Disclosure is one of the first documentaries to offer an overview of the increasing visibility of trans men and women on screen during the past thirty years or so, alongside an exploration of earlier and more problematic representations of gender non-conformity in film. In this sense it aspires to be a trans equivalent to The Celluloid Closet, the 1995 documentary that looked at the hidden history of gay representation within mainstream cinema.

Disclosure follows The Celluloid Closet in two ways, by focusing largely on Hollywood cinema and by interspersing clips with talking heads who discuss their personal and political significance. There are obviously good reasons for this, and viewing the film from the UK, in which the debate over trans issues is bitterly divided and trans-women especially are routinely demonised, it’s hard not to think the film’s overarching purpose is to make its participants appear as unthreatening as possible. Early on, one of the interviewees identifies how few people know or have any contact with anyone trans as a barrier to understanding. The film then gives you ample opportunity to know, relate to, and sympathise with a range of trans filmmakers, actors, and historians.

This is the first of Disclosure’s gambits, offering greater exposure on the assumption that it leads to greater acceptance. The second is to reinforce that trans men and women are not making it up, or following trends, but really are what they assert themselves to be; and third, that transness has been there from the start, both in cinema and in LGBT+ struggles.

What Disclosure aims for then is essentially a feel-good tale of emergence and acceptance, a ‘journey’ narrative rather like those often found in the Hollywood films it is focused on. This desire to be engaging and affirmative can lead to some moving and amusing moments — a montage of one actress repeatedly dying in hospital dramas due to ‘the hormones’ for instance — but other sequences feel overly sentimental and contrived.

A progressive father describing his trans child as a ‘unicorn’ and a ‘force of nature’ leads into an extended tearful recollection on the part of one of the participants about her own parents’ inability to view her similarly. Some elements of the film’s experiences require a certain amount of credulity on the part of the viewer too. The idea that any culturally inquisitive trans youth, no matter how provincial their upbringing, couldn’t have discovered the films of John Waters or Almodóvar in the video age (let alone that of the internet), seems unlikely, as does the notion that a young trans man might simply have forgotten the transphobia central to his favourite film Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, until he rewatched it as an adult.

In pursuing this narrative, the film loses the opportunity to engage more deeply and informatively with issues around the tension between liberal inclusiveness and a more critical and rebellious trans radicalism that both informs and develops out of left political currents. John Waters’ cuddly, commercial Hairspray is mentioned, but not the early monuments to visceral anti-normativity Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble. The proto and post-punk radicalism of other strands of trans-culture, trash-cinema, and experimentalism from Warhol through to Almodóvar, Funeral Parade of Roses, Liquid Sky, or Orlando also go unexplored.

These films are broadly avant-garde and interested in what a trans-aesthetic is at the formal level, rather than simply representation of trans lives in otherwise conventional drama. As a result of this narrow focus, films that might thematically or abstractly draw on elements of trans-ness, the Wachowski Sisters’ The Matrix for example, are glossed over. Another significant omission is the actress Alexis Arquette, one of the first openly trans Hollywood film stars, whose appearance in Last Exit to Brooklyn meant she was something of a pioneer. She is occluded perhaps because her troubled life and early death don’t quite fit in with the film’s narrative of empowerment.

Possibly to avoid appearing too complacent — or to forestall criticism that highly visible inclusion and acceptance for some might be used to forestall more substantive change for the trans men and women whose aspirations may be better met by other, more universal means like employment laws, health provision, housing — Disclosure concludes by gesturing toward the need for change at a systemic level. But without drawing on the negativity and structural critique manifest in some of the more experimental strands of trans culture, how that wider change might be brought about remains open.

While it’s heart-warming, revealing, and a testimony to how much more advanced trans-inclusivity is in the United States, Disclosure dodges the larger social questions it obliquely sets itself. Hopefully that greater and more all-encompassing thinking-through of the potentialities of trans cinema awaits.