‘Every Body’ casts overdue spotlight on intersex lives
Even within the larger LGBTQIA+ community, intersex people remain something of a mystery for most of us. That’s not meant to start a guilt trip; it’s an observation hinting at the power of the stigma that has kept intersex stories buried in the dusty cabinets of medical research halls even as the other segments of the queer population have been given increased representation – and with it, the chance to express their truth – in the public sphere.
Guided by unquestioned assumptions about “natural” expressions of gender, the scientific and medical establishment has long shrouded the facts around intersex people, often even from the parents of intersex children, as they made autocratic decisions about medical procedures to “correct” what they perceived as nature’s “mistake.” How can someone share their truth with the world if it’s always been kept a secret from them, too?
As laid out in “Every Body,” “RBG” director Julie Cohen’s documentary profile of three prominently visible intersex individuals (now streaming on Peacock after a theatrical release earlier this summer), the answer to that question is that they can only do it by forging a new truth, based in their own experience and independent from the expectations of others.
The film’s three subjects – actor/screenwriter River Gallo (they/them), political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel (she/they), and Ph.D.
