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.
