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Sandy Stone Mondo Tranny - Gendernauts

This love letter to San Francisco’s tranny community
is a little too loving

BY GARY MORRIS

Gendernauts (1999) opens with a curious and none too appetizing image — a mangy old spotted hyena. But director Monika Treut finds a peculiar fascination in this creature because it has a "secret," and quite a juicy one. The females have an unusually high level of testosterone, making them the "gender rebels" of the animal world. "Their clit looks like a penis" says Treut (a shot of one of them meandering through the jungle verifies this). They’re larger, heavier, and more aggressive than the males, and they live in clans headed by dominant females. Treut was so impressed by these butch beasts that she named her production company "Hyena Films."

Some viewers may bristle at the idea that the transgenders who are the subjects of this documentary have anything in common with one of the more homely members of the animal kingdom, but Treut isn’t being dishy or ironic. Gendernauts is, in fact, a valentine to a local transgender community, a leisurely stroll through a specific marginal community at a specific time: San Francisco’s "gendernauts" at the end of the twentieth century.

Gendernauts The film is presided over by cultural theorist and self-styled "goddess of cyberspace" Sandy Stone, an aging hippie tranny who drones on intermittently with commentary, psychobabble, and wishful thinking on the matter of shifting gender identities. Treut introduces us to a startling range of characters — some of whom are well known in San Francisco’s queer community — who share an affinity for remaking their bodies and their lives in ways that inevitably make them transgressors. In some cases, this means transvestism, in other cases transsexualism, and sometimes, pushing the boundaries ever further, hitherto uncharted areas in between. The medical aspects of this brand of shape-shifting are neither avoided nor dwelt on, though some viewers may find the hardcore footage of Annie Sprinkle getting down with her hermaphrodite lover a bit raw.

San Francisco is ground zero for this movement, and the TGs of the film have cleverly constructed a secret city within The City to accommodate their needs, pleasures, and fetishes. They have medical facilities set up exclusively for them (The Tom Waddell clinic for gender reassignment), "safe houses" where they can relate with each other without raising eyebrows, the Club Continental for gender-bending entertainment, and more underground realms such as the backrooms of doctors’ office where dubious M.D.s shoot them up with testosterone when they can’t get it through more respectable channels.

The Club Continental sequences are probably the least interesting in the film. While it’s always encouraging to see self-styled outlaws creating community and fun against great odds, the performances of Elvis Herselvis, Pearl Harbour, and some miscellaneous drags and TGs are mostly cloying and dull. A lip-synched rendition of "I Am What I Am" is as tired as any Midwestern dinner theater show.

In spite of the insularity of the Club, and this community in general, the film doesn’t treat its subjects as total outsiders. All the people we see— mostly FTMs (female-to-male trannies), a few MTFs, and intact "goddesses" of the movement like Annie Sprinkle and "trans hag" Tornado — are engaged with society to a considerable degree. Sandy Stone and Susan Stryker, both MTFs, are well-known academics; FTMs Stafford, Texas Tomboy, and Jordy Jones are visual artists and web mavens. Treut shows them partying, having dinner, skydiving, riding motorcycles, performing their art, and having fun. What sets them apart is their determination to live in a way that pleases them without the restrictions of gender roles, which involves treating their own bodies as the ultimate canvas.

Jordy Jones

Their sense of heroic opposition and experimentation permeates the film, and provides much of its interest. Texas Tomboy, for example, refuses all labels, which confounds his/her adopted "mother," Tornado. Stafford is an artist who answers the question "Are you a boy or a girl" with "yes." Sandy Stone talks about the "endless" varieties of gender, and if that’s surely a wild overstatement, the film indeed shows enough variants to give plenty of food for thought. Among the most intriguing interviewees is Hida Vilario, born a girl but with, as she says, in some respects "a male body." She tells a hilarious story about a vacation where she was mistaken by everybody for "this flaming fag traipsing through Costa Rica with a little top on." Hida looks like a boy, lives as a dyke, and happily inhabits a "middle ground" between male and female.

Still, this path can’t be an easy one, despite nature’s apparent approval via the hyena’s example, and this is one area where the film falls short. It’s a little reminiscent of Word Is Out in looking at the lives of a marginal group that seem remarkably successful and well-adjusted. They’re all highly intelligent, verbally adroit, in some cases gorgeous and charismatic, and seemingly quite settled in their lives. There are moments when a rougher reality emerges, as when they talk about past discrimination or dealing with shady doctors dispensing potentially harmful gender-altering drugs. But for the most part this is almost too uplifting and congenial a picture. In Treut’s defense, it’s clear that she’s aware of the film’s narrow scope, so it may be overreaching to fault her for not making a deeper study of the wide range of actual experience in the TG world.

ACCESS: Gendernauts does not appear to be available at this time (October 2001) on either VHS or DVD, but it should be available eventually.

ALSO: More documentaries and tranny cinema