Engrossing Doc About Intersex Children

At the center of The Secret of Me is Jim Ambrose, who grew up as Kristi. Looking into the camera as he begins to tell his story, he says, to be clear, that he is not transgender. He is intersex and was in the dark about that fact until he was 19 and discovered the truth: that he was born with male chromosomes and ambiguous genitalia but underwent surgery as an infant and was raised as a girl.

Grace Hughes-Hallett, directing her first feature, has created a lucid, absorbing film that uses Jim’s first-person account to reveal a much larger story about treating intersex children. The documentary lands as especially timely now, with the very idea of gender identity under right-wing attack.

Hughes-Hellett is a producer of Three Identical Strangers (2018) about triplets separated at birth as part of a social experiment, who only discovered their connection as adults. There are echoes of that film in The Secret of Me, in both its sharp, straightforward style and the theme of how such experiments can have devastating effects.

Like the subjects of Three Identical Strangers, Jim always sensed there was something off about his identity. He was in college in 1995 when, in a textbook, he read about John Money, a psychologist and once a respected, hugely influential researcher at Johns Hopkins. He saw himself in Money’s most famous case study, about treating twin boys. One twin was the victim of a botched circumcision, and Money told his parents to raise him as a girl. That child, David Reimer, grew up, troubled, as Brenda until learning the facts, and committed suicide as an adult in 2004.

Hughes-Hallett blends these two strands easily, interspersing Jim’s experience with interviews and archival footage about Money. Jim is an excellent choice to lead viewers through the film, someone who now seems comfortable in his own skin. His demeanor is calm, direct and earnest. After reading of Money’s case, he got his medical records and learned that he had been born with a penis below what is considered normal size, and that his parents were advised to allow the surgery and never tell him about it. He frequently refers to the operation as mutilation and sees the treatment as a double injury, the surgery compounded by his parents’ deception.

In archival footage, his parents explain that they were following the best medical advice they had and acknowledge his anger at them. In an interview for this film, Jim recalls his thoughts at the time: “You cut my genitals out. What did you think was going to happen?” It took a double mastectomy and removal of a constructed vagina, surgeries his parents approved when he was an adolescent, for him to feel like himself.

The treatment his parents agreed to was straight from the Money playbook. He insisted that gender was a matter of socialization, and that raising David as Brenda would mean he accepted himself as Brenda. Keeping the truth from the children was part of his prescribed treatment, which was followed in thousands of cases around the world, largely because he wrote articles falsely claiming that Brenda was a perfectly happy child. The film includes brief archival footage of the adult David, furious that Money’s lies about him had been so widely accepted. “I was appalled, disgusted and angry when I heard about it. People thought that my case was a success story? There was nothing further from the truth,” he says.

The documentary includes a few talking heads, all relevant and smoothly edited in. They include Tiger Devore, an activist and psychologist who is intersex and was once Money’s intern, and John Colapinto, a journalist who interviewed David and exposed Money’s deceptions in a 1997 Rolling Stone story.

The music is a minor misstep, jarring throughout, with a tinkly piano at the start and suspenseful notes when Colapinto is searching for some old files. It’s a more serous flaw that the film is framed around Jim’s wish to confront Dr. Richard Carter, who performed the surgery when he was an infant. At the end of the film they meet in a coffee shop in a scene too obviously orchestrated for the cameras. Carter apologizes and Jim seems satisfied that at least they’ve talked. What is meant to be climactic is an anti-climax. Worse, it plays as gimmicky, undercutting Jim’s obvious sincerity.

At its best, which is most of the time, The Secret of Me is strong enough not to need anything that artificial. The events and their consequences are powerful enough.