Review: Every Body

By John Corrado

★★★½ (out of 4)

Directed by Julie Cohen (Julia, RBG), the fascinating and highly engaging documentary Every Body explores the people who make up the I in LGBTQIA, which stands for intersex. The term intersex is used to describe those born with elements of both male and female sex characteristics, with over thirty different intersex conditions existing.

The film’s three subjects are River Gallo, Sean Saifa Wall, and Alicia Roth Weigel (who went viral due to a “change my mind” exchange with Steven Crowder on YouTube), three outspoken individuals who were born intersex, and are trying to break away from the secrecy around it.

There are common strands in all three of their experiences, including having had medically unnecessary surgeries performed on them as children, with doctors deciding what stereotypical box they should be put in. They recall secrecy around their conditions, and being made to feel ashamed of their bodies, with medical professionals convincing their parents to choose a sex and allow them to undergo corrective surgeries in early childhood.

A good chunk of the activist work that Gallo, Wall and Weigel are doing now is to stop these surgeries from being performed on children without their consent (including gonadectomies to remove internal testes). The film also becomes somewhat of an indictment of the late Dr. John Money, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins whose ideas about sex and gender set the stage for children who are born intersex being forced to live as either male or female through a mix of these invasive surgeries and social engineering.

Threaded through the film is the tragic case of David Reimer, one of Money’s most famous patients, a boy who was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision, with Money essentially using the child as a research subject. Cohen uses clips from an old “Dateline” episode on Reimer, with his heartbreaking story providing a sobering through-line to the film.

In allowing Gallo, Wall and Weigel to each tell their stories in their own words, and talk candidly about how aspects of their lives were medicalized from a young age, Every Body finds a good balance between being moving, infuriating, and inspiring. Cohen’s film is mostly made up of interviews, but her subjects are all very engaging figures, and she employs a few more upbeats touches such as an opening sequence showing a selection of videos from increasingly exaggerated gender reveal parties.

The film also includes some effectively used acoustic covers of various pop and rock songs (including Springsteen to highlight Gallo’s Jersey roots). It’s a compelling, smoothly assembled documentary, that does an excellent job of shedding important light on an underrepresented part of the population.