The original Orlando, whose story draws from the life of the writer’s own lover, Vita Sackville-West, is a poet who travels across time and space and slowly starts changing their sex and gender, becoming Lady Orlando. Preciado’s Orlandos, instead, are multiple: they are trans women and men, non-binary teenagers and young adults who come together to affirm that they, too, are Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

This collective chorus of Orlandos, like Virginia and Vita, rejects cis-heteronormativity: they challenge medicalization, they question the legislative process of legally affirming one’s gender transition, and they refuse to accept colonial binary ideologies. Within the narrative frame of a casting to perform Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, 26 actors – wearing baroque collars, hoodies and lingerie – talk about meeting their lover at a Pride protest and losing them to a 17th century battle, while being the ambassador of British Constantinople and experiencing queerness as a person of color. Preciado’s voiceover accompanies the experiences narrated by the actors themselves, who mix personal accounts with passages from Woolf’s Orlando.

Collectively, the stories of Preciado’s Orlandos build a continuum that, like Woolf’s Orlando, transcends history and geography to tell a powerful story of resistance to coerced standardization. Some Orlandos are people in their 60s, who struggled for their right to have their transition medically supported and legally recognized; some are nonbinary people in their 20s who oppose the dichotomic obligation to a medical transition, to a binary choice, to a fixed identity. Some have had traumatizing experiences, yet – unlike in the pitiful narratives cis directors often make of the trans experience – no one is their trauma. They are all themselves and, at the same time, they are all each other; they are all Orlando.