Every Body: Rock Your Body Right, by David Bax

Julie Cohen‘s Every Body opens with a montage of videos shot at gender reveal parties, those cringey celebrations where parents-to-be gather their friends and family to make a big deal out of what their future baby’s genitals are going to look like. These stupid things tend to make the news when they accidentally start fires or kill people (leading to the perception, fair or not, that the tradition is only observed by morons) but there’s a darker reason they’ve been on the rise. A surge in the past decade or so in transgender visibility has led some reactionary snowflakes to double down on the idea that gender is both binary and easily biologically observable. Every Body, though, is not a movie about trans people. It’s about intersex people, the very existence of whom disprove such supposed scientific facts about gender.
Cohen soundtracks that opening party montage with a cover of “Be My Baby,” which is admittedly a funny move. And that’s far from the only cover on the movie’s soundtrack. “Born to Run,” “Call Me Maybe,” “Pretty Woman…”; these all get the tongue in cheek cover treatment. It’s a symptom of Every Body‘s assertive cutesiness, an off-putting trait that will be familiar to those of us who endured Cohen’s 2018 biographical doc RBG (co-directed with Betsy West). This time, though, at least the end product has more to say than blind hagiography.
That’s not to say Cohen doesn’t ask us to cheer for her subjects. In fact, she seems to have gone out of her way to pick attractive and successful intersex people to represent the substance of her film. There’s an argument to be made that such a move is good PR. It makes the whole topic more engaging and palatable for everyday audiences. On the other hand, feel-good stories tend to have the side effect of enforcing the myth of resiliency that leads to a kind of moral offramp for the public. “Sure,” this kind of thinking goes, “the movie makes a good case that intersex people have been institutionally and culturally mistreated for generations but, hey, these three are doing pretty well for themselves so I guess it all works out.”
As implied by the gender reveal montage and stated by me in my opening paragraph, the fact that Every Body is not directly about transgender people does not mean that it doesn’t exist, at least partially, as a reaction to anti-trans sentiment and policy. One of the biggest criticisms of gender affirmation is the accusation that we are allowing irreversible body-altering surgery to be done on children who aren’t yet capable of making such decisions for themselves. Well, Cohen argues, that’s exactly what has long been happening to intersex people, as early as infancy. Those born with some mix of both cisgender male and cisgender female anatomy have often had their sex decided for them by parents and doctors and then surgically altered to fit it. Whether they are later told or not about what happened to them, they’ve been forced in a kind of closet before they could even speak their first words.
Most such practices, the movie enlightens us, are the result of the work of psychologist John Money, Every Body‘s principle villain. He died in 2006 but he spent most of his career arguing and attempting to demonstrate that gender could be imposed on a young enough person provided their genitals were made to line up with the categorization and that they were raised, unaware, as the boy or girl it was decided they would be. Money was successful and respected for decades but his research has been increasingly scrutinized over the past 30 years.
Every Body comes down on the nature side of the nature/nurture debate and argues undeniably that nature includes genders other than the two cis ones. Cohen’s pop sheen comes off as, at times, distasteful but, on the other hand, maybe it’s packaging and commodification that make a documentary that aims first to persuade achieve its goal.