A balloon pops with pink confetti. A mini rocket shoots blue dust. A gun shoots a box which contains pink explosives. Every Body, a new documentary following three intersex Americans, opens with snippets of a bizarre, if familiar, ritual: gender reveals, in which people surprise friends and family with a shower of pink or blue. The videos all includes screams of joy – a series of people conflating the celebration of new life with a confirmation of the gender binary.
As Every Body powerfully contends, such an emphasis is not only irrelevant to young children, but inaccurate to the vast spectrum of human bodies. It is possible, explains the intersex expert Dr Katharine Dalke, to be a biological female with testes, and a biological male with a uterus, among many other variations between the two sexes. About 1.7% of humans are intersex, an umbrella term for any variation within a person’s sex traits, including genitalia, hormones, internal anatomy or chromosomes. (For comparison, that’s about the same percentage of people born with red hair.) Some traits are present at birth, while others develop naturally over time, and 0.07% of people – or about 230,000 Americans – possess traits so significant they may be referred for surgery.
Not that most Americans are aware of such differences, owing to misinformation about intersex people, a near-desert of representation and widespread pressure on intersex people to keep quiet. “I’d say, by and large, 80-90% of people probably could not comfortably tell you what it means to be intersex,” said River Gallo (they/them), an intersex activist who appears in the film. “More people are using the LGBTQIA acronym, but still – if you were to ask people what the ‘I’ stands for, it would be ‘what does that mean?’”
Every Body, directed by Julie Cohen (the Oscar-winning co-director of the 2018 documentary RBG) follows three intersex awareness advocates and activists: Alicia Roth Weigel (she/they), a political consultant and writer who lives in Austin, Texas; Sean Saifa Wall (he/him), a Bronx-raised doctoral student living in Manchester, England; and Gallo, a New Jersey-bred actor and film-maker now based in Los Angeles. All three were subjected to non-consensual, medically unnecessary surgeries in their youth – long the standard medical treatment for intersex people, under the assumption that life within an artificial sex binary would be preferable. (The United Nations condemned such irreversible procedures, conducted to “normalize” genitalia under the guise of preventing the shame of living in an “abnormal” body, in 2013.)
And all three grew up with an expectation of secrecy, shame and stigma – their difference framed as a potential threat to future happiness and security, rather than as part of a community or collective history of intersex people. “We get spoken to in these hyper-medical, pathologizing terms that keep us thinking that there’s something wrong with us and makes us reluctant to ever find anyone else, because there’s this part of you that’s inherently broken and shameful,” said Weigel, who was born with a vagina, sans uterus and tubes, with internal testes and XY chromosomes. “What would then inspire you to ever look for other people like you?”
“An important piece of the film is that it’s not just a sob story, that there’s a lot of joy interspersed in there,” she added, referring to growing into her identity as an intersex person and evolution as an activist. As a youth, she was told her condition, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, was a problem to be managed, and underwent surgery to remove her testes, an irreversible procedure requiring lifelong hormone replacement therapy and other complications, such as osteoporosis; now 32, she did not realize she was intersex until she was 27, after reading a profile of the Belgian intersex model Hanne Gaby Odiele.
Gallo, 31, was born without testes, and was not informed of their condition until age 12. They recall years of poking and prodding, a handling of their body with fear and trepidation. At age 16, they underwent surgery to implant prosthetic testicles. “At the time, I just thought it was medically necessary because that’s what doctors told me,” they said. Their parents, immigrants from El Salvador, followed the lead of doctors; however well-intentioned, the message was: you need to be fixed. It took years, as Gallo explains in the film, “to face how angry I was”.
Oftentimes, as Every Body explains, doctors advocated for care rooted in rigid gender ideals under the assumption that it was in the best interest of the patient. But such decisions were “a misapprehension of what might be the best way to handle this complicated situation”, said Cohen. In one scene, Wall reviews his birth records from 1979; for sex, an obstetrician initially checked a box titled “ambiguous”. Though born without a uterus, Wall was assigned female for “the emotional well-being of the parents”, according to the record. At 13, he underwent a gonad removal surgery; according to Wall, his mother consented to the medically unnecessary procedure after doctors inaccurately led her to believe they were cancerous.
Wall had other people in his family with the same variation, but no one talked about it. “I think people were deeply scarred,” he said. “There was a lot of shame, a lot of silence.
“I would’ve given anything as a young, queer, intersex, eventually trans person, to meet another queer person,” he said. “I think about myself as a young person and not seeing those role models, not seeing those people who I can aspire to be.”
The version of medical practice experienced by Wall, Weigel and Gallo – the secrecy, the surgeries at a young age, the belief that picking and sticking to one sex would produce the optimal result – largely stems from the teachings of one physician. The middle section of the film delves into the teachings of Dr John Money, a psychologist and researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and the tragic story of his most infamous medical experiment. In 1967, Money learned of the existence of two infant twin boys in Canada, one of whom had his penis critically burned during a botched circumcision.
Money, a proponent of the “theory of gender neutrality”, which assumed gender identity was imparted primarily through social learning, recommended that the boy, then named Bruce Reimer, undergo sex reassignment surgery to female at the age of 22 months and be raised as “Brenda” alongside his twin brother, Brian, as the experiment control. In later interviews, Reimer recalled that he never believed he was a girl; at the age of 14, he learned the truth of his surgery and went back to living as a boy named David.
David Reimer was not intersex, but the “success” of his “treatment” with Money became the basis for the “optimum gender rearing model” for medical treatment of intersex people. The film includes footage of a 1999 news interview with an emaciated and haunted-looking Reimer, in which he expresses hope that non-consensual surgeries on people will end. He died by suicide in 2004. The “experiment”, though decades-old and debunked, “actually had led to decades’ worth of mistreatment of intersex people that is in some cases still going on today, that certainly is impacting a lot of other people that are alive today”, said Cohen.
Wall, Weigel and Gallo all advocate for legal measures to prevent the legacy of “optimum gender” treatments: unnecessary, nonconsensual surgical procedures to assign intersex youth to a binary sex. In a cruel irony, intersex people have been lumped into the recent spate of state-level anti-trans legislation barring surgery from minors’ gender-affirming care; the same measures that ban the procedures sought by trans youth include carve-outs for pediatric intersex procedures. “These bills are including intersex people and erasing intersex people, which is a tragedy,” said Gallo. As Weigel put it: “We are literally erased from the conversation about our own erasure.”
With footage of Weigel telling her story to the Texas state legislature amid efforts to pass anti-trans legislation, or Wall participating in an art exhibit celebrating his body, or Gallo leading a protest against a hospital still performing surgeries on intersex youth, Every Body gestures to a larger, national fight for bodily autonomy. “Just like trans rights activists, and for that matter reproductive rights activists, the intersex rights activists are just asking to be making the decisions themselves that relate to their own bodies,” said Cohen.
Crucial to that fight is recognition. “A documentary like this is – I was going to say ahead of its time, but it’s the right time,” said Gallo. “It’s overdue.”
Every Body is out in the US on 30 June with a UK date to be announced
