Why I went from wanting to hide my reproductive condition to sharing my story in a movie at TIFF

Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This TIFF 2023 edition by director Molly McGlynn focuses on her film Fitting In.

I make films about disclosure. My first feature, 2017's Mary Goes Round, about a closeted alcoholic who makes amends with an estranged father, was more personal than I was willing to say at the time. Years later, I'm now sober. You can do the math there. 

This time, my disclosure is intentional. My second feature film, Fitting In, is based on my once-very private experience being diagnosed with a reproductive condition called MRKH Syndrome (named after four male doctors) at the age of 16. The condition, which some categorize under the intersex umbrella, meant that I was born without a uterus or cervix and with a shortened vaginal canal that had to be "fixed" before I was able to have penetrative sex.

Before I really knew what kind of sex I wanted to be having and with whom, I was handed a box of terrifyingly intimidating medical dilators and told to work on making a vagina. Accommodating a man was the priority. What I wanted and needed could come later, I guess?

For most of my life, this has been a source of shame — a fact about me that I shared with those around me in half-truths. I was afraid that the whole truth would expose what I felt for so long: that I was a partial woman, a half-formed thing, a chromosomal woman who existed in bodily purgatory. But I knew that this story needed to be told.

The film focuses on a 16-year-old girl, Lindy (played spectacularly by Maddie Zielger), whose burgeoning sexuality and new relationship are both jeopardized by this nuclear bomb of a diagnosis. What begins as a perfunctory trip to the doctor to get birth control before having sex with her charming and horny boyfriend (D'Pharaoh Woon-a-Tai) turns into humiliating medical poking and prodding until she is at last told she has MRKH. Her plans to have sex are stalled, and she realizes she will never carry a child — something almost impossible to grasp the magnitude of at 16.

Like me, Lindy is given a box of dilators and a clumsy explanation by a nurse ("It's like vagina bootcamp!") and sent home to reckon with the absurd and private agony of needing to DIY your vagina. Lindy thinks that if she can just do this one thing, this unfixable conundrum will be solved. But the conundrum of ourselves cannot be fixed. Bodies are not the problem; the impetus to fix them without a patient's physical and emotional autonomy is.

It was important for me to capture moments of absolute anguish of the medical experience — having a pelvic exam in front of a group or residents; the callousness of a male doctor telling you to practice dilating with a boyfriend "unless he's well-endowed" — as well as the absurd and, in hindsight, traumatically funny and bumbling moments, like your best friend finding your dilators and thinking they're butt plugs.

I wanted to make this movie more fun than my lived experience because I wanted audiences to be pulled into something they may otherwise be alienated by — and also because with time and wisdom, I cannot help but see the dark humour in all of this. Nothing is funnier and sadder than a body.

The experience of this diagnosis prompts a barrage of questions that cannot fully be answered (at least by just me or by one film). How does a woman define herself in the absence of the parts and functions that we have so socially and culturally intertwined with womanhood? Is this condition intersex? What does it mean if I am or I'm not? Can (heterosexual) sex for women, in the absence of the potential for reproduction, become primarily about pleasure?

These are enormous questions that teenage Lindy cannot possibly answer but explores in the film through the process of trying to "fix" her body in order to have sex. She finds herself sometimes weaponizing her sexuality in order to feel "normal" or seen. Lindy doesn't solve all of these questions in the film. How could she? She's only 16.

This film is for everyone who has ever felt like their existence was a problem to be solved or who never felt like they fit into the suffocating boxes the world wants to package us in. At one time, I so deeply wanted to be in that box — to be perfectly unnoticeable — but that time is thankfully over. I will no longer contort myself to fit any space the world asks me to be.

I am both, and neither. And I am free.

Fitting In screens at TIFF 2023 on Thursday, September 7 at 8pm; Saturday, September 9 at 8pm; and Tuesday, September 12 at 11:30am.