Hundreds of thousands of Americans have something in common, something that, for the most part, they have been encouraged to hide. It’s so little talked about, in fact, that the greater population may not realize just how prevalent they are.
These people are intersex – an umbrella term for variations in reproductive or sex anatomy, and could show up in someone’s chromosomes, genitals, testes or ovaries. It’s estimated that 1.7% have intersex traits, and 0.7% are recommended to have surgical intervention.
Documentary “Every Body” (in theaters Friday) aims to give this community a platform. The film offers a history of how treatments for intersex people became commonplace; how intersex people are often lost in wider LGBTQ+ conversations; and how through coming together and raising their voices, their stories can finally be heard.
“Who’s speaking up for the human rights of intersex people? And the answer to that question, of course, is intersex people themselves,” says director Julie Cohen.
Several activists – Sean Saifa Wall, 43; Alicia Roth Weigel, 31; and River Gallo, 31 – want you to hear their loud, proud voices.
“I hope that people allow themselves to be moved (by the film) and be moved in such a way to really question what they’ve learned about, what they haven’t learned about and to be curious about themselves,” Wall says. “We’ve all been lied to,” Wall adds, when it comes to the limited knowledge we’ve been given on sex, gender, and the intersex community.
The history of intersex community
You can’t understand the intersex community without knowing their trauma – which can be traced back to Johns Hopkins University sexologist Dr. John Money, whose now-debunked theory on sex and gender identity set the course for intersex medicine for decades.
In the 1960s, Money hypothesized you could take a young Canadian boy – David Reimer, who had been seriously injured during a circumcision – and “make” him a girl, without ever telling him the truth. He wasn’t even intersex.
The experiment backfired and Reimer eventually went on to live as a man and speak out about his experience before dying by suicide in 2004. Money’s work was discredited in the 1990s, but his influence lingers: The core conclusion was that surgery needs to be done early for social integration – i.e., alter someone’s sex organs so they fit into a binary even if it’s not medically necessary.
“Sometimes something spreads so widely, it becomes conventional wisdom, and it takes a lot of work to de-conventionalize that false wisdom,” Cohen says.
Money himself wasn’t all wrong – he understood that transgender people existed, and the detachment of sex from gender. Anyone studying sex and gender knows the topic is extremely nuanced.
And to that end, “when you think about it, intersex is the embodiment of nuance,” Roth Weigel says. “We are the physical embodiment of the idea that things don’t fit into neat little binary boxes and categories.”
‘A huge lack of information’
This early surgical intervention is still happening to kids, hence the need for more education. While the documentary certainly covers this trauma, it offers hope through the eyes of activists.
Everyone’s story is different. Some people’s parents discover they are intersex when they’re born but others do not know until puberty or beyond. Roth Weigel, for example, had internal testes and a vagina at birth. The protocol was to remove the testes – effectively castrating her.
Intersex people are often told to keep quiet about their identities which can make living their lives tricky, especially when it comes to dating and sex. It’s ultimately up to individuals whether they want to come out and feel safe to do so.
Even among progressive circles the word “intersex” leave many scratching their heads. Cohen says: “I was a little floored by how many people just in the dinner party conversations that you have… including people that are in the therapy world are like, ‘oh, yeah, intersex? What’s that again? Is that like trans or kind of like trans?’ Come on people. Get it together!” (Granted, LGBTQ+ terminology has only become very mainstream the last decade or so.)
“There’s a huge lack of information,” Wall adds, “and there is ignorance, and there’s also willful ignorance.”
‘We are OK the way we are’:What the intersex community wishes you knew
‘Our greatest act of resistance’
While the community is fighting for legislative change to protect intersex kids, they’re also figuring out what intersex culture really looks like.
“There’s enough time where trans people have been in community where there’s trans culture. You can talk in a similar language. Intersex people haven’t been together and healed enough to be able to understand what it means to be in joyful community with each other,” Gallo says.
“Every Body” is a large step in that direction, but it’s unclear where the community goes from here and how to balance joy with unpacking traumas. Roth Weigel adds: “We need the focus on how far we have yet to go and the issues that we’re still suffering, but I know that I would not have come out had I not seen joyful intersex representation that gave me the permission to do so.”
And that’s why joy is the ultimate goal.
“Experiencing joy is perhaps our greatest act of resistance, because it’s what they’ve been trying to strip from us,” Roth Weigel says.
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