"I can't believe this came out of the Franco era!" —the most popular comment

Well, I can believe it. It is a conservative film, just notable for being empathetic on top of its conformist message. It is fundamentally about stopping gay relationships and forcing intersex people to conform to binary sexes so that their sexual orientation would match up with the heterosexual form of their perceived sex.

Without allowing Adela to choose their own gender, a doctor makes a judgment…

After all the negative reviews, I was surprised by how much I liked this one. There's some fictionalization of the state of being intersex that was done for theming reasons that unfortunately destablizes the realism and confuses audiences about how much of this reflects reality. Many viewers seem to think this is a distortion of the dyadic transgender experience, when it's supposed to be about the intersex experience, which it is... sort of. It chops up various aspects of intersex…