AFP, published on Friday, September 23, 2022 at 12:10
A new nugget of France tv slash, the series “Tender Flesh” paints a sensitive portrait of an intersex teenager, delicately addressing a subject almost non-existent in the media but loved by its creator, Yaël Langmann, attentive to its “fair representation”.
Available in its entirety from Friday at 6pm on the France Télévisions platform dedicated to young adults, the fiction, crowned the best French series at Séries Mania, will also be broadcast on France 5 in the evening.
In dix épisodes d’une vingtaine de minutes, she traces the identity of Sasha (Angèle Metzger), la nouvelle du lycée, generated after quelques mois au féminin après avoir été elevée comme un garçon, ce que ne saved pas ses nouveaux comrades.
Because Sasha, victim of a “lie” and multiple operations since she was little, discovered that she was born intersex, neither a girl nor a boy.
“The word intersex did not exist” at the end of the 1990s when Yaël Langmann witnessed, as a teenager, a similar realization by a friend whose “construction of identity collapsed completely”, she tells AFP to explain the origin of your project
“It was terrifying and overwhelming to watch. This very confident person was doing just fine” until her doctor “told her she was a hermaphrodite.”
This term, “biologically erroneous” according to the intersex activist group, since it designates “half-male, half-female beings, with a double functional genital apparatus”, has given way to intersexuality, which affects up to 1.7% of people. births and involves anatomical, chromosomal or hormonal characteristics not strictly characteristic of one or the other sex.
A taboo subject that aroused the “rejets violents” of the part of the producers requested by Yaël Langmann after it was launched in the writing of son scénario in 2012. I predict, according to the réalisatrice, that it fails raconter this story”.
After a “long way of the cross”, his project seduced producer Clara Laplace, in search of a series on adolescent malaise, then France TV’s slash platform, at the forefront of diversity issues, more audible in a “world that has changed”. .
The result convinced critics, but it was especially well received by the intersex community, rejoices Yaël Langmann, who made it a priority.
He thus asked Loé Petit, co-founder of the Intersexe collective, not to “betray” an entire community. While she best transcribes the feeling of being “abnormal and inadequate” ultimately felt by “everyone around” Sasha.