Conclave: ‘The world needs to know about the injustices intersex people face’ says filmmaker Pidgeon Pagonis (EXCLUSIVE)

[This article contains Conclave spoilers]

I can’t count how many times people have asked me, “Have you seen Conclave?” One kind soul on Instagram even offered to pay for my ticket: ‘Hey Pidgeon…have you heard of the movie Conclave yet? It just came out and it has some Oscar buzz…I’d be more than happy to get your ticket for you.. It’s not a movie that on the surface looks like something you’d be into, but trust. I think you want to watch it. But I won’t spoil it for you.’

The thing is, the moment I read that, I already knew the twist. As an out intersex person for the last 15 years, whenever people get excitedly insistent that I must see or read something, it’s almost always because there’s an intersex moment.

Watching Conclave, set in the Vatican, immediately took me back to my first time out of the US. I was a second-year university student, tagging along with a friend on a trip to Italy. It was December – cold, but still the most magnificent place I’d ever seen. The thrill of literally tripping over ancient history was something Chicago could never quite match. When my mouth wasn’t full of the best gelato I’d ever tasted, my jaw was on the ground.

A year or so before that trip, I had learned that I wasn’t like most other girls at my all-girls Catholic High School. In fact, if you want to get Trump-ical about it, I wasn’t even technically a girl at all. Sure, my birth certificate said female, and my body looked like everyone else’s with an “F” on their paperwork, but my recently retrieved medical records told a more nuanced truth: I was intersex.

(Speaking of Italy, the term intersex comes from the Latin inter – meaning “between” – and sexus – meaning “sex”. Between the sexes.)

“These discoveries rocked my world”

I discovered that my body existed in a liminal space after learning about Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) in one of my courses – a naturally occurring variation where a person with XY chromosomes is partially or completely unresponsive to androgens like testosterone. Shortly after, I retrieved my medical records and found that I had been diagnosed with AIS at six months of age. The pages were filled with horrifying details about the surgical procedures performed to reshape my young intersex body, forcing it into a single category instead of allowing it to exist in between. My external body looked like most other babies assigned female, but internally, I had undescended testes instead of ovaries, no uterus, a blind-ending vagina, and XY chromosomes. These discoveries rocked my world – and not in a good way.

Just like that twist in Conclave rocked audiences.

It’s wild how something as natural and prevalent as intersex people – roughly 2% of the population is born intersex each year – is still kept so hush-hush that it elicits audible gasps in the cinema. It’s as if our understanding of sex development has never been allowed to graduate elementary school.

This silence surrounding intersex lives, mirrors the secrecy in places of power – like the Vatican. The word ‘conclave’ itself comes from the Latin for ‘locked room’ – fitting for the hidden, high-stakes decisions that unfold behind closed doors. After the passing of a pope, Cardinals gather from around the world to meet behind fortress-like doors until they vote in the next leader of the Catholic church. This film’s recently deceased pope, we learn, had doubts “about the church.” Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), who is battling his own internal “crisis of faith”, is tasked with overseeing the conclave. Doubt and instability define the film early on. What follows is a days-long, cutthroat, backbiting affair, hidden from all but the hand-selected men draped in Cardinal red.

“The whole film is soaked in doubt, fear, and instability”

Amid the buildup, there’s that terrific moment when Fiennes tells the gathered men, “Let me tell you that there is one sin I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end.”

This tension – the crumbling of long-held traditions – is embodied in the battle between Cardinal Tedesco, who believes “homosexuals should be sent to prison in this life, and hell in the next,” and Cardinal Bellini, who represents a more progressive future. The contrast is everywhere: ancient Vatican grounds set against cardinals smoking cigarettes in the courtyard while others scroll on smartphones. The whole film is soaked in doubt, fear, and instability.

And that secretive, locked-door decision-making? It reminded me of something else: the so-called “care” of intersex children. The parallels were striking. Just like the cardinals make life-altering decisions for over a billion Catholics behind closed doors, so too do surgeons and doctors make irreversible decisions about intersex kids – without consent, shrouded in secrecy, motivated by fear and instability.

“Duality is inherent in most belief systems”

Christian faith is rooted in uncertainty, relying on belief in what can’t be seen. Isn’t gender much the same? In the ’90s, Judith Butler argued that gender – an elusive and divisive concept – is a set of performative acts, something we enact rather than inherit. In Conclave, the church faces a crisis of faith, but by the end, another crisis unfolds – one of gender. The twist? [Spoiler alert…] the newly elected Pope, Cardinal Benítez [Carlos Diehz], is intersex.

He’s the kindest, most progressive character in the film. While Bellini talks somewhat progressive views, it seems Benítez walks them. He speaks about women (nuns), the poor, and the marginalised. He represents a future that could save the crumbling church (which, in case you missed it, is literally crumbling in the film when a bomb goes off). If I may go out on a limb, Benítez represents Christ – who was originally depicted as both masculine and feminine to appeal to a broader audience, including pagans. The hyper-masculinised versions of Christ we see today didn’t emerge until centuries later in Rome. Yin Yang. Two-Spirit. Shiva and Shakti. Duality is inherent in most belief systems.

“Being intersex has profound implications in today’s anti-LGBTQIA+ climate”

But here’s the thing: as Conclave builds toward its ‘shocking’ moment, it ultimately falls flat. The word intersex is never uttered. Benítez simply states his body is as God made it, as if his intersex corporeality were a mere detail – nothing that should stand in his way of becoming the Pope. Yet, in reality, being intersex has profound implications in today’s anti-LGBTQIA+ climate. Intersex people, and our trans siblings, are being crucified in public “debates” and legislative bills across the globe for the sin of daring to exist.

And then? The movie ends. No deeper conversation, no reckoning with what this means. While I was disappointed by the reveal, I know not all intersex people feel the same. Some of my intersex friends really liked, even loved, Conclave, while others shared my frustrations. For me though, it was a missed opportunity.

In an Oscar-nominated film, we finally make the big screen, but our name isn’t even spoken. It’s a missed opportunity. The world needs to know about the injustices intersex people face. And for once, we had the stage. But instead of opening the doors, Conclave left them locked.

Pidgeon Pagonis is an intersex writer, speaker, photographer, and filmmaker based in Chicago.

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