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“Intersex People Don’t Need To Be Fixed”: Grace Hughes-Hallett on The Secret of Me
The Secret of Me A seemingly breakthrough medical innovation from the ’60s set off a still-ongoing worldwide trend of surgeries performed on “atypical” babies. Those surgeries were celebrated in the context of the gender equality movements of the 70s, but over the long tail of history, the trauma inflicted by this innovation revealed those marginalized by the results: a largely hidden and, per the stats, sizable community of people worldwide assembled under the queer umbrella.
Premiering at SXSW 2025, The Secret of Me is British director Grace Hughes-Hallett’s directorial debut, but you may already know her as the producer of 2018’s Three Identical Strangers. The main subject of The Secret of Me is Jim Ambrose, born in Baton Rouge in 1976 as Kristi. The doc makes us privy to Jim’s super personal story while artfully looping in two intersex activists, Bo and Tiger—and, finally, the late, once hailed New Zealand-American psychologist John Money, on whose recommendation doctors globally still perpetuate unnecessary, life altering surgeries on babies.
Filmmaker: What is the connecting line between your producing work for Three Identical Strangers and directing The Secret of Me?
Hughes-Hallett: They’re both stories I came across myself. Three Identical Strangers came about from a conversation with a New Yorker friend at the theater in London. I just produced a feature doc about adoption called The Dark Matter of Love and she said, “That reminds me of this New York based-story, about this adoption agency that separated twins and didn’t tell them.” I went home, Googled that and the result is the making of Three Identical Strangers.This film came about via a conversation with my brother, who is a urologist. It’s pediatric urologists who do these surgeries on intersex children—he’s not a pediatric urologist, I might add, and has nothing to do with these surgeries. But he’d been at a medical conference and said, “I had no idea these surgeries happened and now there were all these adults who were very unhappy with what was done to them.” So, that sparked my interest. By pure coincidence, there is this God-complex psychologist at the center of both films. What’s also really odd is that last year I also made a documentary podcast series called “Dangerous Memories,” which also has a sort of therapist-type figure with a God complex at its center. So, what that says about my brain, I don’t know [laughs].
The Secret of Me was slightly different from Three Identical Strangers, [where] the story that jumped out at me [with the latter] on day one was basically the story that you saw in the film. With The Secret of Me, I came to understand the past few decades of the history of the intersex community, and the present, because it’s very much still an ongoing medical scandal. I fished around for my narrative; I spoke to quite a few different intersex people about their stories, and Jim was one of them. I knew that the John Money story had to be in there somehow, and the fact that it fits organically into Jim’s story was very pleasing to me, because that meant I didn’t have to sort of crowbar the John Money piece and the David Reimer piece [on him in Rolling Stone] into Jim’s story. It exists naturally in there. Plus, Jim is a great storyteller. He has a lot of archive in his past, which is obviously a huge help to tell his story. So, I suppose I cast Jim in a way I didn’t really cast Three Identical Strangers. That’s quite crass word to use for a documentary, but yeah.
Filmmaker: This is your feature directorial debut. For your previous features, you were producer. What was different about wearing a director’s hat for this project?
Hughes-Hallett: It was a long time coming. I started Three Identical Strangers as the director. In 2025, I hope I would have remained the director, but it was a while ago and I was a young woman. That is the truth of it. I’ll leave that there. Any young female filmmaker can probably relate. So, it was a nice feeling to be trusted when I felt like I was capable of it for a while, to be honest. In producing, there’s always that slight heartbreak moment, where you have created this relationship with the story and the contributors, then you have to hand it over. So, it’s a real treat to be the director and to get to keep it.
Filmmaker: Near the one-hour mark, there is a powerful photograph of your three main subjects, Jim Ambrose, Bo Laurent and Tiger Devore. The narrative was already easy to follow, but that photo really brought it together. At what point did you see the story coming together in terms of these three—and later, Dr. Richard Carter—being the main subjects? And how did you find Bo and Tiger?
Hughes-Hallett: Well, again, that’s the beauty of Jim’s story: John Money’s narrative is part of Jim’s general discovery. Jim found out this terrible secret, packed his bags, left Baton Rouge and went to join the nascent activist movement in San Francisco. The founding mother of that was Bo. So, I came to her naturally through Jim’s story, but if Jim had never met her, she still would have been the person that I wanted to interview for this film because she really started the whole intersex activist, “Please end these surgeries, let’s make a noise” movement in the US. Ditto Tiger, who was at the very beginning of that. I don’t know if you remember it, but that grainy VHS footage of that first meeting [in the late 90s] of intersex adults in the US gives me goose bumps, even though I’ve watched it thousands of times now. Watching the birth of something, this group of people who all thought they were the only person on the planet and realizing they’re not, was just lovely.
Filmmaker: How did you work together with the three main subjects? Did you have to negotiate with them about how much they wanted to speak, or were they all very willing to tell their story?
Hughes-Hallett: With Bo and Tiger, it was always speaking to them on a professional level about the work they’ve done in their careers. We did touch a little bit on their personal lives. I think they knew that the story I would wanted to hear from them was about the activism. But with Jim, this film is about his childhood, family and trauma. That was an ongoing conversation right up until the very last week of filming. Things were moving and changing. And that’s that that’s the hardest thing about documentary making, isn’t it? I know that I am right when I say to a contributor, “Please trust me. I’ve got your best interests at heart, and I’m going to tell your story in the best, kindest way possible. I would never put anything in there that you don’t want in there. If you say something in an interview and you regret it the next day, ring me, we’ll get rid of that.” But at the same time, you know this is their one shot to tell their story, so you want to gently encourage people to step out of their comfort zone and talk about things that they might feel shy or awkward about. So, it was an ongoing conversation. As Jim would tell you if he was here, this is not some piece of his past that’s all wrapped up with a nice ribbon. It’s still something he fights with everyday.
Filmmaker: How many production days did you have with Jim as the talking head?
Hughes-Hallett: Two days? Exhausting. I felt terrible. He was so tired!
Filmmaker: The hook at the top of the film is so powerful when Jim, introduced as Kristi, says that this is not a transgender story. I immediately knew that you were speaking to a possible conflation, even within the LGBTQIA+ community, between trans and intersex folks. Did the hook come about naturally, or was it scripted?
Hughes-Hallett: I don’t script interviews, I don’t put words in people’s mouths, but that was an exception. Every conversation I had with someone about this film, pitching it or just talking to friends and family about it, that conflation happened. People get so confused. I knew we needed to eradicate that confusion very quickly. So, I did actually ask Jim to say that—in his own words, of course, but I went into that master interview knowing that we had to get that at the very top of the film.
Filmmaker: That’s excellent. What Jim says could be part of the trailer!
Hughes-Hallett: It is!
Filmmaker: In terms of story structure, I also found it smart how you build in an argumentative back and forth in the first 30 to 45 minutes. E.g. when you first introduce Tiger Devore, it seems as though he is a protégé of John Money, and how Money’s talk of gender fluidity was an idea that people latched on to in the movements of the 1970s. Thus, gender reassignment was considered to be good. You then spend the next hour pulling the rug from under that assumption and show John Money to be the villain of the story. Is that back-and-forth structure something you found in the process of interviewing the subjects or something you wanted to build in from the beginning?
Hughes-Hallett: When we first were reading about Tiger, we wanted to speak to him for his work as an activist. We had no idea that he had been John Money’s PhD student. So, that was a bit of a plot twist [laughs]. That [revelation] came about naturally in his interview. [The argumentative structure] was a narrative device, because if you tell the audience in the first minute of meeting John Money that this is the boogyman, it’s slightly less satisfying as a viewer. Also, to be honest, Tiger actually said that people around John Money understood that [Money] did start out with good intentions. You know, he didn’t start out thinking, “I’m gonna ruin some children’s lives, what fun!” We wanted to reflect that. But his ego ran away with him and he put his own reputation above the wellbeing of others, which is when things started to become unforgivable.
Filmmaker: I’m always interested in how filmmakers conceptualize their audience. As we discussed earlier, knowledge about intersex identities and folks is not prominent even within the LGBTQIA+ community, let alone the general population. How are you weighing that? Some of the information is a little technical, maybe even academic. How do you figure out the tenor and tone of the information and how to parcel it out?
Hughes-Hallett: That was really hard, because we’re telling a story and need people to stay engaged. When people think they’re being given a science or ethics or history lesson, they tend to switch off, or I do at least. I watch documentaries for the story, and if something feels too worthy or finger-waggy or chin-stroking, I switch off. So, that’s what I have in mind when I’m editing a film. With this one, I knew we had to educate people about the very basics, what or who is an intersex person. I like to think of myself as relatively well-educated and well-meaning, and I knew nothing about the intersex community and these surgeries. So, we were all working as a team on the assumption that the viewers would come into this film probably knowing nothing as well. But it was very hard to parcel in those tiny nuggets of education through the story without pulling back from the narrative and feeling like, “Okay, now here’s five minutes of grade-five-level education for you about intersex.” I hope we managed it.
Filmmaker: Of course you want the audience for this film to be as wide as possible, but do you wonder if the immediate audience will be the LGBTQIA+ community or documentary lovers?
Hughes-Hallett: I’d love the LGBTQIA community to watch the film, of course, but I’d be really disappointed if it was only that community that it reached. That’s probably the community that needs to watch it the least. The people who need to are those who don’t know who an intersex person is and have no idea about this medical injustice that’s happened and is still happening. So, I hope it reaches a mainstream audience. I hope it reaches that person on a Tuesday evening who’s sitting down with their dinner on their lap thinking, “Do I watch reality TV or is there anything else out there that might grab my attention?” That would be my dream.
Filmmaker: I assume the international medical establishment is an audience as well, although I don’t know how many doctors watch documentaries.
Hughes-Hallett: Wouldn’t it be great if even little bits could be shown to medical students? I know intersex activists feel that it’s the older doctors who are harder to convince, just because of human nature and we don’t like admitting that we were wrong. Whereas with medical students, they haven’t done anything yet, so they’re more open to the idea of change.
Filmmaker: Regarding one of the documentary’s final scenes, the confrontation of Jim with Dr. Richard Carter [who was the doctor that performed Jim’s gender reassignment when he was a baby] was so remarkable. How did you get that done?
Hughes-Hallett: That was the idea of my amazing producer, Flora Stewart. She said, “Should we try and find the guy who did the surgery on Jim?” She reached him on the phone, they had a chat and he—very bravely, I think—said, “Sure, why not? I’ll meet him. You can film it.”
Filmmaker: That is exactly what you want to hear! It is such a gracious scene. Did you get that all in one take? And what was it like when Jim saw Richard?
Hughes-Hallett: They didn’t meet off camera. They met on camera. When Jim walks into the cafe and Richard’s sitting there, that was the first time they’d ever set eyes on each other.
Filmmaker: Was that always the plan to do it that way?
Hughes-Hallett: Yes. It’s like when we’re like setting up the cameras for an interview; the interviewees always want to start talking to me, and I always go, “Let’s talk about the weather.” Because people always say that once you ask someone to start talking about something again, it’s not real. And I knew that it was such an emotive thing for both of them to meet. They were probably going to blurt out the most real emotional stuff in the first minute. But we were really nervous because we had no idea how it was going to go.
Filmmaker: Did Jim know in advance, or did you discuss with him, the series of questions he was going to ask leading up to the demand for the apology? Or were the questions something he just said in the moment?
Hughes-Hallett: It was just something he said. I had nothing to do with what he spoke to Dr. Carter about. I think he gave it a lot of thought, but that’s his choice. I didn’t know whether he was going to go in really angry or shy. I was hoping he’d ask the questions he wanted to and not be too polite.
Filmmaker: I had a question about the labeling and the chapter headings/intertitles of “Kristi.” The accepted view amongst queer folk is those who come out and have changed their names do not want to be called by their birth name. I feel the label “Kristi” works well in this case, because you’re presenting the biography of this person and you’re giving datestamps, but of course it’s super delicate. Did you and Jim arrive at the decision together to use the name Kristi and not reveal his name until later?
Hughes-Hallett: Yeah, we decided together. We would never have used “Kristi” without his permission. We tried [the doc] with “Jim,” but it just felt it didn’t, work because you are existing in the past at that moment when it’s Kristi and Kristi doesn’t know she’s ever going to be Jim. Jim, in his interviews, never speaks in hindsight. He’s always talking about the moment. I find that immediate way of talking keeps people more engaged rather than talking slightly more lackadaisically.
Filmmaker: Both films bring in the seemingly exciting political backdrop of the times, then show how it actually harmed the subjects. In Three Identical Strangers, it was the rise of psychology as a field and science. In The Secret of Me, it was the gender equality movement of the 1970s as a backdrop for the acceptance of John Money’s work. I find the resort to the political backdrop so important in helping contextualize how and why these mis-interventions happen. Is that something that you were looking to find as a missing puzzle piece in this film or did its inclusion come about naturally?
Hughes-Hallett: You just want to explain the time that this grew out of. Initially in the edit, we didn’t have so much of that, then we realized it felt like it was existing in a bit of a vacuum. Also, it reflects that good intention thing as well. You know, the 70s were such an exciting time, such an optimistic time. This all grew out of excitement about gender equality and equal rights, and it didn’t grow out of cynicism, the kind that we have today. The ’70s were also a bit of a wild west in terms of that kind of stuff as well. A lot of a strange immoral experiments using people went on around that time.
Filmmaker: What are your biggest personal takeaways from working on this film? And what have you learned about the gender-as-construct or nature-versus-nurture debates?
Hughes-Hallett: Jim and other intersex people get frustrated when their story gets pulled into the gender wars that are going on at the moment. Because for Jim, it’s a medical scandal and medical trauma. The truth is that I don’t really want to go there. It’s just so hard not to conflate, isn’t it, when you’re talking about gender? I am a huge ally of the trans community, as is Jim, as he says in the beginning of the film. But it’s a different story. What have I taken away from this film? Intersex people don’t need to be fixed. I suppose there are some lessons there with regard to gender. These intersex babies went through all of these surgeries, and still are, because the way they looked made their parents and doctors feel uncomfortable. Discomfort is not reason enough for surgery. It’s funny, because I went into this film thinking it might address some of those questions. But learning more and more about the intersex experience, it’s just not to do with that. It’s about not doing unnecessary surgeries on babies who you think need to conform in some way to a norm that we’ve created.
