The third act twist in “Conclave” has nothing on the labyrinth of secrets and techniques buried in Grace Hughes-Hallett’s documentary “The Secret of Me,” an intricate, stunning, and deeply affecting documentary a couple of medical scandal that has rocked the intersex group worldwide for the reason that late Sixties. Relaxation assured that the themes on the coronary heart of this movie are granted — and invited to show — a level of interiority that was lacking from the catty pope film.
As a lot because the queer umbrella shelters all kinds of non-hetero and non-cis identities, there’s been a obtrusive lack of well-liked and societal understanding — not to mention acceptance or cinematic illustration — of intersex people, or what intersex even means (Julie Cohen’s energetic “Each Physique” being a notable latest exception). It stands to motive {that a} scandal that has ruptured the material of the intersex group would additionally obtain partial, inconsistent, and/or area of interest consideration. “The Secret of Me” seeks to vary that by introducing the world to Jim Ambrose, whose story is advised over the course of this movie’s nimble and extremely involving 80 minutes.
It’s a narrative that Hughes-Hallett begins by instantly addressing a conflation that sure audiences could in any other case have been liable to make: This isn’t a transgender story, and it’s actually not a narrative about sexual orientation. A bearded, somber male-presenting particular person, whom the year-stamped intertitles introduce to us as Kristi, stares on the digicam after some archival footage of their beatific childhood in conservative Baton Rouge.
Kristi was a contented little one who turned an sad adolescent, desperately drawn to girls however deeply uncomfortable in her personal physique. When she was a teen, her mom tearfully confided in her that quickly she is going to want a surgical procedure that may make it inconceivable for her to have youngsters. To maintain the “household secret,” Kristi undergoes a vaginoplasty. Till then, she had “no gap down there,” as she later divulged to her childhood finest pal.
Shortly thereafter, Kristi attends a university feminist research class the place her world is turned the other way up. A chapter in a textbook known as “The Medical Development of Gender: Case Administration of Intersexed Infants” flooring her and sends her flying to the hospital for her beginning information, the place she lastly uncovers the reality: She was born with a phallus deemed too tiny to be a penis, and her testes and different organs had been surgically eliminated when she was a child. She was thus raised to be a lady. Enraged at her mother and father for having adopted the recommendation of the urologist, Kristi would quickly depart Baton Rouge. She would start her journey involving additional surgical procedures and life-saving therapies that will transition her to who she is at this time, an intersex particular person named Jim Ambrose.
Constructing on her work producing “Three Equivalent Strangers” — a rousing non-fiction about triplets separated at beginning by a New York adoption company and the way the heart-eyes-emoji mainstream protection of their reunion scarred their futures whereas burying the lede — Hughes-Hallett’s mission right here is to be forensic and academic; to contextualize the unhealthy guys’ good intentions, sure, however primarily to permit the voices and lived expertise of some individuals born as intersex to subvert that context. Constructed round an arresting sit-down interview with Ambrose, Hughes-Hallett deftly weaves in refined re-enactments, a trove of archival footage, (overabundant) pans to images, and quite a lot of jargon-decoding graphics.
By the point the phrase “intersex” is definitely uttered across the doc’s twentieth minute (by a dashing scientific psychologist named Tiger Devore), Hughes-Hallett has well articulated the conflation at stake right here. Transgender people are categorically completely different from intersex people, as are their explicit obstacles, even when they is perhaps on the mercy of comparable oppressions, sociopolitical contexts, and power-mad therapists (one other parallel “The Secret of Me” shares with “Three Equivalent Strangers”). Hughes-Hallett successfully argues that the character vs. nurture debate is much extra difficult than its simple-minded center college classroom avatar would enable.
It’s a present to have an in any other case harrowing medical scandal narrative quadruple up as a science documentary, a slice of queer activism historical past — one joyful archival video of the primary gathering of intersex people in North America, led by the movie’s third key character, Bo Laurent, programs with the profound serotonin rush of feeling seen — and a searingly private confessional of the repercussions additionally on mother and father and households, who Hughes-Hallett is cautious to not carve out as villains. In truth, the hero-turned-villain rhetoric surrounding Dr. John Cash, the egotistic therapist whose revealed suggestion nonetheless promotes these surgical procedures, is skillfully baked in.
To witness the milestones in Ambrose’s pursuit of an apology is cathartic, even when it’s a stroke of improbable luck for the director that Jim already knew Bo and Tiger by means of their time within the Nineties, and was accustomed to the Rolling Stone story on affected person zero, a boy named David Reimer whose botched castration began the cascade of gender reconstruction surgical procedures on an untold variety of infants. It’s a stroke of luck that Hughes-Hallett capitalizes upon with intricate enhancing, consideration to exposition, and the earned belief of her informants.
“The Secret of Me” checks all of the bins of an accessible, judiciously contextualized exposé documentary. If it typically feels pat, or doesn’t boast the grand mythology or aesthetic bounce of “Three Equivalent Strangers,” or often edges only a tad in the direction of the foibles of a bygone cable TV present like “Forensic Recordsdata,” chalk it as much as the character of the terrain. Such delicate subject material should additionally enlighten, entertain, and really feel satisfying. Jim Ambrose’s arc as charted does all of that. Hughes-Hallett’s movie insists that the surgical gender reassignment Ambrose obtained on the behest of the social binary can not ever absolutely be overwritten or undone, simply because it makes clear that Ambrose himself stays without end inconceivable to invalidate.
Grade: B+
“The Secret of Me” premiered at SXSW 2025. It’s at present looking for U.S. distribution.
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