With humour and generosity, three intersex people in the US talk to film-maker Julie Cohen about their experiences campaigning for intersex rights and visibility, and their feelings about having grown up in an era in which intersex children were routinely made to submit to surgery before the age of consent, a cosmetic intervention (painful and risky, like all surgery) based on an assumed horror of intersex reality.
This is an educational, eye-opening film, though it arguably leaves some questions unanswered. Sean Saifa Wall is an African American researcher and activist who was subjected to a gonadectomy at 13; Alicia Roth Weigel is an intersex advocate who presented as female at birth, though without a uterus and ovaries; River Gallo is an artist and intersex performer whose film Ponyboi was presented at BFI Flare in London. Each is passionate and persuasive, with tough stories from their childhoods about being made to feel taboo.
The medical orthodoxy with which they grew up appears to have been substantially created by the New Zealand sexologist Dr John Money, who surgically “normalised” intersex infant genitalia and who became notorious for the David Reimer case; believing, as he did, that gender identity is societally constructed, Dr Money oversaw the 1966 gender reassignment surgery of a Canadian baby boy whose penis had been damaged in an accident, having encouraged his mother that he might as well be transformed into a girl, and be raised as a girl – with tragic results.
Of course, aspects of this are bound to seem paradoxical within the trans debate, although the film is clear that consent and self-affirmation are the important points. More contentious is Weigel’s statement that the very existence of intersex people objectively disproves the notion of distinct sexes. She is shown losing her temper with a conservative interviewer who asked if the biological anomaly of people born with webbed toes disproves the concept of “feet”. A somewhat facetious comparison maybe; it might be more rewarding to discuss whether biracial people disprove the concept of race. At all events, this is a sympathetic and very contemporary study.
• Every Body is released on 15 December in UK and Irish cinemas.
