movie review- Gendernauts

Last night, I watched a movie from the late 90s called Gendernauts. The documentary takes place in San Francisco, and as a native of the bay area, as well as a resident of San Francisco since 2002, I am personally interested in the message of the story as well as the people. For me, it's very interesting to see the recent history plays out in film, because I didn't get he chance to live it. When this movie came out, I would have been in 9th grade, so I was still out of the loop at that point.

San Francisco has always been a mecca for queer people, and as it is discussed in the movie, San Francisco is one of only a few handful of cities in the WHOLE WORLD who makes legislation in favor of trans and gender queer people. Although anti-discrimination seems to be a human rights issue, just as we've all seen from the recent removal of trans people from the anti-discrimination act a few months, discrimination is alive and well in our nation's capital. As a statistic, I guess I should repeat that trans people have the highest rates of unemployment of any minority in the entire world.

I find the 90s to be such an optimistic time. Bill Clinton was president, and overall the country was doing a lot better in every measurable respect of success. It seems like the 90s was really the conception of the contemporary. I was amazed about how the movie initially dealt with the singularity and uploading consciousness. Making humans analogous to cyborgs was also smart and relevant, because as much as we'd like to think we're all unique and self-created, we really are just an amalgamation of everything present in our culture, our identities still run on scripts and schemas. It seems like gender queer people understand something that everyone else who blends in never could; or perhaps gender queer simply can't understand anything with respect to culturally constructed gender roles and instead are completely self created...

What I find the most interesting about this movie, are the subjects who instead of transitioning from 1 gender to another, instead choose to occupy a yet unnamed and still "underground" middle ground, choosing to neither be masculine or feminine. It's strange to think how much of a "big deal" these kinds of people pose to society even now. Even I find myself staring when someone doesn't fit into the preconceived boxes that I've been socialized to expect. Even now, in the 2000s, men are left with the emotionless butch archetype, and women can choose either to be disney princess femme or be met with much resistance through life.