Why ‘RBG’ Filmmaker Julie Cohen Joined Forces with Focus Features on Intersex Doc ‘Every Body’

variety.com:

Addie Morfoot Contributor After a two-year hiatus Focus Features is back in the documentary theatrical game with Julie Cohen’s “Every Body,” a film that explores the lives of three intersex people.

Defined as those born with sex traits that do not fit binary medical definitions of male or female sexual or reproductive anatomy, intersex people make up close to two percent of the world’s population.

By some estimates that’s as common as being born a redhead, yet the intersex population is largely ignored by society, which is one reason Cohen wanted to make a film about the topic.

Cohen (“RBG”) first came across the issue in 2018 when she was working with NBC News Studios. There she discovered the story of psychologist John Money who, in the 1960s, claimed that a child, without consent, would take the gender identity he/she was raised with rather than the gender identity corresponding to the biological sex. “In doing research into what might be the modern-day relation to that story I came to understand the huge impact that this crazy, stranger than fiction, holy shit story from 50 years ago had and how it related to what’s been going on for intersex people ever since,” says Cohen.