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.
