadomasochistic 'vicious cycles'.

Hermaphrodite Georgina Somerset lived as a man and then had an operation in 1957 to correct her sexual status. She talks about her life as an intersexual.