In 2016, film-maker Michael Barnett went to the Sundance film festival to promote his most recent project The Mars Generation, a documentary which chronicled the history of American space exploration through the lens of a group of exceptional kids involved in Nasa’s youth space camp. When he got home to Los Angeles, his ears and eyes peeled for new subject matter, a close friend called Barnett to tell him their child was transgender. “I realized I didn’t have the knowledge or tools to advocate for this family or be an ally,” recalls Barnett at the Tribeca film festival, where he’s promoting his new documentary. “So I kind of did what I do, gathering as much knowledge as possible.”

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His research led him to Mack Beggs, a trans male high school wrestler in Texas, where interscholastic regulations require trans athletes to compete against the gender they were assigned at birth. This means Mack, a muscular, stoic young man with a hip, shaved-side hairstyle, wrestles girls. “We didn’t get the chance to see if there was space for the film, but we very slowly started reaching out,” Barnett says, noting that representatives of the advocacy group Glaad helped facilitate the introductions. “Mack’s story was an interesting way to start to think about trans youth and trans rights, so we flew out to meet the families and started to build some trust over about a year.”

In the hotel room where Barnett and his subjects have gathered to promote Changing the Game – a vital and big-hearted documentary about a group of trans high school athletes and their families – one can intuit trust at the heart of the relationship between film-maker and subject, which is perhaps the most crucial ingredient in a film as reliant on confidence and candor as this one. That starts, of course, with the athletes, who’ve defied the national firestorm that enveloped them as teenagers and emerged as consummate athlete-advocates.

Changing the Game primarily follows three of them: Beggs, who won two state championships in high school; the voluble Sarah Rose Huckman, an accomplished cross-country skier and makeup vlogger from New Hampshire; and Andraya Yearwood, a 17-year-old track phenom who competes for Cromwell High School in Connecticut, where she’s permitted to race against other girls and has been readily scrutinized for doing so. Her teammate and fellow trans athlete Terry Miller is also featured in the film.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mack Beggs is a trans male high school wrestler in Texas where regulations require him to compete against girls. Photograph: Turner Jumonville

It’s not everyday you encounter teenagers as courageous and poised as these ones, which was why Barnett initially felt compelled to their stories. But thick skin comes with the territory, they explain, especially when you grow up trans, with your very identity put under the harshest of microscopes. The opposition they’ve faced has only been exacerbated in the field of athletics, where questions of gender and identity, of tolerance and discrimination, are amplified.

But Changing the Game, shot with the crackling, highlight-reel intensity of a sports film, doesn’t linger on the most trying aspects of being trans, though there are many. In films about disenfranchised groups of people, adversity is often conveyed as an inherently ennobling hill to climb, and hardship stands in for character. Barnett, instead, chose to make a film that balances moments of real gravitas with ones of optimism, focusing on three athletes who’ve used their notoriety as an opportunity for enlightenment both at home and beyond. “It was a very conscious choice; we’re used to seeing sports and athletes portrayed a certain way and I thought every single one of these kids deserved the same treatment,” says the director of the film’s hopeful tone. “I certainly don’t want to diminish what one path is like for certain individuals or families, but we wanted to make a film that, while living in a regressive time, could be a beacon, so people inside and outside these communities could see that there’s a road to love and acceptance and support.”

Support comes from many sources in the film, both filial and fraternal. Beggs was raised by his grandparents Nancy and Roy, self-identified Southern Baptist conservatives who’d never heard of transsexuality before Mack revealed he identified as a man. One of the most powerful moments in the film comes when Nancy decides to remove a childhood photo from before Mack began his transition. “We made him a girl,” she says, the camera lingering on an old photo of Mack riding a motorcycle. “He was never a little girl.” Changing the Game, however, doesn’t sanitize its subjects’ experience: later, as Mack stands atop the podium relishing yet another state championship, the sound of an arena-full of boos bring into sharp focus the immense pressure, and in some cases verbal abuse, the kids must withstand in order to be themselves.

“I didn’t pay any mind to it,” says Andraya when asked if the hostility ever made it difficult to take pride in her athletic accomplishments. In one scene, after Andraya wins a race, a woman calls her participation in women’s track an affront to Title IX. “People are afraid to speak up because they’re going to be accused of being discriminatory,” she says on the sidelines. “It has made a mockery of girl’s sports, made a mockery of women’s rights, it’s a total sham.” The athletes are by now accustomed to this sort of rhetoric, thought it’s harder for their parents to watch their children walk into the line of fire.

“I get concerned about how they’re gonna internalize it,” says Ngozi, Andraya’s mother. “But they’ve all been strong and used it as fuel. I don’t know if I could be as strong as that.” At one point in our interview, after Andraya talks about coming out to her parents, Ngozi chimes in. “I’m going to correct you guys about this ‘coming out’ business,” she says, smiling. “You guys didn’t come out: you are who you are and you’ve always been who you are, so stop, stop, stop, stop.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sarah Rose Huckman is an accomplished cross-country skier and makeup vlogger from New Hampshire. Photograph: Turner Jumonville

It was a gift, Barnett says, that the subjects were captured during such eventful years of their lives. In the documentary, Sarah, far and away the least camera-shy of the athletes, can be seen testifying before the New Hampshire State Legislature on behalf of HB1319, a gender identity anti-discrimination bill that eventually passed. Though a public speaking course in school helped, Sarah was nervous to testify, she says, “knowing that there were people in that room that were against me because of their religious beliefs, or because they’re closed-minded, or most likely they’re not really well-versed in their facts.”

One year earlier, Sarah had testified on behalf of a different anti-discrimination bill that died in conference. “I got much better at presenting myself as a transgender advocate,” says Huckman, who documents her life and offers makeup tutorials on YouTube. “I really learned to compose myself in front of thousands of people.”

“We sat through days of hateful testimony,” adds her mother. “To see their character, their strength and resolve: they weren’t going to be defined by those things.”

If Mack, Sarah, Andraya, and Terry were already flag-bearers in their hometowns, Changing the Game has given them an opportunity to cast a much wider net. Aside from violence and discrimination, they explain, trans kids suffer from a lack of visibility. For Terry, being the first trans girl at her school became an exercise in dismantling preconceived notions: “They hadn’t met anyone transgender,” she says. “It was all stereotypes and I broke all of those. That’s the issue: people aren’t knowledgeable so they make up all these theories. The film shows who we really are.”

“When kids see someone like Andraya or Sarah or Terry, they get to know who trans people actually are and not just projections in the media,” adds executive producer Alex Schmider. “That’s why this film is so powerful and why visibility is so important.”

For Barnett, Changing the Game is right at home in a filmography, which has tended to centralize prodigious groups of kids, or communities that are cast aside as niche and misunderstood. “I love communities of exceptional people who don’t realize they’re exceptional. You’re all so open and you didn’t owe us anything,” he says, gesturing toward his subjects. “By their actions they’re doing something that really moves the needle. I don’t think this is necessarily a conscious choice of mine. It’s just who they are, it’s the definition of the kids in this film. So I’ll keep on this road as long as I can.”