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Julie Cohen’s moving and illuminating documentary Every Body opens with a montage of increasingly outlandish gender-reveal moments, those bizarre, colour-coded displays arranged by expectant parents, mostly in the US, to tell everyone whether their unborn child is a boy or a girl. It underscores just how rigidly binary most people’s views of gender are. But what if a child is part of the 1.7 per cent of the US population that has intersex traits?
The film meets three very different people who are intersex and recount how as children they were not told the truth about their bodies until well into adolescence. For years, following guidelines established largely by just one doctor, sexologist John Money at Johns Hopkins University, medical professionals guided thousands of parents to perform early surgeries on their intersex children.
Such was the fate of Alicia Roth Weigel and Sean Saifa Wall, two subjects here who both have XY chromosomes. However, because of their genital appearance, both were labelled female at birth and later endured surgery to remove their undescended testes. River Gallo, on the other hand, had no testes and was advised to have implants to make them appear more male. As the interviewees explain, there are some 35 to 40 different intersex variations, which is arguably why it’s so important to let intersex people themselves choose how they wish to present themselves.
The stakes are underscored by the tragic story told here of David Reimer, who, on Money’s advice to his parents, was raised as a girl after a botched medical intervention when he was a baby. Reimer ended up publicly castigating Money; he eventually died by suicide. His trauma and profound psychic pain are achingly evident in the archive interview footage shown. But Cohen strives to end the film on an upbeat note, with everyone involved on both sides of the camera taking a bow to Lizzo’s affirmation anthem “Good as Hell”.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from December 15
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