Rosa von Praunheim's TS Menace documents the birth of transgender activism in the States and its demands for basic human rights. Personal in its approach, the film has a range of cross-cultural interviewees who have sought refuge in the US from Africa, South America, the Philippines, Japan and Europe as well as Hawaiian, Native American and African American perspectives. At the end of an array of interviews, conferences and political lobbies from the stairs of the Whitehouse to the Fantasia Fair in Provincetown in Praunheim's wide ranging film, Riki Anne Wilchins, founder of the direct action group Transexual Menace gives further insight into transgender politics as a movement against shame and victim status within the community and of ignorance and brutality from without. TS Menace was set up in response of young f-t-m Brandon Teena and two of his friends, execution-style, in Nebraska and the media circus that surrounded it. TS Menace wanted to ensure that it was clear that the men being tried for this had committed a trans-phobic hate crime. Against oppression and discrimination on the one hand, transgender pride is, on the other, also about celebration and expanding the possibilities of what it means to be gendered or not in contemporary society. TS Menace begins to show us what is beyond the tip of the iceberg of what we believe gender used to be. Menacing indeed.

An examination of the growing political force of the transsexual movement. From female-to-male and male-to-female, post-op to pre-op, von Praunheim interviews a diverse range of people in an examination of social intolerance of choice.