We are here now: New documentary powerfully portrays intersex stories

Alicia, Rover, and Saifa have strong educational backgrounds and are successful in their chosen professions. They live in Austin, TX, and Hollywood, CA. They are people with brains, hearts, and a proper understanding of who they are…now. All three of them are intersex, and it has been a long road for them to reach this understanding. In a new documentary, Every Body, they unveil their stories and help uncover our own misconceptions of what it means to be intersex.

When we discuss the LGBTQIA community, either as a sense of pride in June or as a hot-button issue in today’s political discourse, the “I” is often left out of the conversation. Intersex individuals and their stories are not reported on as much as others. However, an estimated 1.7% of the population has some intersex traits, according to the documentary from Academy Award-nominee Julie Cohen, which premieres at the Tribeca Festival June 11th.

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The film wholeheartedly centers the trauma of non-consensual surgery. For decades, children born intersex have been subjected to mutilation in the form of surgical procedures performed under a profound misconception. Doctors and parents choose the sex of a baby in these circumstances, and those decisions remain shrouded in secrecy.

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But these babies grow into children whose bodies are telling them one story while the medical community tells another. By the time they reach adulthood, the subjects of the doc discover more about who they are and where they come from, and they see that they are not an anomaly. But decisions about their bodies were already made without their consent.

Alicia, River, and Saifa were all subject to forced reassignment surgery as newborns because they presented the physical traits of intersex people. Alicia, for example, was born with XY chromosomes, which typically denotes a male child. However, she was also born with a vagina. So, the doctors assigned her “female” at birth because the medical community usually leads with the genitalia you are born with to determine sex. Yet, she was not born with a womb, and she was born with testes on the inside. The protocol then was to remove those testes at birth, which Alicia now views as involuntary castration. 

Every Body imagines what this type of action can do to a person’s mental health as they age. The film introduces its audience to the outdated picture of the gender binary as the norm, with our current American interpretation of having a baby resulting in elaborate gender reveal parties that spark pink for a girl and blue for a boy. 

The binary is ingrained into our psyche, yet nothing is that black-and-white. That’s the gift Every Body provides to its audience, serving as a jump start to that conversation and highlighting the experiences of several individuals as they navigate life as intersex people. About .07% of the population have intersex traits so significant they may be referred for surgery, which amounts to about 230,000 Americans alone.

If those numbers seem high, there’s a reason: Those that are intersex have been told their entire lives to keep quiet about their bodies. At birth, their sex was chosen by their parents and doctors, and they’ve lived their childhoods into maturity not understanding their own bodies. On the surface, these three people in the documentary appear to be either men or women. But there’s a severe lack of representation for them, their pronouns, and even their dating options. 

Every Body is an astounding peek into the minds and hearts of intersex people on a global scale. It challenges theories practiced by Dr. John Money, a sexologist at Johns Hopkins University, who researched gender and pioneered involuntary sex reassignment surgery on infants. His research and misunderstanding of how surgery on babies could affect them as adults became an unfortunate standard in American hospitals. 

The practice became global and intersex children were subjected to mutilation and psychological issues for the rest of their lives. His theory was debunked in the 1990s, but at the cost of suicidal intersex people who felt that pediatric drugs and surgery weren’t necessary for their development. These kind of medical interventions are still in practice today, even though, according to the documentary, it creates more problems than it claims to fix.  

Alicia, River, and Saifa’s stories are fully displayed in Every Body. They are courageous and fighting to affect change. All three have become politically active in challenging outdated notions of what it means to be intersex. Their goal is simple: Eliminate intersex surgery at the infant level and allow intersex people to receive treatment if they choose to later in life. Instead of doctors and parents unaware of what it means to be intersex making decisions for the child, leave it up to that child to grow up and make decisions for their own body.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Bathroom bills and anti-hormone treatment targeting trans youth have been widely debated in state legislatures across America. Some politicians believe that children claiming to be trans should not undergo what they perceive as radical treatments. These same politicians seem to have no problem forcing surgery on intersex youth because they feel there should be a binary standard.

It’s all based on outdated ideology seeking to categorize others as either male or female, with no space for the in-between. 

The most important takeaway from Every Body is the honest words from its three participants and the lessons they’ve learned from connecting with other intersex people. Beautifully illustrated in the film is the fact that there have been and always will be those born outside of the binary “norms” of male and female. With this film, intersex people finally have their words and emotions displayed in a major theatrical release. Focus Features will debut Every Body on June 30th in all major markets, a huge turning point for those who have felt marginalized by politicians, family, and those lacking the understanding of what it means to be intersex.