Every Body: a sympathetic guide through the stories of intersex people

The prologue of Julie Cohen’s new documentary goes a long way towards rendering American culture’s obsession with the gender binary anthropologically strange. It’s a montage of ‘gender reveal’ celebrations, in which expectant parents receive with hysteria the news of their inchoate offspring’s genitalia, coded in pink or blue symbols: confetti from popped balloons, powder from exploded objects, fireworks.

It’s an inspired opening for a film about people born outside this gender binary, specifically those born intersex – with male and female biological traits. The rest of Every Body unfolds expertly (if conventionally) towards their de-marginalisation and insistence on their right to consensual health care.

In early intertitles, Cohen dispenses with basics: some 1.7 per cent of the population are born intersex. “If that’s higher than you thought,” it’s because they’re “often told to keep quiet about their bodies”. This cues introduction of the film’s unquiet stars: Saifa Wall (he/him, assigned female at birth, had intersex anatomy surgically ‘corrected’ as a baby); Alicia Weigel (she/them, ditto Saifa’s treatment); and River Gallo (they/them, assigned male despite intersex traits).

These three are sympathetic guides through their own stories and, by extension, those of their terrified parents, counselled by doctors that their newborns’ anatomical ‘errors’ could be solved by ‘surgical corrections’ and decisive sexual assignment along with gender-specific ‘rearing’ and hormone therapy in the teen years.

That treatment paradigm has been influenced by a case study conducted by mid-century psychologist Dr John Money: when he was an infant, David Reimer’s penis was removed following a botched circumcision; Dr Money’s direction to remove Reimer’s testes and raise the child as ‘Brenda’ was designed to confirm his theories. But Dr Money was wrong: Reimer, who always felt male and wasn’t informed of the experiment until age 14, was traumatised. In the 1990s, his case and Dr Money’s misrepresentations were publicly exposed, including in an episode of the US current affairs programme Dateline that Cohen stumbled on.

Nonetheless, Dr Money’s paradigm still informs the practice of surgery on intersex babies, including on Saifa, Alicia, and River: they are shown ruefully watching Reimer’s story, which ended in suicide. But a strength of Every Body is that it leads not with trauma, but with this trio’s self-accepting empowerment and the intersex movement’s progress towards ending early surgeries, so that doctors wait until, as one intersex specialist explains, “a child is old enough to tell us who they are and participate in the decision.” Some might even choose no surgery at all.

 ► Every Body is in UK cinemas from 15 December.