Cohen’s documentary is a call for equity, change and education that places the needs of the child first. Every Body arrives in UK cinemas on the 15th of December.
Julia Cohen (RBG) opens her documentary Every Body with clips from gender reveal parties. These parties have grown in popularity over recent years as prospective parents take to social media with elaborate and ridiculous ways of announcing the sex of their unborn child through pink or blue glitter, cakes, smoke, fireworks, ribbons and more.
These celebrations aren’t really about the child yet to arrive; they are about the parents and their expectations. Many parents assume the gender of their child is fixed in the womb, often buying into a range of damaging gender stereotypes before their child arrives, stereotypes that continue to fuel oppression, discrimination and a fear of difference. As these parents cry, celebrate and hug everyone around them, they choose to ignore the fact that gender isn’t binary, as they wittingly or unwittingly endorse the idea that there’s only one “right” way to be a woman or a man.
Every Body (Clip)
Roughly 1.7% of babies born into our world are intersex, which means they don’t fit our binary views of male and female. Some are born with vaginas and testes, while others may have penises and a clitoris. Their parents are encouraged to define their sex not long after birth, with doctors making judgements based on which gender they feel “best fits” the child. The child isn’t informed or consulted about the decisions taken to remove parts of them or alter others, and the surgeries they go through often stretch from early childhood to puberty. Doctors, parents and psychologists make decisions in the child’s apparent best interests. But what if those decisions are wrong? What if they choose a physical gender that doesn’t match the child’s sense of self? And why the rush to instantly label a child before they can consent to the gender they are given?
Every Body (Clip)
Every Body chronicles the lives of three intersex adults, screenwriter River Gallo (they/them), PhD student Sean Saifa Wall (he/him), and political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel (she/they), as they discuss childhood experiences, the adult barriers they face, including dating and the direct effects of parental decisions and early medical intervention. All three uncover and challenge the stereotypes many intersex people have and continue to face, from the “freak show” label that continues to haunt the intersex experience to the dangerous medical assumptions that directly affect the lives of so many as they transition from childhood to adulthood.
At the same time, harrowing archival footage explores Professor John Money’s psychological experiments on David Reimer, a Canadian man raised as a girl following medical advice after his penis was severed during a circumcision. Reimer would commit suicide in 2004, the psychological and physical damage inflicted by Money throughout his childhood, leaving a scar that would never fully heal. Money, meanwhile, would walk away and continue his work; even up to his death in 2006, his damaging and discredited studies remained in print and were regularly quoted as scientific fact. This story of medical and psychological incompetence is harrowing and represents the human cost of a failure of ethics. I only wish it were a one-off in 20th-century psychological research and treatment programs, of which far too many left lasting marks.
Every Body (Clip)
Throughout the interviews and discussions on intersex experience and the damaging medical rush for parents to choose a binary identity, Cohen, Gallo, Weigel, and Wall debunk a series of harmful myths while asking a straightforward question: Why aren’t intersex children allowed the time and space to figure out their true gender identity before decisions are made? It’s a powerful and logical question and one that highlights our society’s damaging rush to assign simplistic gender labels to intersex children who have not yet fully grown into themselves. Cohen’s documentary is a call for equity, change and education that places the needs of the child first. But it is also a documentary that firmly states our bodies are our own, and the decisions we make about them must also be our own.
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