‘Every Body’ Review: Documentary From ‘RBG’ Director Sensitively Chronicles Fight for Intersex Rights

Lovia Gyarkye
·4 min read
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Julie Cohen’s intimate and engaging documentary Every Body is guided by a single question: In a world of binaries, where do intersex people fit? The answer — perhaps we should abolish categories altogether — isn’t very complicated, but creating that reality will be a struggle.

It’s smart that Cohen, who co-directed RBG and My Name is Pauli Murray, opens her most recent film with a montage of gender reveal parties. The popularity of this practice, in which expectant parents plan an elaborate celebration around the predicted and subsequently disclosed sex of their unborn baby, shows how committed society is to the idea of two genders. Videos of couples staging ornate (and often dangerous) special effects, bursting into tears at the sight of pink confetti or blue fireworks, are haunting. These parties assume that children will play into normative behaviors based on their sex. They are less about the kid than the hopes of their parents and the expectations of society.

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The practice is also exclusionary. Roughly 1.7 percent of the world’s population are born with intersex traits, which means they have sex characteristics (genitals, gonads and chromosome patterns) that don’t fit into the male/female binary. How do we acknowledge the reality of these children and celebrate them, too?

Every Body chronicles the lives of three intersex people living as openly and expressively as possible. Cohen’s documentary takes a conventional approach to telling the stories of the actor River Gallo, the political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel and graduate student Sean Saifa Wall. Through a combination of individual and group interviews, the three intersex activists recount the traumas of their childhoods and their impact on how they navigate life as adults.

Weigel, who uses she/they pronouns, was born with XY chromosomes, a vagina and testes instead of ovaries. When she was a child, physicians decided to remove the testes so they could declare that she was biologically female. Wall, who uses he/him pronouns, shares a similar story: He was born without a uterus, but the hospital, without consulting his parents, declared him female. Wall grew up being told he was a girl even though he felt like a boy. There are echoes of this state-sanctioned control in Gallo’s story too. The actor, who uses they/them pronouns, did not have testes as a kid. When Gallo was 12, doctors put them on testosterone, forcing them to go through puberty as a boy.

Medical interventions like these are a common thread for intersex people. Although Cohen’s doc stays close to her three participants, it also paints in broad strokes the relatively young history of the intersex movement. In footage from the first meeting of the Intersex Society of North America in 1996, a dozen or so activists sit in a circle sharing their stories of coercive surgeries and the mental toll that took on their lives. This gathering was radical because it brought intersex people together to commiserate and build a framework for understanding their identities.

Aware that mainstream audiences lack foundational understanding of intersex identities, Every Body cuts its primary interviews and archival footage with expert commentary and historical asides. The film debunks common misconceptions about what it means to be intersex and covers the bitter history of intersex people being treated as “freaks” and mislabeled as “hermaphrodites.” The analysis paints a painful portrait and illuminates the dehumanizing treatment faced by intersex people.

Some of the most harrowing parts of the film come when Cohen investigates the medical community’s relationship to intersex people. She contextualizes the participants’ anecdotes, tracing their distressing experiences back to John Hopkins professor John Money. He was a proponent of the “optimum gender rearing model,” which imposed a binary on intersex children. Money’s experiment on David Reimer — which was later discredited — paved the way for a cruel and authoritative approach to thinking about gender: Instead of giving children the opportunity to figure out which gender identities felt most comfortable, doctors — committed to maintaining the male/female binary — chose for them.

Every Body is primarily an informative documentary, one that takes a cursory glance at many facets of the intersex awareness conversation to give viewers unfamiliar with the material a new perspective. Cohen and her team connect the dots for us, too, which helps us understand how solidarity with intersex people helps in the broader fight for bodily autonomy. Stories from the intersex community confirm that the continued attack on trans rights and gender affirming care has more to do with moral panic than protecting children. The doc points out that often these bills trying to ban gender affirming care sneak in addendums that make exceptions for intersex people; surgery is okay as long as the state approves.

Another strength of Cohen’s documentary is that it tackles these troubling stories with a tenderness that prevents it from feeling like exploitation. The relaxed nature of the interviews with the main participants, who feel comfortable enough to crack a joke or two, coupled with an energetic score helps Every Body maintain an optimistic tone. The film leaves you with the sense that, with greater awareness and collective action, the future for the intersex community can be powerful and bright.

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