Gendernauts review

The prize-winning documentary Gendernauts offers a breezy tour of San Francisco's transgender community, their lifestyles and experiences. Engaging figures like Texas Tomboy and Hilda Viloria don't conform to the traditional categories of either male or female: some are full transsexuals, some are undergoing gender reassignment, while others are hermaphrodites, occupying a middle ground. To these mavericks, gender is something that's constructed, learned and performed rather than a biological attribute.

Scripted and directed by film-maker and drag king Monika Treut, Gendernauts trumpets the mutability and experimentalism of its subjects, many of them friends. But there's no sense of their lives outside this queer enclave: surely they meet bigotry and prejudice? And the issue of medical danger from testosterone use is also avoided.