That the people with whom Brandon feels most at home would kill him if they knew his true gender is the movie's most tragic irony--and the one that lifts it out of the realm of gay-martyr hagiography and into something more complex and  a meditation on the irrelevance of gender.
It is sad to know that those close to him would not approve of his true identity.
A man wearing a checkered shirt and red apron sits and uses a pottery wheel to make intricate clay pots.