Let's just cut right to it, this show was painfully boring. There, I said it. A story built around partial amnesia has real potential, but between the choppy scene structure and random flashbacks thrown in constantly, the whole plot ends up feeling more tangled than it needed to be. The romance doesn't fare much better either, it's written so poorly that I never really found myself invested in this couple. Both leads come across stiff on screen and deliver their lines in a really awkward way. The show runs 8 episodes, each somewhere around 30 to 35 minutes. Hanuel, a 29 year old language teacher, wakes up after an accident only to realize his memory stops at age 19. It turns out he'd been in another accident back then too, which is why his memories cut off at that point. He has zero recollection of the fact that he's currently living with his childhood friend Saebyeok, who's now a huge celebrity. That makes the whole situation even harder for Hanuel to wrap his ...
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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