Every Body

Every Body is an advocacy documentary about intersex people, an attempt to educate as to what it is to be intersex, to encourage people to be empathic and non-bigoted regarding intersex people, and to argue in favor of the issues that some intersex people who have chosen to be activists are most concerned with. It’s “pro”-intersex, which is not necessarily objectionable in itself, but understand that you won’t get “both sides” here, insofar as any of the issues addressed have multiple “sides.”

According to Wikipedia, “Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (including genitals, gonads and chromosome patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. Intersex is an umbrella term used to describe a wide range of natural bodily variations.”

An estimated 1.7% of people are born intersex, though the number that are really of ambiguous sex is much smaller. The bulk of intersex people are much more one than the other, where you wouldn’t be able to tell looking at their bodies that they’re intersex (and in some cases they don’t know themselves, perhaps until they’re medically examined later in life because of fertility problems they’re experiencing or something).

No intersex person has both a fully functioning penis and related anatomy, and a fully functioning vagina and related anatomy. Therefore, no humans are literally hermaphrodites (unlike some animal species, which can get themselves pregnant through sexual reproduction), which is one reason that term has fallen out of favor applied to people.

If we want to make the now common distinction between sex and gender (which I think can be useful to a degree, though I’m skeptical that it can carry quite as much weight as it has been asked to do in current left political dogma), intersexuality is a matter of sex rather than gender. That is, whether a person is intersex is a matter of biology, of anatomy. Whereas gender is a cultural, social, psychological thing (does a person’s behavior, lifestyle, etc. fit more into what is stereotypically regarded as male or female, do they “feel” more male or female, do they “identify” as male or female, and so on). An intersex person can be but doesn’t have to be transgender, and a transgender person can be but doesn’t have to be intersex. (Thus they each get their own letter in the ever expanding LGBTQIA terminology.)

Not that they’re completely unrelated issues. Intersex people may feel more free of the obligation to make their gender match their sex, or of the obligation to go along with such binary ways of thinking in the first place, because they’re not one hundred percent one sex or the other.

Certainly the issues are related socially and politically, in the sense that intersex and transgender people (and gays and the various other LGBTQIA folks) generate the same ick factor for conservatives, the feeling ranging from slight discomfort to bitter hatred based on the sense that there’s something vaguely immoral, creepy, or freaky about them, that they’re a potential threat to children, that “Well, I’m sure there’s something in the Bible against whatever the heck they’re doing,” etc.

Indeed, I suppose intersex people are freaks in a way, in the same sense that left-handed people are, as differing from the majority. Or maybe in a modestly stronger sense insofar as the condition renders them infertile in a sexually-reproducing species. But clearly not in a sense that makes them “bad” or worthy of ill will or discrimination. They’re just people with an anatomical oddity, like having six toes, having Billie Eilish-size breasts, being seven feet tall, or having situs inversus (internal organs on the “wrong” side).

The film focuses especially on three intersex activists: Alicia Weigel, River Gallo, and Sean Saifa Wall. There are also extended sequences on controversial Johns Hopkins sexologist Dr. John Money (who defended a pretty extreme nurture over nature position, that regardless of biology people will typically conform to the gender expectations of however they are raised), and on the sad case of David Reimer (arguably a “victim” of Money’s theories).

One of the points the film makes is that it’s especially inappropriate to expect intersex people to conform to their “assigned” gender (not that it’s necessarily appropriate for non-intersex people). What’s interesting, though, is that the “assignments” seem pretty darn accurate in the case of the folks profiled.

Weigel is basically a chick. She was born with some sort of internal, partially developed testes (surgically removed as an infant, which she now denounces as involuntary “castration”), but she presents at least 98% as female. At least I don’t see anything male about her. (A very, very slightly tomboyish walk perhaps? I have to strain to come up with anything.)

Gallo tries his darnedest to be otherwise, but he’s basically a dude. He wears all the makeup, and he adopts the flamboyant female mannerisms (unsurprisingly, he’s a theatrical performer in musicals and the like), but his exaggerated girliness comes across almost nothing like a real woman but as just a stereotypically fruity gay guy. Let’s say 95% male.

The only one that’s significantly ambiguous is Wall, and even she comes across as maybe 75% female (in spite of trying hard to be male or non-binary). She just presents as a butch black chick.

Not that I much care what they want to be genderwise. The fact that somebody does or doesn’t fit gender stereotypes matters to me about as much as whether a black person likes watermelon or a Chinese person operates a laundry. They should live however makes them happy (just as non-intersex people should). Sex is almost entirely binary (intersex people representing the tiny exception), but forcing gender to be binary is an artificial social thing with no morally compelling justification. If someone wants to prance around like Gallo, if that’s how the person naturally wants to live, to express themselves, then God love them, regardless of whether they’re male, female, or somewhere in between.

I mentioned Reimer above. He was a twin, and when he and his infant brother were circumcised, there was a terrible mishap that burned off much of his penis. Faced with the awful decision of how to respond, and guided in part by the philosophy of the aforementioned Dr. Money, his parents agreed to have the remnants of his penis surgically removed and replaced with a makeshift vagina, and to raise him as if he had been born female and not tell him otherwise (since obviously the accident occurred so early that he’d have no memory of it).

Evidently it was a complete fiasco. Despite their best efforts, he kept reverting to stereotypical male behavior and attitudes. The gender conflict between his natural tendencies and what he was being pressured into totally fucked him up emotionally. Eventually his parents came clean with him, and he reverted to being straightforwardly male as an adult (looking strangely like an emaciated Peter from The Brady Bunch in interview clips), even marrying a woman and adopting children, but clearly he was never again right in the head and ended up committing suicide in his 30s.

So Reimer wasn’t intersex in the same biological sense that Weigel, Gallo, and Wall are. The anatomical change or ambiguity came about due to surgical intervention.

But the film treats his case as relevant to intersexuality insofar as it speaks to the issue of using surgery on infants to move them into one or the other sex category and then raise them as such for their own good.

The film is condemnatory toward Money, claiming, for one thing, that he and his supporters in the medical community were blatantly intellectually dishonest. Money was especially drawn to the Reimer case because of the twin factor; it provided a potential excellent test of his theory that gender identity was almost entirely a product of controllable early social learning in that one identical twin would be raised male and one raised female in the same household with the same family dynamic. He examined and worked with the Reimers throughout their childhood, and consistently insisted that the case was a confirmation of his theory, in spite of the evidence pointing in precisely the opposite direction. Any dissenters found it difficult or impossible to have their views published in medical journals.

I read a little about Money and the Reimer case on Wikipedia, and you can make the case that he was even more of a creepy nutcase than the film implies. He believed that part of what it is to mold a person as male or female is to normalize for them the conventional motions of heterosexual copulation. So he would place Reimer on his back with his legs spread, or on his hands and knees doggy style, and have his brother pantomime fucking him.

The film and the profiled intersex activists take the position that it is a violation of human rights to surgically alter an infant to render them more male or female, that instead this is something that can only justifiably be chosen by the person themselves when they are old enough to be competent to make such a decision, the Reimer case being cited as one piece of evidence.

I have mixed feelings about that. First off, as far as the Reimer case, how certain is it that Reimer’s problems stemmed from his being surgically altered and then raised as a girl?

Is he typical of such cases? If there were a thousand cases of emergency sex changes due to infancy accidents like that, and 990 of them resulted in normal, well-adjusted adults living as their replacement gender, that would be a lot different than if 990 of them resulted in people as fucked up as Reimer. One case doesn’t tell us much.

The parents, the physicians, etc. were in a terrible situation. It’s not like there was any “good” choice. Is it so clear that Reimer would have lived a happy, well-adjusted, non-suicidal life if he had been raised as a male with a severely damaged non-functional rump of a penis? Maybe having his dick burned off was a much bigger source of his problems than his parents’ decision of how to deal with it.

Furthermore, maybe he was as fucked up by stuff like Money having him and his brother pantomime having sex as anything. Maybe it wasn’t so much being raised female as being raised in specifically the perverse ways Money implemented. (Certainly his brother thought so. The film doesn’t mention it, but their childhood was utterly traumatic for the brother as well—who was not surgically altered as an infant, who was not pressured to live in a way that didn’t fit his sex—and he actually committed suicide a couple years before David did.)

I don’t know. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be better to wait in some cases. But I’m not convinced that surgery on intersex babies is always wrong.

It can be a very, very difficult situation for parents, and maybe they should have a certain amount of leeway in how to handle it. Maybe their making the decision to surgically alter their child’s genitalia is sometimes, not always, a reasonable option. As it might be if there’s a way, for instance, to remove an infant’s sixth toe or correct a cleft palate. Yes, you could wait and let the person decide for themselves when they’re 18 or whatever, but not every parenting decision can be foregone like that until the person can make their own decisions. Sometimes parents have to use their best judgment in determining what is most likely to give their child their best, happiest life, and I’m not persuaded that intersex-related surgery can never be such a case.

Especially insofar as we’re talking about infants, who have no meaningful will to be overridden. I’d feel differently about an 8 year old who, for whatever reason, opposes the surgery and is taken to the surgeon kicking and screaming by his parents.

To me, infant surgery is much closer to, say, a drug a person could take before conception that makes them substantially less likely to give birth to an intersex baby. I’m not particularly concerned that any baby subsequently born wouldn’t get to choose whether to be intersex or what kind of genitalia to grow up with.

The activists also advocate against the various silly right wing bathroom laws, citing themselves as proof against any mandatory binary division into male and female.

Which strikes me as only of quite limited relevance. I think the bathroom laws are opposable on their merits without the intersex angle. If the idea is “People have to use the bathroom that matches their biological sex” and the objection is “But some of us don’t have an unambiguous, binary biological sex,” then I would think there could be a proviso added to any such law making an exception, that is “And the fraction of 1% of the population who don’t fit how this law defines male and female biologically are free to use either bathroom.”

I’m not keen to see transgender people prevented from using the bathrooms of their choice (and only allowed to use bathrooms more likely to render them vulnerable to embarrassment, verbal attack, and physical attack), and that would be my position even if intersex people didn’t exist.

Maybe I didn’t go along a hundred percent with Every Body’s celebration of intersex people and their issues, but it’s a worthwhile documentary, and certainly I share it’s perspective that intersex people are as entitled as anyone else to be happy and to live their life as they choose without busybodies trying to force them to fit some gender paradigm or otherwise mistreating them or discriminating against them. They’re just people.