Directing: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A

We are informed early on in Every Body, an excellent documentary on intersex people that predictably not nearly enough people are seeing, that in the United States alone, up to 1.7% of the population “has an intersex trait.” That amounts to an estimated 564,000 people. Much more to the point, up to 0.7% of Americans have clinically identifiable sexual or reproductive variations which may at one point warrant surgery. That amounts to about 230,000 people—or, the equivalent of the population of Spokane, Washington.

The idea that the systemic issues faced by any minority group should be ignored precisely because they are supposedly so small in number is preposterous. It’s mathematically illogical. And I should be frank here, in a way that director Julie Cohen does not bother to be: the queer community has been historically problematic on this front as well—just as we have been regarding queer people of color, just as we have been regarding trans people. Anyone complaining about the inclusion of the purple circle on a yellow background in the design of the progress flag clearly doesn’t get it, especially considering the vast overlap of struggles between the trans and intersex communities, in spite of them being two distinct groups. Again: rejecting their inclusion is illogical. (Side note: there are also fair debates about this.)

Small-minded people have a long, sad history of conflating sex with gender, and conflating sexuality with both. The deeply conditioned obsession with binary systems, which provably do not exist within any strict boundaries in nature (human or otherwise), persist with deeply frustrating tenacity. The film Every Body quite economically underscores this notion by opening the film with several clips of “gender reveal” parties, an idea that rivals astrology as the dumbest thing currently known to humankind. We see expectant parents, of both evident genders confined by the binary, getting truly nuts-excited by the news of their baby being a “boy” or a “girl.” All they are doing, really, is jumping up and down at the news of a visible penis, like an obsessive fan at a Beatles concert. Seriously, what are we all doing?

Cohen then introduces us to the three outspoken, out, intersex activists that Every Body almost exclusively focuses on: Sean Saifa Wall, assigned female at birth and now using he/him pronouns; River Gallo, assigned male at birth and now the only known working intersex actor in Los Angeles, using they/them pronouns; and Alicia Roth Weigel, assigned female at birth and now using she/her/they/them pronouns.

These three individuals provide more than enough content, and food for thought, for a feature film running at a brisk 92 minutes, but I would have liked a few more subjects to illustrate the very diverse array of intersex experiences, because the way being intersex manifests itself is extraordinarily diverse. Weigel is a uniquely fascinating case as she was born with internal testes and has XY chromosomes, but was assigned female at birth simply due to a lack of a penis—and she alone disproves any boneheaded arguments about “basic biology” proving any kind of sex binary. She stood as a physical rebuke to the transphobic Texas “bathroom bill” when she testified against it. By mandating that all people use the bathroom of their “biological sex,” Weigel would be legally compelled to use the men’s room, even though she was raised as a girl based on medical practices and laws inconsistent with what is currently being faced. And what sense is there in denying life-saving medical care to one group while forcing it upon another group that doesn’t need it?

The most important concern here, by far, of course, is bodily autonomy: surgeries forced on children, ranging from infancy to puberty, without their consent, which are regularly performed to this day. There are now decades of this practice, all traced back to a study later revealed to have a false conclusion, based on the case of David Reimer. Reimer had a botched circumcision as an infant, then his mother was advised by doctors just to raise him as a girl. We see a large number of clips of him getting interviewed in the late nineties, speaking out about his horrible experience and how the same horrors are being inflicted on other children based on incorrect conclusions about his case—and he wasn’t even intersex. He is not interviewed for this film because he committed suicide in 2004 at the age of 38.

Amnesty International notes that the number of people with intersex traits is comparable to that of people with red hair. Can you imagine forcing some kind of physical “correction” on every person with red hair? Presumably you would find that both preposterous and inhumane. What the film Every Body does best is humanize intersex people, and make the case that it really doesn’t matter how small the number is: barbarism is barbarism.

We clearly have a long way to go in terms of cultural understanding, as the resistance to understanding and accepting intersexuality is rooted in the longstanding, mistaken notion that there are only two sexes, and therefore any aberration is abominable, and worthy only of secrecy, shame, and correction. Anyone with sense can see how wrong-minded such thinking is, and Every Body is a deeply effective tool for directing a spotlight onto that sense.

*Ending intersex surgery, one step at a time.*

Overall: A-