This is my entry for “X” in the Blogging A to Z Challenge. Throughout April I will be watching and reviewing a documentary movie from A to Z. This is the first “X” documentary I’ve reviewed.
Title: XXXY
Release Date: June 22, 2000
Director: Porter Gale and Laleh Soomekh
Production Company: Stanford University, Department of Art & Art History
Summary/Review:
X is always a challenge for the A-to-Z Challenge, especially if you’re looking for movies where the letter X has certain connotations. I feel fortunate to have found this terrific documentary made by students at Stanford University in 2000, which is at 13 minutes is the shortest documentary I viewed for the challenge.
XXXY features two intersex people, Kristi Bruce and Howard Devore, who speak frankly about their experience being born with ambiguous genitalia. Both underwent multiple surgeries over the course of their lives and struggled with their own identity. Bruce’s parents and a pediatrician are also interviewed.
The movie makes a strong case against the medical community determining that infants and children require medical intervention and surgery to make their genital anatomy resemble typical male or female genitalia. The decision to have surgery should only be made by an adult intersex person. Furthermore, it advocates for recognition of intersex people and their human rights.
What Can One Learn From Watching This Documentary:
It is estimated that 1 out of every 2000 children born are intersex. This is far more common than we’re led to believe and all the more reason to recognize the great amount of sexual variation.
If You Like This You Might Also Want To …:
The Accord Alliance has resources related to Disorders of Sex Development (DSD), a term adopted in 2006 to define “congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal or anatomic sex is atypical.”
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is a fictional account of a person with 5-alpha reductase deficiency.
Unrest is another documentary I watched for this challenge that deals with the medical community at odds with what is best for the health of their patients.
Source: I watched this movie on YouTube (the full film is embedded below).
Rating: ****
Panorama of the Mountains 
It’s always amazing to me that something that is so widespread (1 in 2000) is completely unknown to me. This looks like an informative documentary. Weekends In Maine
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I did some reading and found it’s hard to get a good estimate because some people’s condition isn’t clear until later in life, and so many babies are assigned a gender and never learn otherwise.
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One out of every 2000. I would never have suspected it would be that high…
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