Alex (Efron) is a 15-year-old intersex person, with both male and female genitals, who has been living as a girl and using medicines to suppress masculine features, such as a beard, and to attempt to have more feminine features. However, recently Alex has stopped taking her medication. Alex’s parents moved with her from Argentina to a village by the sea in Uruguay, to avoid society’s negative stigma. Her father, Nestor Kraken (Darin), is a marine biologist who has written a book on sexuality and makes a living treating wounded animals found by fishermen.
Her mother, Suli (Bertuccelli), invites friends from Argentina: a surgeon, his wife and teenage son Alvaro (Piroyansky). The purpose, unknown to Nestor and Alex, is to discuss the possibilities of a gender reassignment operation. Alex directly tells Alvaro that she would like to have sex with him. Alex seduces Alvaro and begins to have anal intercourse with him (with her as the penetrative partner), but they are interrupted when Nestor catches sight of them through an open door. When Alex later apologizes, Alvaro admits that he liked it.
Three boys from the village forcibly pull down Alex’s pants to see her genitals. Nestor realizes that reporting this to the police would cause the whole village to know about Alex’s condition. However, Alex decides that it does not matter. Alex also decides that she does not want to resume taking medicines or have an operation. The movie has a quite heavy subject; hermaphrodite. It is also the first movie with this subject, but the movie handles this subject in a perfect way. The movie is not too heavy, the subject of the movie is already heavy enough.
This is a very strong point of this movie. The sex of Alex is based upon biological criteria; ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, her chromosomal typing is; XXY. The environment of Alex see her as a woman/girl because from the day she was born her parents raised her as a girl; her parents gave her the identity/gender of ‘girl’. However her parents let her free in choosing her own identity because they did not choose for a sex operation at her birth. In this way Alex is able to choose her own gender at a later age. I like this because her parents have not taken her choice away.
So the environment knows not better than that Alex is a girl; Alex displays herself as a girl. Alex has to take in account the normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for her sex category. Alex has to play a certain role in order to be linked with her sex. Off course this brings ‘role conflicts’; although she has developed breasts and has a girl’s voice, we eventually discover that she has a penis. Her masculinization may not yet be visible in facial hair and other signs, but her male aggression has already landed her in trouble.
As the story begins, she has overreacted to the curiosity of a close male friend about her sexuality and has broken his nose. So she has also behavioral verbal responses of males. I agree with the parent’s action and intervention with their child because I would have protected my child the same way. The father was very supportive in letting their child choose which sex she/he wanted to be even though they made her feel like her identity was supposed to be female and they try to give her the pills so she doesn’t develop masculine features.
The parents become concerned with their child’s wellbeing so they try to get her to get surgery and choose which sex she wanted to be. They isolate her from the world because they don’t want her to be ridiculed. I think they should have put her in support groups because she seemed confused and they shouldn’t have isolated her from everyone because every child needs support from other people and they need to feel accepted in order to be happy. At the end, of the film the parents accept that their daughter doesn’t to want to have a sex change and they still accept her for who she is.
