Every Body

American director Julie Cohen’s (RBG, Julia) latest documentary turns its spotlight onto arguably the most overlooked letter of the LGBTQIA+ acronym: the intersex community. The NBC News production opens with accumulated footage of the grotesque trend of ever-increasingly extravagant gender reveal parties in order to break down the detrimental effects of this binary mindset immediately thrust upon neonates. The three protagonists of Every Body, River Gallo, Alicia Roth Weigel and Sean Saifa Wall, were born with sex characteristics transcending the limited notion of a male or female body. Julie Cohen accompanies them on family visits, political rallies or creative endeavours to give audiences an idea of their lives and struggles. It soon crystallises that having been assigned a definitive gender at birth and undergoing corresponding surgery was a traumatic event in each of their pasts.

A friend of Gallo’s words it perfectly when they say, “It’s ironic that those doctors will use the rhetoric of biology when the body is the biggest argument against the sex binary.” As it is estimated that 1.7% of the population are born with intersex traits, it is shameful how little public awareness there is regarding this topic, so this documentary is long overdue.

A large part of the film uses the story of David Reimer to make its case against infant surgery to (re-)assign bodies a particular gender, however, the subject in question was not born intersex and while the comparison works, the complexity of his situation threatens to overshadow the affected parties at hand. The reaction video of the protagonists watching a pre-existing documentary on Reimer stands a little forlorn in between footage of emphatic and hard-hitting interviews. There are some flaws in structure and editing and occasionally, the music choices sell the depicted scenarios short.

However, when the protagonists are given the screen time to share their stories, the feature reveals its true colours of marvellous, intimate glimpses into previously hushed-up lives. Gallo, Weigel and Wall are extraordinarily charismatic and eloquent and like in any fiction film, where a director’s most important job is casting, Cohen struck gold with her participants. They are open to being vulnerable and even acknowledge that parents want the best for their child and that with little education on the subject matter, most are at a loss on how to approach raising a non-binary child, but equally, they vigorously stand their ground that forcing an idea of normal onto anyone just isn’t the way to go.

Every Body’s political arguments deserve be heard by those in positions to make changes to include (as the title puts it) everybody, and one could argue that it should be made obligatory viewing for delivery nurses and any doctor working in the field of obstetrics.

Selina Sondermann

Every Body is released in select cinemas on 15^th December 2023.

Watch the trailer for Every Body here: