The third act twist in “Conclave” has nothing on the labyrinth of secrets buried in Grace Hughes-Hallett’s documentary “The Secret of Me,” an intricate, shocking, and deeply affecting documentary about a medical scandal that has rocked the intersex community worldwide since the late 1960s. Rest assured that the subjects at the heart of this film are granted — and invited to demonstrate — a degree of interiority that was missing from the catty pope movie.
As much as the queer umbrella shelters a wide variety of non-hetero and non-cis identities, there’s been a glaring lack of popular and societal understanding — let alone acceptance or cinematic representation — of intersex folks, or what intersex even means (Julie Cohen’s energetic “Every Body” being a notable recent exception). It stands to reason that a scandal that has ruptured the fabric of the intersex community would also receive partial, inconsistent, and/or niche attention. “The Secret of Me” seeks to change that by introducing the world to Jim Ambrose, whose story is told over the course of this film’s nimble and highly involving 80 minutes.
It’s a story that Hughes-Hallett begins by immediately addressing a conflation that certain audiences may otherwise have been liable to make: This is not a transgender story, and it’s certainly not a story about sexual orientation. A bearded, somber male-presenting person, whom the year-stamped intertitles introduce to us as Kristi, stares at the camera after some archival footage of their beatific childhood in conservative Baton Rouge.
Kristi was a happy child who became an unhappy adolescent, desperately attracted to women but deeply uncomfortable in her own body. When she was a teen, her mother tearfully confided in her that soon she will need a surgery that will make it impossible for her to have children. To keep the “family secret,” Kristi undergoes a vaginoplasty. Until then, she had “no hole down there,” as she later divulged to her childhood best friend.
Shortly thereafter, Kristi attends a college feminist studies class where her world is turned upside down. A chapter in a textbook called “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants” floors her and sends her flying to the hospital for her birth records, where she finally uncovers the truth: She was born with a phallus deemed too tiny to be a penis, and her testes and other organs were surgically removed when she was a baby. She was thus raised to be a girl. Enraged at her parents for having followed the advice of the urologist, Kristi would soon leave Baton Rouge. She would begin her journey involving further surgeries and life-saving therapies that would transition her to who she is today, an intersex person named Jim Ambrose.
Building on her work producing “Three Identical Strangers” — a rousing non-fiction about triplets separated at birth by a New York adoption agency and how the heart-eyes-emoji mainstream coverage of their reunion scarred their futures while burying the lede — Hughes-Hallett’s mission here is to be forensic and educational; to contextualize the bad guys’ good intentions, yes, but mainly to allow the voices and lived experience of some people born as intersex to subvert that context. Built around an arresting sit-down interview with Ambrose, Hughes-Hallett deftly weaves in subtle re-enactments, a trove of archival footage, (overabundant) pans to photos, and a variety of jargon-decoding graphics.
By the time the word “intersex” is actually uttered around the doc’s twentieth minute (by a dashing clinical psychologist named Tiger Devore), Hughes-Hallett has smartly articulated the conflation at stake here. Transgender folks are categorically different from intersex folks, as are their particular obstacles, even if they might be at the mercy of similar oppressions, sociopolitical contexts, and power-mad therapists (another parallel “The Secret of Me” shares with “Three Identical Strangers”). Hughes-Hallett effectively argues that the nature vs. nurture debate is far more complicated than its simple-minded middle school classroom avatar would allow.
It’s a gift to have an otherwise harrowing medical scandal narrative quadruple up as a science documentary, a slice of queer activism history — one joyful archival video of the first gathering of intersex folks in North America, led by the film’s third key character, Bo Laurent, courses with the profound serotonin rush of feeling seen — and a searingly personal confessional of the repercussions also on parents and families, who Hughes-Hallett is careful to not carve out as villains. In fact, the hero-turned-villain rhetoric surrounding Dr. John Money, the egotistic therapist whose published recommendation still promotes these surgeries, is skillfully baked in.
To witness the milestones in Ambrose’s pursuit of an apology is cathartic, even if it’s a stroke of fantastic luck for the director that Jim already knew Bo and Tiger through their time in the 1990s, and was familiar with the Rolling Stone story on patient zero, a boy named David Reimer whose botched castration started the cascade of gender reconstruction surgeries on an untold number of babies. It’s a stroke of luck that Hughes-Hallett capitalizes upon with intricate editing, attention to exposition, and the earned trust of her informants.
“The Secret of Me” checks all the boxes of an accessible, judiciously contextualized exposé documentary. If it sometimes feels pat, or doesn’t boast the grand mythology or aesthetic bounce of “Three Identical Strangers,” or occasionally edges just a tad towards the foibles of a bygone cable TV show like “Forensic Files,” chalk it up to the nature of the terrain. Such delicate subject matter must also enlighten, entertain, and feel satisfying. Jim Ambrose’s arc as charted does all of that. Hughes-Hallett’s film insists that the surgical gender reassignment Ambrose received at the behest of the social binary cannot ever fully be overwritten or undone, just as it makes clear that Ambrose himself remains forever impossible to invalidate.
Grade: B+
“The Secret of Me” premiered at SXSW 2025. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.
