Louis Theroux: Transgender Kids

Director: Tom Barrow
Release Year: 2015

In the 2015 BBC documentary Louis Theroux: Transgender Kids, award-winning journalist Louis Theroux travels to San Francisco to explore the work of doctors and families supporting children who identify as transgender. Set primarily at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at UCSF Hospital, the film provides an intimate, sometimes joyful, sometimes uneasy look into the experiences of young people navigating gender identity, the parents standing by them, and the professionals guiding them through complex medical and social landscapes. At the outset, Theroux acknowledges the subject’s sensitivity, noting that the question of how old a child should be to make life-altering decisions is fraught with difficulty. Yet, as the documentary unfolds, it becomes evident that many of the assumptions fueling public unease are based on misunderstandings. For very young children, transitioning is primarily a social process, wearing different clothes, using a different name or pronouns, without any permanent medical steps. While puberty blockers may be introduced at a later stage, their effects are reversible, a fact the documentary unfortunately fails to clarify clearly.

Enigma

Director: Zackary Drucker
Release Year: 2025

Enigma (2025), directed by acclaimed trans filmmaker Zackary Drucker, premiered at Sundance on January 28 and debuts on HBO on June 24. The documentary chronicles the intertwined yet divergent lives of April Ashley and Amanda Lear, two veterans of Paris’s legendary Le Carrousel cabaret, as they each navigated a world hostile to their existence, leaving a layered legacy of identity, resilience, and community.

A Dose of Life

Director: Aaron Chan and Lulu Gurney
Release Year: 2009

In the 2009 documentary A Dose of Life, co-directed by Aaron Chan and Lulu Gurney, we are invited into the intimate, often invisible world of what it means to live with HIV as a transgender Indigenous woman in Vancouver. It is a film rooted in raw truth and quiet strength, anchored by Lulu’s moving narration and her unapologetic honesty.

Lola

Director: Robin Macdonald
Release Year: 2019

Robin Macdonald’s powerful documentary Lola is more than a portrait of a transgender woman’s transition. It is a testimony of endurance, familial love, loss, and the desperate pursuit of a life lived openly and without fear. At the heart of this story is Lola, a young Iranian woman who was born male and forced to flee her homeland to survive as her authentic self. Her journey, captured with compassion and cinematic grace, is not only geographically vast, stretching from Iran to Turkey to Canada, but emotionally seismic, shaking the foundations of identity, belonging, and survival in a world that often insists she should not exist.

La Dany: The Diva of Bolivar Park

Director: Jim Giles and Julie Giles
Release Year: 2010

La Dany: The Diva of Bolivar Park is a compelling and intimate documentary directed by Jim Giles and Julie Giles that shines a powerful light on the life of Dany Castaño Quintero, a transvestite street performer from Medellín, Colombia. Released in 2010, the film captures not only the extraordinary performance art of a singular personality but also the complexities and hardships faced by marginalized communities in one of Colombia’s most volatile cities.

Apparence féminine

Director: Richard Rein
Release Year: 1980

Richard Rein’s 1980 documentary Apparence féminine is a rare gem in French cinema, an unvarnished, cinéma-vérité portrait of a trans woman at a time when transgender identities were largely invisible, ridiculed, or reduced to medical oddities. Shot with a fixed camera, stripped of visual artifice, and devoid of dramatic music or narration, the film invites the viewer into an unmediated encounter with Dominique, a trans woman in her thirties, whose dignity, wit, and self-awareness cut through decades of social stigma. At the center of the film is Dominique, formerly Jean-Paul, who recounts her journey not as a linear narrative of transformation, but as a complex and evolving negotiation with gender, society, and desire.

TEDx Talks: Nina Arsenault

Show: TEDx Talks
Title: The transgender conversation has just begun
Release Year: 2015

On December 8, 2015, at a TEDx event, artist and activist Nina Arsenault took to the stage not to explain what it means to be transgender, but to ask: Why wasn’t she angry? And more importantly, why did that question matter so much? Delivered with emotional clarity, biting humor, and searing honesty, Arsenault’s talk was less a lecture than a call to witness. It spanned continents, cultures, and decades of personal and political reckoning. From performing naked 60 feet above the ground at the Pope’s Palace in Avignon, France, to confronting the mundane cruelty of everyday ignorance in Canadian bars, Arsenault charted the internal journey of a trans woman who had once resisted anger, and eventually learned why she couldn’t anymore.

Schoolboy to Showgirl: The Alexandra Billings Story

Written and produced by: Alexandra Silets
Release Year: 2009

Schoolboy to Showgirl: The Alexandra Billings Story is a powerful documentary that chronicles the remarkable life of Alexandra Billings, a trailblazing transgender actress, singer, and teacher. Written and produced by Alexandra Silets, the film takes viewers on an intimate journey through Billings' multifaceted life, exploring her gender transition, battles with addiction, triumph over homelessness and HIV, and her ascent in the world of performance and activism. Part of the "Out & Proud in Chicago" series, the documentary premiered on PBS (WTTW-11) on June 19, 2009, and earned a nomination for an Emmy Award in the Best Documentary category. Through candid interviews and rare archival footage, the film offers a raw and deeply human portrait of one of the first openly transgender women to appear on American television.

Translatina

Director: Felipe Degregori
Release Year: 2010

In 2010, filmmaker Esther Prade released Translatina, a groundbreaking documentary that emerged from three years of intensive production, over 100 hours of footage, and interviews spanning 15 different nationalities. This ambitious work paints a sobering, vivid portrait of the daily struggles and systemic challenges faced by transgender individuals throughout Latin America. More than just a film, Translatina is a critical social document and a call for justice and inclusion in a region where transgender people are often invisible, marginalized, and discriminated against. Transgender people in Latin America face deeply entrenched societal barriers. Often rejected by their families and communities, they endure harassment, discrimination, and violence that few outside their communities fully understand. These experiences are frequently denied or ignored by mainstream society, which perpetuates their invisibility.

WhatEver Will Be

Director: Esther Prade
Release Year: 2013

In WhatEver Will Be, filmmaker Esther Prade delivers a raw and unflinching exploration of identity, intimacy, and the painful complexity of human connection through the intertwined lives of two transgender women, Cilla van Opstal and Ilona Willemars. Once bonded by their shared experience of living on society’s margins, the women find their friendship slowly unraveling in the face of conflicting desires, identities, and definitions of what it means to be a “real” woman. What begins as a story of solidarity transforms into a piercing commentary on rivalry, disillusionment, and the fragility of chosen families.

Beauty and Brains

Director: Catherine Donaldson
Release Year: 2010

Would you enter a beauty pageant if it meant you might finally be safe? Would you put on makeup and a sash not for glamour or fame, but to protect yourself from sexual abuse, police brutality, and being banished by your own family? In Catherine Donaldson’s poignant and courageous documentary Beauty and Brains, this is exactly the question posed, and lived, by Nepal’s third-gender community. In a society where third-gender individuals are expected to choose between blessing newlyweds, begging in the streets, or selling their bodies to survive, the idea of participating in a beauty contest may sound like an indulgence. But Beauty and Brains reveals something far more radical: a community reclaiming their humanity and dignity through performance, activism, and visibility.

Et il voulut être une femme

Director: Michel Ricaud
Release Year: 1977

Before disappearing, quite literally, beneath the waves near the fabled “Vas-y Vas-y” islands, yes, that’s their nickname, and yes, it’s ominously fitting, Michel Ricaud left behind a curious legacy. A prolific figure in French pornographic cinema, Ricaud was known for his unapologetic embrace of the erotic. But among his oeuvre, one film stands out as an outlier, an experiment that straddles exploitation and empathy, salaciousness and sincerity. That film is Et il voulut être une femme (“And He Wanted to Be a Woman”), a 1977 documentary-fiction hybrid centered on trans identity, transition, and the quiet violence of societal alienation.

La bocca del lupo

Director: Pietro Marcello
Release Year: 2009

La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf), Pietro Marcello’s haunting 2009 documentary, is one of the most original love stories ever committed to film. Neither strictly documentary nor purely fiction, the film follows the 20-year romance between a rugged Sicilian ex-convict named Vincenzo Motta, known as Enzo, and Mary Monaco, a trans woman and former convict herself. It is a love that emerged from the shadows of Genoa’s prison walls and endured through decades of hardship, addiction, displacement, and poverty. Marcello weaves their lives into a poetic meditation not only on love but on time, class, gender, urban decay, and the aching pull of memory.

Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr

Director: Kimberly Reed
Release Year: 2024

Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr is a short yet deeply resonant documentary by award-winning filmmaker Kimberly Reed, capturing a moment both intimately personal and politically seismic. At its center stands Montana state representative Zooey Zephyr, a transgender woman whose principled stand against anti-trans legislation in April 2023 led to her expulsion from the Montana House of Representatives. What began as a legislative clash over trans healthcare became an international symbol of courage, community, and the power of staying true to one’s identity, even under siege.

Guilda: Elle est bien dans ma peau

Director: Julien Cadieux
Release Year: 2014

There are artists who play roles, and then there are those whose entire existence is a performance of resilience, defiance, and beauty. Guilda: Elle est bien dans ma peau, Julien Cadieux’s 2014 documentary, is an evocative, shimmering tribute to Jean Guida de Mortellaro, better known by the singular name Guilda. In its sweeping emotional scope and elegant visual storytelling, the film does far more than chart the life of a drag performer. It captures the breath of an era, the soul of a city, and the spellbinding artistry of a man who made illusion into a radical act of truth. 

Gender Revolution: A Journey with Katie Couric

Producer: Emily Bina
Release Year: 2017

In 2017, National Geographic made a bold and timely foray into one of the most complex and pressing conversations of our time, gender identity, with the documentary Gender Revolution: A Journey with Katie Couric. Produced in collaboration with the renowned journalist herself and the creative minds behind World of Wonder, the film marked a significant moment in mainstream media’s engagement with trans and non-binary lives. Released on February 6, 2017, Gender Revolution aired on the National Geographic Channel, shortly after the magazine’s January 2017 special issue also titled “Gender Revolution,” which featured a young transgender girl on its cover, a watershed moment in media representation.

Miss Transgender: Britain's New Beauty Queens

Director: Jasleen Kaur Sethi
Release Year: 2016

"Miss Transgender: Britain's New Beauty Queens" (2016), directed by Jasleen Kaur Sethi, is a powerful observational documentary that immerses viewers in the intimate, joyful, and painful realities of being transgender in modern-day Britain. Against the backdrop of the country's first national transgender beauty pageant, the film follows three trans women, Fay, Courtney, and Jai, each with deeply personal motivations for entering the competition. Their journeys reveal the intersections of beauty, identity, survival, and hope, and they underscore just how multi-layered the transgender experience is.