The latest film from BBC documentarian Louis Theroux profiles children with gender dysphoria in the Bay Area.
"Transgender Kids," which aired on BBC Two, looks at young Northern Californians who feel that they've been assigned the wrong gender. One subject is Sebastian, a five-year-old born a boy who identifies as a female named Camille. Another is 14-year-old Nicky, who taking hormone treatments to become a woman but laments the fallabilities of the process and of being a "girl with a penis."
"Theroux’s documentary was rich in such existential paradoxes, but most thought-provoking when considering a young American called Cole, who sometimes dresses as a girl and self-describes as Crystal," wrote The Guardian in a review of the program. "She/he has an unfulfillable desire to be both boy and girl. Quite possibly, then, despite all that pills and surgeons can do, the right to be ourselves is sometimes unrealisable and gender more fluid than we allow."
Theroux is the son of writer Paul Theroux and the cousin of actor Justin Theroux, the latter perhaps better known as Jennifer Aniston's husband-to-be.
