It was very hard to hold in all the shivering and the crying throughout the film, and I felt my anger and my confusion seen. I cannot "rate" this film as I normally do and have lost all judgment if it's a well made documentary but I have cried so hard and the surgery scar from 23 years ago somehow started to ache.
Although, (jokingly but also not), I was dazzled by how beautiful all the intersex ppl portrayed in this documentary are. "Not all intersex ppl are beautiful and we also exist :')" I whispered.
A bit of tmi of my own shit I thought about throughout the film:
Fascinatingly, I grew up in a small town in China and had that mysterious gonadectomy disguised as a hernia repair in 2000 and all the narratives around it from the doctors and family sounded exactly the same as those experienced this in the U.S. in the 90s. Dr. Money's students traveled far I guess. Even better, the hospital claimed to have lost all files on me (although other files of the same year were all intact) and they simply cannot find any record on this surgery. All I have left as proof is that scar that doesn't really match a hernia treatment, and my father's ashamed admission that "something testis like" that was a "developmental overgrowth" was taken because it was "potentially cancerous" for the 4yo me. Short of a in-network genetic specialist, my pcp said, I would never be able to find out for sure what actually happened. Alas, this fucking journey of queer self finding is so long. And I don't have the time and energy (and right insurance) or the balls (ha!) to unpack it all in this economy.
