The new documentary “Every Body,” received high praise in a recent Boston Globe review and is currently on screen around Boston. According to the Globe it delivers much-needed representation of intersex people’s stories and lives, and dispels myths about gender as binary.
Reports the Globe:
Julie Cohen’s “Every Body” is a master class in how a documentary should be done. It packs a lot of information into a briskly paced runtime of 91 minutes, and its use of clips and talking heads doesn’t distract or feel extraneous. The main interview subjects are three intersex people whose stories are at times traumatic. But we are also allowed to experience their joy, something a lot of nonfiction films about marginalized people forget to include. Cohen ends her film with an empowering display of people having a good time.
Even the needle drops are cleverly handled, starting with the cover of The Ronettes’s “Be My Baby” that plays over absurd gender-reveal party scenes during the opening credits. People are shown blowing up or destroying an object to divulge whether the mother-to-be is having a boy or a girl. This sequence highlights the notion of gender as a binary, one that “Every Body” intends to dispel.
We are told that 1.7 percent of the population have some form of an intersex trait. We’re also told that there is a lot of misunderstanding about what the “I” in LGBTQIA+ denotes. According to the documentary, much of that misunderstanding traces back to one person, Dr. John Money, a Johns Hopkins psychologist who was widely considered the authority on intersex people and their treatment.
“The most inclusive definition of intersex is any variation in a person’s sex traits with which they’re either born or they develop naturally during puberty,” explains Dr. Katharine Dalke, one of the film’s medical experts.
Dalke further explains that it’s possible for someone to be biologically male and have a uterus, or to be biologically female and have testes. In such cases, doctors may pressure parents into choosing their child’s gender, resulting in surgical removal or reconstruction of genitalia.
Weigel, River Gallo (who uses they/them pronouns), and Sean Saifa Wall (who uses he/him pronouns) all tell stories of how their diagnoses affected their lives. There is something extremely powerful about seeing these three activists together, supporting and acknowledging one another. The strongest asset of “Every Body” is that it lets us get to know each of them fully.
Read the complete Boston Globe review here.
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