Jim Ambrose was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1976 with what he describes as “a body that was really upsetting to my parents and my doctors.” Though medical tests determined that he was perfectly healthy, his doctors seemed more concerned about what was between his legs: either “a really, really small penis, or a really large clitoris,” Ambrose explains.
Genetic testing came next. The results showed that he had XY chromosomes — indicating he was male. That’s when a local urologist advised his parents to put him through the first of two surgeries in order to make him look more like a girl.
“[The doctors] were like, ‘Look, we can’t raise this baby as a boy,’” Ambrose tells Rolling Stone. “‘Would it be able to stand to pee? We’re gonna clear out the male reproductive organs and clear out the phallus and we’re going to raise it as a girl.”
This was considered the standard treatment for babies born with differences of sex development (DSD), previously described as being “intersex.” In some hospitals in the U.S. and around the world, it still is. Doctors presented these surgeries to parents as their child’s best hope for a normal life, without discussing the long-term implications of permanently altering their body — and, in many cases, their gender — at a time before they’re able to provide consent or assent.
After the surgery, Ambrose’s parents named him Kristi, and their doctor told them to keep the truth to themselves. “They were prescribed the awful trinity of shame, secrecy, and isolation,” Ambrose says. “My mom made sure not to have anybody change my diaper. There was a lot of anxiety around my body and who might see it.”
Ambrose grew up wearing dresses and feeling loved. “My parents raised me as best they could,” he says. “They sent me to school, they clothed me, they gave me shelter, and they loved the little girl that they saw me as and wanted to raise me to be.” While there’s no scientific evidence that reinforcing a surgically achieved gender actually works, the prevailing idea at the time was that it was possible.
This is the focus of a new documentary, The Secret of Me, which premieres March 9 at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas. The film explores the history of these medically unnecessary genital mutilation surgeries and their lasting psychological impact through the lens of Ambrose’s experience. It marks the directorial debut of British filmmaker Grace Hughes-Hallett, the producer of the 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers. The award-winning film tells the story of three identical triplets who were intentionally separated at birth and adopted into different families as part of an undisclosed experiment, and reunited later in life with heartbreaking repercussions.
Production on The Secret of Me began in 2021, after Hughes-Hallett first learned of the surgeries done on infants with DSD from her brother, an adult urologist (“He doesn’t do these surgeries, I might add,” she clarifies) who heard about them at a conference. “He told me that there’s now a lot of adults who are very unhappy with these surgeries,” Hughes-Hallett tells Rolling Stone. “That sounded very interesting to me, so I Googled it, and started sort of going into a wormhole on this subject, and quite quickly came across John Money.”
Money, a medical psychologist at Johns Hopkins University who believed that nurture was more important than nature when it came to gender identity, was the chief proponent of these surgeries. He spent the 1950s and 1960s researching human sexual behavior, but was handed the case study of a lifetime in 1967, when he convinced the parents of David Reimer, a baby boy who lost his penis to a botched circumcision, to allow their child to undergo what he called “sex reassignment.” This involved surgery constructing female-passing genitalia, then raising him as a girl. Money also put the child, named Brenda, and their identical twin brother, Brian, through years of psychological and sexual abuse, masquerading as research.
His experiment was an indisputable failure: in spite of his upbringing as a girl, Brenda always felt like a boy and endured a childhood of torment. Yet Money published his findings, fraudulently claiming that his work was a resounding success. This cemented his position as a leader in his field, and his “sex reassignment” protocol as the standard treatment for babies born with DSD.
The Secret of Me delves deeper into Money’s experiments and the impact they had on the Reimer twins. “I knew [Money] was of the past, but there’s a present to this story,” Hughes-Hallett says. “So I spoke to quite a few intersex people. I also spoke to doctors who have done and are doing the surgeries. But it was speaking to Jim — I immediately connected with his story, and thought that the way to tell the wider story is through Jim.”
At first, Hughes-Hallett planned to include the stories of multiple intersex people, but then “came to realize that a single narrative would be a stronger film” and decided to focus on Jim. As it turned out, Ambrose was a fan of her work. “In 2018 I saw Three Identical Strangers, and thought, ‘Wow, these people really get the themes of secrecy, isolation, manipulation of children and families,’” he says. “And about midway through, I remember thinking, ‘If these people called, I would take that call.’ So when [Grace] called [in 2021], I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll definitely talk to you.’”
BACK IN BATON ROUGE IN the 1980s, Ambrose was being raised as a girl, according to the standard “treatment” plan for children born with DSD, as devised by Money. “There was some fantastical idea of being able to imprint the gender at an early age, and that it will stick,” Ambrose says. “She will be the little girl. She won’t be able to give you babies right out of her vagina, but she’ll marry a man, and she’ll have a vagina constructed, and the man will be able to have sex with this vagina, and then everything will be OK.”
Around age 12 or 13, Ambrose’s mother pulled him aside and told him that he’d have to start taking pills that would make him look more like other girls, and informed him of the surgery she’d have in a few years to create a vagina. “[She said] ‘You’re gonna grow breasts, and hopefully you’ll grow taller’ — it was really about the phenotypical female characteristics,” he says. “It was all about carrying off the illusion.” The pills worked. Then, during winter break of his freshman year of college, he was admitted to Children’s Hospital New Orleans for a vaginoplasty.
“At this time, I’d never had a boyfriend,” Ambrose says. “I had never had a sexual interaction with a boy. In fact, by that point, I was already on to my second girlfriend, and she wasn’t, like, ‘When are you going to get a vagina so we can have proper sex?’ She didn’t give a shit.”
Around a year later, Ambrose was in a feminist studies class, catching up on the assigned reading, when he came across an essay on the medical construction of gender on intersex infants. “Reading through the essay, it hit me,” Ambrose says. “I think, ‘This is me. This is what happened to me.’”
His medical records confirmed his suspicions.
Soon after that, Ambrose connected with intersex activists, including one who contacted him in December 1997 with some news. “She called me and said, ‘Go to the nearest magazine shop and buy Rolling Stone — you have to read this,’” Ambrose says.
It was an article by John Colapinto titled “The True Story of John/Joan.” The feature told the true story of the Reimer twins and the years of medical, physical, psychological, and sexual abuse they experienced at the hands of Money. Five years after the article was published, Brian died from a drug overdose at the age of 36. Two years later, David died by suicide.
While academics and intersex activists had been familiar with David’s story, it had now reached a mainstream audience. “It blew up with Colapinto’s Rolling Stone article,” Ambrose says. “Basically, everything that I learned [about David Reimer] was from that article.” It also provided activists with a new entry point to the discussion on intersex issues. “It gave tremendous context to people,” Ambrose says of the article. “You could start using it as shorthand: the John/Joan case. You could start using that in presentations and conversations. You could actually start out by saying, ‘Are you familiar with the John/Joan case?’”
It was also right around that time when Ambrose first started telling his story in public. He moved to San Francisco and worked in a bookstore and as a bike messenger, while volunteering with the Intersex Society of North America. Ambrose began working with a team of doctors in Oakland who actually listened to him and took his medical needs seriously. “At one point, I just said, ‘I want this vaginoplasty out,’” he says. “So I got that removed in an attempt to decolonize my own body.”
Ambrose stopped taking estrogen around age 20. “[It was] an act of defiance, an act of rebellion, an act of ‘fuck you,” he says. “But the fallout is that when you castrate — or you rip out ovaries, or testes, or ovotestis, or reproductive organs — you medicalize a child for the rest of their life.” After three or four years without estrogen, a bone scan revealed that Ambrose had developed osteopenia — a precursor to osteoporosis.
For the sake of his bones, his doctor told him he’d either have to start taking estrogen or testosterone. He chose testosterone. “It was much less about ‘I am a man now, and I am going to take testosterone, and my pronouns will be honored, and I will wear these clothes, and I’m going to tell everybody at work,’” he explains. “It was much more about not going back on estrogen.”
After several years on the frontlines fighting for the rights of intersex people, Ambrose started to burn out. “I kept doing the public speaking and activism and writing and traveling and speaking and things like that,” he says. “Then I kind of just hit a wall of inexplicable depression, and I really had to step away around 2015 and 2016, which really broke my heart.”
Now, Ambrose is sharing his story again in The Secret of Me. When Hughes-Hallett learned of Ambrose’s experience with the John/Joan Rolling Stone article, it solidified her plans to center the documentary on his story. “The fact that Jim actually picked up a copy of Rolling Stone and learned about the John Money Story himself, as a storyteller, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s perfect, because then I don’t need to crowbar that story in — it exists organically in Jim’s journey,’” she says. In addition to hearing from Ambrose directly, the film features interviews with Colapinto, the urologist who performed Ambrose’s surgery, intersex activists, and archival footage of Money, who died in 2006.
When work on The Secret of Me began, Ambrose had been retired from activism for several years. “When I was first approached by Grace, it was my understanding that there would be more people — that I’d be on the screen for five minutes as part of an ensemble,” he says. “I still remember the phone call where Grace was like, ‘We want the story to be you.’ I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, I would have said no if she had come to me right away.’”
But then he started thinking. “I work at a university with some pretty progressive people; I’m not going to lose my job,” Ambrose says. “I have an incredibly supportive partner who I’ve been with for a long time, who knows me and loves me fiercely. I have a family that loves me and supports me. So I thought with all of this privilege, I’m obliged. If I have the opportunity to tell people my story, so they feel less alone in this world, then that’s worth everything.”
Hughes-Hallett believes that telling this story is especially important in the current political climate. “I’m glad that this is coming out now and not last year, actually, for that reason, because it’s even more important to get the message out there and to make sure people see this and understand what it’s actually about,” she says. She hopes the film raises awareness of the surgeries performed on infants with DSD and their far-reaching implications.
“My ambition was to get create a narrative that was interesting and edge-of-your-seat and fast-paced enough to keep today’s very distracted, impatient audience engaged for 90 minutes, and hide that education within that strong narrative, so that people leave thinking, ‘Wow, I just watched a story that blew me away. And also, oh, wow, shit. Didn’t know that. OK, I know that now,’” Hughes-Hallett says.
Ultimately, Ambrose wants viewers to come away from the film with a better understanding of kids with DSD, knowing that there’s nothing disordered or wrong about them.
“There’s nothing about their bodies that threatens the world,” he says. “There’s nothing about their bodies that threatens themselves or their families. They are not problems or mistakes to be fixed. The intended erasure is damaging to the child, and to the families and the people that love them. Bodily autonomy and self-determination are subjects that are important to everyone, and when they’re not honored — and when they’re not addressed and respected — it destroys lives.”
For more information on intersex issues, get in touch with interACT, an organization that works to empower intersex youth and advance the rights of all people with innate variations in their physical sex characteristics.
