M is 27 years old. Deborah is 25. Both are living in bodies that Western medicine — and often society — deems too taboo to discuss publicly. Like an estimated 1.7 percent of people, they were born with variations in their sex characteristics that differ from classical understandings of male or female. For M, growing up intersex has also meant grappling with the fact that she underwent medically unnecessary surgeries to “normalize” her body as a child — before she could even understand what was going on. But when M finds Deborah online, she is introduced to new voices, language, and representations that allow her to understand who she is in more than just medical terms. This beautifully crafted, poetic documentary from Swiss director Floriane Devigne joins these and other brave young people as they seek to reappropriate their bodies and explore their identities, revealing both the limits of binary visions of sex and gender and the irreversible physical and psychological impacts of non-consensual surgeries on intersex infants.
Category
🎥
Short film