‘We are literally erased’: what does it mean to be intersex?
Aballoon pops with pink confetti. A mini rocket shoots blue dust. A gun shoots a box which contains pink explosives. Every Body, a new documentary following three intersex Americans, opens with snippets of a bizarre, if familiar, ritual: gender reveals, in which people surprise friends and family with a shower of pink or blue. The videos all includes screams of joy – a series of people conflating the celebration of new life with a confirmation of the gender binary.
As Every Body powerfully contends, such an emphasis is not only irrelevant to young children, but inaccurate to the vast spectrum of human bodies. It is possible, explains the intersex expert Dr Katharine Dalke, to be a biological female with testes, and a biological male with a uterus, among many other variations between the two sexes. About 1.7% of humans are intersex, an umbrella term for any variation within a person’s sex traits, including genitalia, hormones, internal anatomy or chromosomes. (For comparison, that’s about the same percentage of people born with red hair.) Some traits are present at birth, while others develop naturally over time, and 0.07% of people – or about 230,000 Americans – possess traits so significant they may be referred for surgery.
Not that most Americans are aware of such differences, owing to misinformation about intersex people, a neardesert of representation and widespread pressure on intersex people to keep quiet. “I’d say, by and large, 80-90% of people probably could not comfortably tell you what it means to be intersex,” said River Gallo (they/ them), an intersex activist who appears in the film. “More people are using the LGBTQIA acronym, but still – if you were to ask people what the ‘I’ stands for, it would be ‘what does that mean?’”
Every Body, directed by Julie Cohen (the Oscar-winning co-director of the 2018 documentary RBG) follows three intersex awareness advocates and activists: Alicia Roth Weigel (she/they), a political consultant and writer who lives in Austin, Texas; Sean Saifa Wall (he/him), a Bronx-raised doctoral student living in Manchester, England; and Gallo, a New Jersey-bred actor and film-maker now based in Los Angeles. All three were subjected to nonconsensual, medically unnecessary surgeries in their youth – long the standard medical treatment for intersex people, under the assumption that life within an artificial sex binary would be preferable. (The United Nations condemned such irreversible procedures, conducted to “normalize” genitalia under the guise of preventing the shame of living in an “abnormal” body, in 2013.)
And all three grew up with an expectation of secrecy, shame and stigma – their difference framed as a potential threat to future happiness and security, rather than as part of a community or collective history of intersex people. “We get spoken to in these hyper-medical, pathologizing terms that keep us thinking that there’s something wrong with us and makes us reluctant to ever find anyone else, because there’s this part of you that’s inherently broken and shameful,” said Weigel, who was born with a vagina, sans uterus and tubes, with internal testes and XY chromosomes. “What would then inspire you to ever look for other people like you?”
“An important piece of the film is that it’s not just a sob story, that there’s a lot of joy interspersed in there,” she added, referring to growing into her identity as an intersex person and evo