I was probably about six years old when my mother told me about the baby boy she almost had. The baby that would have been born with an extra chromosome; an XXY. The doctors advised she terminate the pregnancy or risk having a very sick child. This was the 1970s, and little research had been done on chromosomal abnormalities. Today's evidence shows that if my mother had not been pressured to abort that baby boy, he very well may have grown up healthy and strong, with minimal behavioral issues. Nothing like the terrors the doctors had warned her about.

As a sophomore in college, I began feverishly studying the topic of intersexuality. I pored over Foucault's The History of Sexuality and obsessed about Anne Fausto-Sterling's theory of a five-sex gender model. Perhaps, I thought, it was part of my life's purpose to educate people about intersexuality, in homage to the baby who died so that I could exist.

Imagine my intrigue when I discovered the award-winning film XXY. Directed by Lucia Puenzo, this edgy, enthralling film explores the dramatic soul-searching of one intersex fifteen year-old, painfully straddling two worlds. It's a passionate depiction of the tumultuous road from desire to discovery. Puenzo called to discuss the film from her home in Argentina. — Alexandra Godfrey

What inspired you to make this film?
It was a writer who's right here with me — my husband, who wrote a short story about an intersex named Alex, and as soon as I read that short story I knew I wanted to do that film.

Did you have any personal connection to the story?
Actually, not at the moment when I read the short story. Of course I knew quite a lot about it because it was always for me an interesting subject, and I had read the few books — like Middlesex. It was curious for me how few artistic expressions of intersex I could find in modern times, because in ancient times there were so many, it was incredible.

They had a lot of very beautiful artwork depicting people with ambiguous genitalia and it was really more of an open thing.
Exactly, and they were always very powerful people, very respected. And something happened, after centuries and coming into modern times, where they began to be seen as people who had some kind of illness that had to be normalized. So that for me was a bit of a question mark, you know, why had that happened?

It's surprising that it's a taboo topic in today's progressive society. Was part of your reason for making this film to show people who might still be ignorant what it means to have a chromosomal abnormality?
Well, to be honest, at first, it was more of a selfish reason; I write literature, and I make cinema for me. If I cannot take it out of my head. Because you spend so much time with that material, that if it's only for altruistic reasons, to do something for others to see, I think you cannot — that desire is very difficult to work with for such a long time. So from the moment I read the story, I was so captivated by the love relationship of these two, of Alvaro and Alex, that I just knew I had to make something with it. Then, yes, when I began to do some research I realized I not only had something that I really loved as a subject but that the moment in the world was special.

As time has gone on I'm sure you've reached a lot of people who were ignorant about the subject.
Absolutely, many. I had never imagined that for how many people the subject was almost a mythology. Many people they thought that it couldn't be possible. That was a big surprise for me. You can see also how a country or a specific city is like that. In a very conservative city in Spain, everybody in the audience thought it was completely fiction. They couldn't imagine that it was possible. And in places like Thailand or Germany and the States, there was so much more knowledge that this was not fiction and that it really happens.

Were you able to share the movie with people who are intersex in some way?
Yes. The film was supported so much by so many of these people. I think that the film actually did well in many countries because many intersex people went out to defend and speak about the film. I really didn't look in the film for medical realism, in the sense that even though I researched for many months and the script was supervised by geneticists and by psychologists and many doctors, it was important for me that this was a fiction. Alex is not purely XXY; I used more than one diagnosis, not because I didn't know what I was doing but because of this idea that intersexuality can be poetic. And people absolutely understood and defended that. In Italy and Argentina some doctors explained why I was using one diagnosis in the title when the diagnosis in the film was different, and I think they supported the film because they understood that intersexuality can be a place of permanence and not a place of passage.

In your own words, what does XXY mean?
XXY clinically is a syndrome of young boys who start to feminize; it's actually the opposite of Alex. At the same time for me, XXY, outside the medical world, is this idea of the XX or XY together in one same body. It was also this idea of the three letters in the graphics for the film — it's almost like three Xs and the third one has one leg cut off. It was the idea that in a world where so many people look the same, some people have been normalized. Also, for me it was very important to me to find a title that was universal. Everywhere, even in Japan, the film was called XXY.

There's a lot of symbolism like that in the film. Alex's father, a marine biologist, is named Kraken.
Yes, I really liked this idea of this biologist who had studied the sexuality of other species in the world, who always saw Alex as the perfect creature. He never understood why Alex should be operated on or normalized. I thought it was important to have the other worlds where hermaphrodite organisms exist, like the animal world, present in some point. Sea turtles, from the outside, you cannot see if they are female or male. You have to open them.

Despite being very feminine looking, Ines Efron does a fabulous job of playing the ambiguous role and convincing the viewer of her dual existence. What kind of training did she go through?
She worked very hard. She went with me to many interviews with doctors and geneticists and she became a patient to one of them to understand exactly what was going on with her body. Then we spent many weeks with her and Alvaro going out to the street and looking for people whom we thought would move like Alex would move, and it was very hard for her not to look at men like she was a woman. She is so feminine and so fragile, she had to be very careful to go forth from a more androgynous place.

The sex scene between Alex and Alvaro is obviously quite a pivotal point in the film. It manages to be tender, awkward and at the same time almost animalistic.
That was actually the last day of the shooting. By that time we were very close, all of us. We had never rehearsed the scene because that was actually something that I never wanted to do; I wanted to reach that point and to find that scene for the first time. The only thing I asked for was to have a lot of time. We took the whole day and we had a lot of fun actually. The whole team could hear us laughing from the outside. It came out from games and playing. And Alex and Alvaro are very close friends, so that was very good.

Alex's animalistic qualities at this point suggest that sexuality is a human's most innate, primal characteristic.
Many people suggest the film is about freedom of choice and more rational things; I think it is a film basically about desire, no? The sexuality in the film is the most important, and that's what we worked on very much — and I thought that that was actually the only thing that moved the film all the time. I think that when people connect with their sexuality and what makes them feel desire, they are saved.