This Indian series is being sold as a story about a gay man falling for his straight best friend but honestly, at its heart, it's really about friendship and what friendship can look like when it gets complicated and messy and emotionally loaded. It's available on the YouTube channel of Last Leaf Pictures, seven episodes of about 30 minutes each. I had mixed feelings throughout and a big part of that comes down to how I felt about one of the lead characters, but more on that in a bit. Anshul and Kavith are the two men at the centre of everything. They first meet on a train heading to Delhi, both of them not really ready to go back to their hometowns. They get off midway, turn around and head back to Mumbai to give themselves one more shot at the life they want there. Anshul is an aspiring actor with a young son back in Delhi living with his grandmother. Kavith is gay, freshly out of yet another relationship, his 17th by his own count over the years. The two strike up this unusu...
We meet Charlotte first, she's a trans woman and she works in this very old school, very masculine railway maintenance job. Her part of the story is really about the social stuff, not surgery or anything medical, just the everyday reality of telling your coworkers, changing how you dress, asking people to use a different name and pronouns, and just living with that fear of how people are going to react. Then there's Jamie, a trans man who's just starting his medical transition. His story is a lot about testosterone treatment and what it feels like when your body slowly starts to catch up with how you've always felt inside. And then we have Vinessa who is in San Francisco actually getting gender confirmation surgery. They show the surgery on camera and honestly I did not need to see that. Besides these three we also hear from a few other people throughout. The documentary also spends a good amount of time on the science side, things like whether biology or brain development plays a role in gender identity, how puberty blockers work for trans teenagers, what gender dysphoria means, and whether gender is really more of a spectrum than just male or female.
What I liked is that it never tries to be dramatic or sensational about any of this. It just lets people talk and brings in doctors and family members too which makes it feel more complete. And it's honest about the fact that everyone's experience is different. Some stories are hard and painful and some are actually really warm and hopeful, and having that mix stops it from feeling too heavy or too sugar coated. If I had to point out one thing, it does feel more like a beginner's guide than anything really in depth. But that's probably the whole point.
If you don't know much about this topic and want to actually understand it without feeling lectured at, this is a pretty good place to start. (6/10)
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