>> MetroFocus is made possible by the Peter G Peterson and Joan Ganz Cooney Fund.

Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, and by Jody and John Arnhold.

Dr. Robert C and Tina Sohn foundation.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation.

The estate of Ronan Karlen.

>> Good evening and welcome.

I am Jack Ford.

As we continue to celebrate pride month in the LGBTQIA+ community, we are joined by the people by a new documentary that's perhaps the first film to take a close look at the lives of those individuals represented by the I that stands for intersex.

The film is called "Every Body."

It tells the story of three individuals from their childhood to adulthood where they are free to live as their true selves.

Here is a preview.

>> 3, 2, 1.

Whoo!

>> society generally considers biological sex is cut and dry.

Actually it's not.

We don't fall neatly into the male-female box.

I was born intersex.

Although I was born with a Regina, I was also born with internal testes.

>> We live in a society that is so binary, so where do I fit?

>> The definition of intersex is any variation in a person's sex characteristics.

>> They told my mom, we have a child we feel is abnormal.

>> That body was a problem that needed to be fixed and I should never tell anybody.

Jack: Joining us now is the director of the documentary, Julie.

She was the co-director and producer of the Academy award nominated and Emmy winning documentary RPG.

Also with us are the three intersex activists featured in the film.

Actor and screenwriter River, political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel and Sean Saifa Wall.

This is a fascinating documentary.

It is a compelling documentary.

It makes you think and helps you To understand things I suspect most people out there don't.

Julie, let me start with you.

It is always a pleasure when you come on MetroFocus, you and Betsy in the past.

If it is a documentary you are involved in, I want to talk about it.

Let me start off with your journey to this documentary.

It is the same question I have Asked you in the past, but I think your answer seems to be very different in terms of how you got from this story.

Tell us about that.

Julie: My journey started with the past, moving speedily into the present.

It started with an archival story that my friends at NBC news studios had covered many years ago.

They had asked me to take a look Through their archives and said one of the old stores that might be a jumping off point for a new documentary, I landed on a wild story that shows up in the film about some misconceived and Misconstrued research on gender, going back to the 1960's.

Stranger than fiction kind of case.

That led me to looking into what might be some of the modern day implications.

It turned out this old case where it was viewed that any baby could basically be turned any gender was being used in a really unfortunate way over many decades to lead to mistreatment, enforced secrecy, and often nonconsensual medical interventions up to and including surgeries on decades of intersex people.

In the modern day, there are activists who are coming out, coming forward, speaking out, and really making change in the way society views this issue.

Those are the three people featured in the film who are joining us today.

When I got to see the incredible activism they are doing today, I thought this would be fantastic for a documentary.

Jack: When you talk about that Story you found, talking about it being wild and bizarre, troubling, even frightening story to generate this documentary.

I want to go into too much more because it is in the film and people are going to want to see that.

One quick question to you, Julie, because you said this before.

You mentioned when you were starting to work on this and it was evolving and you would tell people about it, frequently you Would get the question, " intersex, what just does that mean?"

Let me ask you to give us a working definition to frame the rest of our conversation about intersex.

Julie: It is interesting in this age of a lot of awareness on some LGBTQ+ issues that there is such limited societal understanding about the intersex issue.

The working definition of intersex, it's an umbrella term for a number of variations in people's sex traits.

We are talking about biology.

Chromosomes, hormones, anatomy that puts people not squarely in those male and female boxes that we have been taught -- and correctly I might add -- are the only possibilities for human existence.

Jack: Understanding that, I want to ask the three of you the same question.

We talked to Julie about how she came to this.

Alicia, what was it about this film that made you say, I want to be part of this and I want to tell my story?

Alicia: Thank you for having me, appreciate being here with you today.

I think what really brought me into Julie's film was the fact I had almost gone down the path for another film prior with a pretty well-known filmmaker, and what started off as excitement on my part ended up quickly feeling exploited, which is unfortunately not an uncommon experience in the intersex community.

We often have to share an inordinate amount of detail about ourselves that most human beings don't to be heard and understood.

When I was going down that path for this film prior, it felt quickly kind of icky and they were not in it for the right reasons.

My first conversation with Julie could not have felt more different.

She has a huge track record of doing films in the realm of gender equity and our issue squarely falls into that category.

Because there is so little understanding and even awareness of our community, it helps to have someone with that mark of credibility and stamp of approval, because we have been doing this work for a long time, we just have not been given the platform to talk about it.

Having someone like Julie who has had the RPG film and the film about Gabby Giffords and so many other incredible activists fighting for gender equity really brought me into the idea.

Working with Julie has been incredible the whole way along.

Jack: Saifa, what drew you into it?

Saifa: Alicia reached out to truly first and recommended Julie speak to me, so Julie contacted me.

She contacted me by email and I think we set up a zoom and she shared some of her previous work with me.

I was like, OK.

I really liked the way Julie approached me because I feel like she came with knowledge and she seemed like what I could feel was some integrity, and I think given my experience with media I have not always felt that people were listening or respectful, so I think that was definitely the deciding factor for me.

Jack: River, how about you?

River: For me, I was the last to complete the trifecta that you see here.

Alicia and Saifa were both activists who I knew, mostly online, and became friends over the last few years online, and I was the newest out of three of us to the activism circle.

My experience came from being an actor and a filmmaker, so I was honestly a little suspicious of wanting to put my life in a documentary, but Alicia -- and I knew Alicia was part of it and Saifa and they were doing a protest in New York and they invited me to speak, and that was my first time at an intersex protest.

I kind of had a lot to say, and Julie then approached me about joining the documentary.

I felt very nervous about it, but I know my role in the community as an activist is, whenever given the opportunity to share my story, I view it as an act of service, and I never refuse, though I did have a lot of conflicting feelings about it.

However, through working with Julie and filming with the most incredible and caring and loving crew, and Julie with such ability to hold space for our stories and also for ourselves as full humans, it was such a joy to work on the film.

I am just so pleased with how it all came out and so excited for everyone to see it.

I really do think it is going to change a lot of lives and hearts.

Jack: I will agree, having seen it.

I will come back to Julie, because I have seen you talking about working with our folks here and mentioning the fact they have very different experiences, life experiences, yet very connected experiences.

That was important to you as a filmmaker, why?

Julie: This is a story about an issue.

It's also a story about people.

To the extent it's a story about an issue, we want to talk about the commonalities of the experiences of these individuals.

When you are in the people part of a thing, you want to feel like in an hour and a half, you want to get to know some people you feel like are worth knowing.

When I leave a documentary, it almost doesn't matter what it's about.

My favorite reaction coming out of a documentary is, I'm so glad I had the opportunity to meet the people on the screen.

That's how I felt about knowing Saifa, Alicia, and River in real life and I hope that's how people come away from this film.

They are going to learn about the intersex issue, about nonconsensual surgeries and how people are fighting to educate society and the medical community about the problems of that, but also you are going to get to know these sort of incredible people who have chosen to speak publicly about something that's not easy to speak publicly about, for the purpose of helping people that come after them.

There is something to me profoundly beautiful about people speaking up for themselves and others and watching that happen again and again.

It was an inspiring experience to watch.

Almost leaving aside the outcome.

Maybe you are fighting to get a bill passed, you get it passed, you don't.

Life is full of ups and downs.

Coming forward saying this is what I believe in, even if I was told to keep Wyatt, that's a beautiful moment no matter what the outcome.

Jack: Saifa, let me come back to something Julie mentioned, something I mentioned in the introduction, the notion of non-conceptual surgical procedures.

Reading up on this, I saw at one point, not long ago, you had the opportunity to confront the surgeon involved with yours.

Give us a broad sense of what we are talking about when we are talking about nonconsensual surgical procedures, then tell us how you dealt with yours.

Saifa: How I dealt with it as a young person or as an adult?

Jack: Let's talk about both.

Saifa: When we are talking about nonconsensual surgeries, we are talking about surgeries that are done without the explicit, thorough, conformed consent of the patient.

When I say that, I'm talking about the long-term complications of surgery that people are not aware of, that parents may consent to.

In my case, my mom consented to the surgery without proper information.

She was misled.

She was told that my gonads, which they referred to them as, were cancerous and that they should be removed.

Later when I secured my medical records, I found out that my gonads were actually testicles and my testicles did not have any cancer.

They were actually healthy testicular tissue.

And I think -- you know, I had secured my medical records because I was going through a process of transitioning from female to male and was having complications around taking testosterone, so my medical provider at the time wanted my medical records.

At the time when I had confronted my surgeon, I was Board President of interact, a large youth policy organization dedicated to protecting intersex youth.

At the time, a producer from ABC wanted to do a segment about someone confronting their surgeon.

I actually confronted the surgeon who had done the surgery on my body when I was 13 years old.

Jack: How -- this is I am sure a difficult question.

But let me ask you, when you walked away from that confrontation, did you feel that in some way, it was liberating?

Maybe that's a word we can use.

Saifa: Yeah, I think what wasn't aired on television was -- you know, I want to go back to when I was 13.

I think actually having my testicles removed was perhaps the most painful experience I have had in my life.

I had a fair number of surgeries, but that goes down in my history as probably one of the most painful.

For me what was liberating about confronting my doctor, or confronting the surgeon who had removed my testicles -- who had castrated me -- was that in the segment, which wasn't taped, but essentially I had told him, you as a grown man told me as a 14-year-old girl that you would shave down Michael Taurus -- my clitoris and create a cavity inside me, which when he said that literally made me feel sick to my stomach.

I asked him, how do you think that Woodland Wen Yu would tell a 14-year-old girl to that as a grown man?

And he didn't have a response.

I think after that confrontation, I felt I had vindicated my 14-year-old self.

But I think collectively, for people who were watching that, particularly people who were intersex who had went through the same experience, they could actually breathe.

Jack: Alicia, let me ask you this question, then there is something I want to go to River about.

I mentioned you do a lot of things, involved in political campaigns where awareness and messaging are essential parts of what you are doing.

Let's take that experience and apply it to this, your activism now.

Talk about the awareness, or absence of awareness, of the notion of intersex.

Illustrated by the fact that when we talked to Julie before, she is talking to a lot of intelligent and aware people, yet they are saying, intersex, what does that mean?

Talk about your experience and what this documentary can do hopefully to alleviate that in some way.

ALICIA: It's a good question.

I have a book coming out this fall called "inverse cowgirl," not reverse cowgirl, because I am intersex in Texas and that is an important part of the narrative.

People here LGBTQIA plus and think it is some newfangled thing that was not around when I grew up.

We have always been here, we will always be here.

I don't just mean the liberal bastions of the coast, I mean all over the great state of Texas, where I am proud to live and fight for our right to exist , our right to health care, our right to anything any normal human being deserves because we are also normal human beings.

The narrative have consistently left us out.

However, the bills have not.

There is a concerted political effort to ban gender affirming care for transgender youth state-by-state by state across the United States.

What is not talked about is all those same bills explicitly reference intersex bodies, there is so little awareness of the existence of intersex bodies and what that means that the media has not picked up on that enough to include us in the conversation about our own erasure.

It is pretty wild to be erased from the conversation about your own erasure.

These bills say you can't give surgeries and hormones to children who want them and are asking for them, but you can continue to force them on children who are too young to consent, in most circumstances too young to even speak.

When I had my nonconsensual surgery, I was an infant.

I could no less say mama or dada then I could say yes, I consent to this surgery that will alter my body and the trajectory of my life for the rest of my life.

I think the first step is having people understand that we are here.

River often talks about how it is just as much of a cultural effort as a political effort.

In order to change hearts and minds and make change, people need to know we exist and that the problem exists before we can endeavor to solve that problem or fix things.

Jack: Let me follow up on that.

River, the idea that people need to know, the notion that before you can move forward with any change, cultural, political, societal, there needs to be an understanding, an accurate understanding, which I think is very important.

River, you were mentioning that you felt technology, the ability to reach out remotely, may well be an important weapon in the arsenal of awareness.

Why do you think that?

RIVER: I think for many intersex people, and I would endeavor to say queer people in general, trans people, we find each other through social media, through technology that helps us form community, helps us spread information.

I think where it can become, not toxic per se, but it's surface level, is when it stays at the level of virtual reality.

I think when we all met -- well, Saifa had COVID and could not come to the protest but was there in spirit.

>> Spoiler alert, that's in the film.

RIVER: When we met as a collective with other intersex people in New York and allies from different medical schools that also showed up, just the energy changed.

I think in light of the recent protests that happened and are happening more and more in this country, there is something about using technology and social media to garner and galvanize collective power.

At the end of the day, a lot also has to be done in physical reality, physical community, getting to the streets.

I think it's like a two step process that I think social media and technology can only do so much, up until the point that we as intersex people can meet each other and know what it feels like to be in relationship with people who have similar experiences to us.

Jack: There is so much we could talk about.

I am astonished by how much time has already gone by.

I have time for one last question.

We have about a minute and a half.

Julie, let me come to you as the filmmaker.

What do you hope viewers will take from this film when they walk away from it?

JULIE: I want people to walk out of the theater and kind of go immediately to their laptops and phones and start getting more information.

This film will educate viewers quite a bit about what it means to be intersex and what you can do to be a better ally to your intersex siblings, but it's not going to educate you thoroughly.

I guess I want people to want to learn more and dive further into this issue.

Maybe even more than that, and this might be a surprising answer on a film about a fairly serious topic that deals with nonconsensual surgeries and other things, I want people to feel -- and I think they will feel -- feel good and feel inspired.

There is a lot of beautiful stuff going on in the intersex rights movement.

There is a lot of fun being had by activists who are taking on a new approach to making activism fun.

There is a lot of humor and music in the film.

I say this intersex rights doc is a feel-good movie and I hope viewers feel that way.

Jack: I know you stressed the notion that you wanted to make sure you included the concept of intersex joy.

I know you have all talked about the notion that you are victims of trauma but that should not define your lives.

I think the three of you are going forward in defining your lives and the way you choose to define your lives.

I said at the beginning it's a marvelous documentary.

It does what we want films to do, educates us, eliminates things, makes us think.

Once again, it is called "Every Body."

Check your local listings to find it in theaters near you.

Thank you for sharing your stories and your time about this very good work you are doing.

Thank you so much, you be well now.

>> Thank you, Jack.

Jack: Thanks for tuning into MetroFocus.

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>> MetroFocus is made possible by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim, the Peter G Peterson and Joan Ganz Cooney Fund, Bernard and Denise Schwartz, Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, and by Jody and John Arnhold, Dr. Robert C and Tina Sohn foundation, The Ambrose Monell Foundation, Estate of Roland Karlen.