'Every Body' puts faces to the long-silenced intersex community
In the new documentary “Every Body,” filmmaker Julie Cohen, follows powerful voices in the intersex community: Alicia Roth Weigel, Sean Saifa Wall, River Gallo.
In “Every Body,” filmmaker Julie Cohen — who co-directed the 2018 Emmy-winning Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary, “RBG” — follows three powerful voices in the intersex community, which is composed of individuals who have a combination of male and female biological traits, including chromosomes.
From the worlds of politics, public health and entertainment, these activists in their 30s and 40s use their life stories to bring attention to a community that, despite representing an estimated 1.7% of the global population, has been largely unrepresented in popular culture. And because of that, the documentary asserts, their lives have been dictated and weaponized by conservative forces in the medical community and, more recently, by politicians legislating transgender children’s rights.
“For a trans kid or a gay kid, they can’t tell you they’re gay or trans until they can vocalize those feelings. With an intersex kid, you often know from the moment they’re born, and so the effort to erase our existence starts from the minute we leave the birth canal — through surgeries, through doctors, through hormones, through language, through the very split-second decision of whether to put male or female on a birth certificate,” one of the three activists, Alicia Roth Weigel, told NBC News in a conversation with Cohen and fellow activists Sean Saifa Wall and River Gallo. “The first decision that is made in our lives is to actively erase our existence.”
Like her fellow documentary subjects, Weigel, a Texas-based political consultant and writer who uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, has been a vocal advocate for queer and trans rights throughout her career. But she has struggled with her own community being left out of conversations about bodily autonomy — and, more importantly, conversations at large. As Weigel says in an early scene in the film, “No one even knows what intersex means, and people fear what they don’t know and understand.”
“Every Body” addresses head-on the pervasive lack of understanding about what it means to be intersex, beginning with how modern medical practices, predicated on long-held beliefs about the gender binary, are at the root of it.
Rating: 5