Although this documentary spreads its net wide to encompass the recent history of intersex identity in the US, mostly it centres around the story of Jim Ambrose, who until he was 20 years old was called Kristi and raised female. Raised in Baton Rouge, Lousiana, Jim was born in 1976 with XY chromosomes and had atypical genitals. So his parents, under the advice of a local doctor, decided to have surgery performed on the infant to create more female-looking organs, and then raised him as a girl without ever telling him the truth. It wasn’t until he read about intersex people in a university feminism course that he realised who he really was. Although Jim would go through further painful surgeries and much mental anguish, eventually he would find his voice as an activist, a place within the increasingly visible intersex community, and a loving partner.
The emotional climax of the film follows Jim as he prepares to meet the surgeon who operated on him as a baby. The encounter doesn’t go at all as you might expect, given footage earlier in the film where one intersex person talks about getting revenge using a rusty knife. Let’s just say. The phrases “at the time” and “in retrospect” get invoked a lot.
Meanwhile, the rest of the documentary goes over material that was also recently covered in Every Body, directed by Julie Cohen, and people who appeared in Every Body crop up here as well. Most importantly, the film reprises the tragic case of David Reimer, who accidentally lost his penis during a circumcision and was raised female, and subjected to surgeries under the guidance of eminent academic Dr John Money. In the 1970s and 80s, Money’s writings argued that the plasticity of gender identity meant that reassignment surgery was the kindest thing to do for intersex children, and David was supposed to be his star case study. Unfortunately, David’s intense unhappiness with being raised female somehow never made it into Money’s textbooks, a kind of academic malpractice that still has repercussions for children today.
The Secret of Me director Grace Hughes-Hallett has a slightly more tabloidy, heavy-handed style than that deployed by Cohen in Every Body, but the two films complement each other and serve this complicated, knotty subject well.
