On demand: "Transhood"

Transhood is a real journey, in just 93 minutes. As per that title, the approach this HBO doc takes is not unlike that taken by Richard Linklater in his Boyhood: documentarist Sharon Liese follows four young transitioning Americans and their families as they navigate the middle part of the 2010s. We begin in 2014: the year Linklater's film opened, but also the final sandgrains of Obamatime, when transness was altogether less contentious. We end five years later with a new President installed and taking a particular delight in waging war on the trans community. The film's subjects are seen to grow, change, adapt; around them, however, America - itself caught in a transitional moment - is devolving, becoming set in its ways and only more hardened. For much of the running time, Liese observes the usual rituals of childhood and adolescence: birthday parties, doctor's appointments, crushes, first dates, family meals, trips to the barbershop, playdates, prom nights. Fifteen-year-old Leena - the furthest along this trajectory, but also sensitive enough to grasp what kind of a world she's entering into - has started to weigh up career options. Yet the film also captures what the majority of American kids don't and won't directly experience: puberty blockers, pronoun changes, transphobic bullying, bathroom nonsense, people with placards opposing your very existence, and an elevated level of background noise that cannot be good for one's headspace. The most complicated (and thereby compelling) story here is that of eight-year-old Avery, raised by erstwhile Southern Baptists to become, among things, National Geographic's postergirl for all things gender, a position that leaves her horribly exposed as a lightning rod for online abuse.

For the most part, Transhood bears witness to the secret resilience of kids: Liese's subjects are often observed bouncing around, forever in youthful motion, oblivious to some (if not all) of that aforementioned noise. If anything, it's arguably the parents who bear the blunt of the worry, seen trying to obtain expensive medical treatments within a non-socialised healthcare system (a palpable emotional bind: they want to give their children the best shot at happiness, but struggle to afford it), recognising they've been prioritising one of their children over others with needs of their own, or juggling intervening on their trans kid's behalf with stepping back to let their offspring stand on their own two feet. You soon realise these parents must have been carefully selected at an early stage in the project. They're not obvious flowers-in-hair, hippy-dippy bohemians, rather working moms and pops, often from flyover states, who nevertheless have some idea of the issues in play and the best language to use. (Though unspoken, the editorial insinuation is clear: if these non-New Yorker subscribers can do it, why can't more Americans?) Elsewhere, an intriguing push-me-pull-you tension is visible in Liese's filmmaking: she wants to position these kids as extraordinary case studies, as brave and beautiful as they are, but she also wants to show them living ordinary lives - or at least lives that would be blissfully ordinary were it not for Trump, bathroom bans and transphobic hate attacks. The filmmaker's fix is a simple, effective one: she hangs back, watches, listens and learns, and wherever possible does her utmost to let her subjects be. The simplest story here would appear that of four-year-old Phoenix, a biologically male four-year-old - too young for puberty blockers - who's taken to wearing dresses and feather boas as countless cis kids (and the young protagonist of the French feature Ma vie en rose) have. Yet Phoenix starts dressing (and identifying) as a boy again in the wake of the Trump inauguration and his parents' divorce. Maybe Phoenix will grow up to be trans, gay or gender-queer; maybe he won't. The film's stance is firmly and that's OK: no harm, no foul, and either way his parents still dote on him. Sometimes you have to give people time and space to reveal themselves, on their own terms; sometimes a documentary's line of approach is as instructive - you'd hope as teachable - as anything its subjects say or do.

Transhood is now streaming via HBO Max and NOW.