This paper focuses on the national and global geopolitics of Veysel Aksahin’s short documentary, Hala (2012), which centers the life and struggles of the gender non-conforming Ihsan Hala from Kayislar Village of Manisa, Turkey. Aksahin’s documentary is intended to spectacularize the exceptional acceptance of gender non-conformity in a conservative and rural town of Turkey. However, the documentary’s politics of representation raises serious implications concerning the reproduction of the colonial ethnographic gaze, the asymmetrical circulation of the Global North’s politico-cultural capital, and the collision of the rural and the urban in neoliberal Turkey. I argue that the documentary obscures the complex entanglements of the biomedical transgender modernity and the peripheral gender non-conforming lived experience against the backdrop of the neoliberal and neoconservative transformations that Turkey has undergone since the 1980s. Through a critical reading of the documentary as well as several interviews published before and after its release in 2012, I contend that the figure of Ihsan Hala exposes both the corporatized universalization of transgender rights as human rights discourse and the limitations of metronormativity. By analyzing the epistemic erasures enacted through the ethnographic gaze and the Eurocentric knowledge production, I situate the mediated representation of Ihsan Hala within the shifting national and global discourses of gender, sexuality, class, and religion while ensuring that the referential gender non-conforming subject does not disappear in their invocation.