Over the nature footage that opens Gendernauts, Monika Treut's superficial documentary about the transgender community in San Francisco, the director explains why the spotted hyena is her favorite animal. In a case when "nature is more inventive than culture," the female of the species has so much testosterone in her body that its clitoris looks like a penis, making conventional gender distinctions seem irrelevant. Later in the film, she embraces the vague millennial concept of gender "cyborgs," people constructed by parts into an entirely new identity through hormone treatments and surgical technologies. Treut's determination to not explore these contradictory notions of human sexuality speaks to her tolerance and compassion for the trans world, but her unwillingness to ask the tough questions severely limits her as a documentarian. Are the health risks involved in regular hormone injections and body-altering surgeries really that negligible? Is self-mutilation a psychologically sound route to self-realization? Is it too insensitive to wonder if someone's personal history might have played a role in his or her gender confusion? It makes sense that Gendernauts skirts these issues for agreeable political reasons, because even great films about gender fluidity—Paris Is Burning, Boys Don't Cry—still associate it with trauma and tragedy. To that end, Treut presents a warm and sympathetic portrait of numerous Bay Area transgenders, with equal time devoted to females-to-males and vice versa. Among the tight-knit subjects, there's a university professor, a historian, a web designer, and a conceptual artist, all of whom offer lucid, highly intelligent reasons for falling outside conventional modes of identity. But there are few stories about the struggle for acceptance that must have taken place within their families, within their communities, and, most of all, within themselves. Gendernauts paints a rosy picture, but it's conspicuously incomplete.