Every Body

I learned about this film from an episode of the Pure Nonfiction podcast. Before I was half way through, I was so intrigued I sought out the film and watched it, then finished the podcast. The film is fantastic. (So is the podcast, BTW.)

The film is beautifully crafted, with such exuberant and joyful opening and closing credits, you can't help but smile and celebrate the stars of the film, despite the tragedy that shaped their lives. They were all born with genital characteristics that made it impossible to determine their sex. Decisions were made for them by manipulative clinicians based on fraudulent research giving bad advice to frightened parents. Their anomalous sex organs were removed in childhood, depriving them of the right to let nature take its course or make their own decisions. Furthermore, they were assigned a sex and forced to live lives that contradicted who they were.

The history behind why this was the standard of treatment when they were born is told through archival footage of the charlatan John Money, M. D. (1921-2006), and his most famous victim of mistreatment, David Reimer. Director Julie Cohen films the three stars watching the archival footage first time. We see their reactions while also sharing their shock and anger at the injustice done to Reimer and the intersex community whose treatment protocols were based on this one case of bad medical research.

Besides imparting empathy for intersex individuals, the film also explains and illustrates the anatomy and genetics. I am grateful to now have a better understanding of why the spectrum of human gender and sexuality is so broad and diverse.

What I would like to see now is a sequel about intersex people who were treated correctly following enlightened medical protocols, whose sex was never a secret, whose bodies developed naturally and who made their own choices in being who they are. Please, Julie Cohen, continue the story!

Finding out that you're intersex and realizing that there are no resources or information on sex development disorders is pretty disheartening and frustrating. My intersex condition was kept hidden from me by my parents until I received genetic testing on another rare disorder I had ...at age 35! Turns out this is pretty common in the intersex community!

After watching this film at an early screening, I don't feel too isolated now as an intersex person. We are very much considered outcasts by society from the start.

Thanks for giving us intersex folks a voice in a very crowded LGBTQIA environment.

Everybody should see this. You will be changed, in ways you did not even know needed to be changed. You will never view a gender reveal party the same way. Every Body teaches, explores, and affirms. Everybody should experience Every Body.

Years ago, when my first doctoral candidate revealed that a significant portion of her subjects in her dissertation study were intersex "boys," I was floored. I'm the professor. I'm the one who should know the implications of studying nonverbal behavior with this special group. I did not. Well, I listened, I read, I learned... or so I thought.

Every Body brought me to a new, better informed, and empathic understanding of intersex people, an understanding that has become a core foundation for my communicating to others. Thank you Sean, Alicia, River and special thanks to David for his sacrifice. We failed David; but Every Body showed a path to redemption. The Christ would be proud of the love shown in this documentary.

Julie Cohen directs us to new heights of appreciation. Thanks to Fisher, Oppenheim, Berg, O'Brien, Cole, Nguyen, and Knizhnik for bringing this great documentary to the screen. You've changed lives, my friends!

The parts where they focused on the medical malpractice done to patients with difference of sexual development(DSD) were good. Those stories were emotional and heartfelt. What was done to these people as children was criminal.

They should have stuck to that.

Nothing was done to Male Minnie Driver. Fake testicles implanted into an already existing scrotum when you're old enough to understand what's going on is nothing worth including in the movie.

Then they get into trans issues. DSD has nothing to do with trans. If the subjects in the film hadn't been mutilated as children, they would have grown up with testes, and their masculinising effects. It would have been appropriate for them to use male bathrooms if the mutilations hadn't occurred. Suggesting that because these people exist that trans identitied males should be able to use women's spaces is absurd.

The movie primarily focuses on three intersex individuals. It is estimated there are 230,000 intersex persons in the US. They have the chromosome XY, and they are not the trans population. It is a wide range of differences in the sexual anatomy of the individuals, but the bottom line is that it is complex and evolving. And their main desire is to allow the individual to make the decision of how they want to live their life as they grow up and understand who they are, and to stop the intersex surgeries of which they have no choice about just to conform to society's definition of male/female. So much of what has been in textbooks simply is wrong, and they give the example of twins, where there was a medical mistake at age 2, and he was then raised to be a girl, with devastating results, worsened by the prominent doctor who kept reporting that things were going so well. If anyone is looking for anything sordid in this movie, they need to go elsewhere. Thoughtful, informative and certainly providing a picture that most know nothing about.