One of the most compelling arguments that gender orientation resides somewhere other than genitalia is in intersexed people. Because with both sets of genitalia present, there is still a gender orientation self-perceived! Which proves that gender orientation resides somewhere other than that genitalia.
Just like it does for transgender people…
…just like it does for cis-gender people.
There is no reason to hate, no reason to reject…except for one’s own predilection for fear and ignorance.
Should We ‘Fix’ Intersex Children? – Charlotte Greenfield – The Atlantic.
Dear Constance…PLEASE!! Please click thru…
See, humans are born on a gender spectrum, both emotionally and physically. This fact has long been covered up by our cultural paradigm regarding gender: That gender is a binary condition, and variations from this binary are anomalies that must be fixed, and fixed immediately. So, for decades, thousands of parents every year had to make an agonizing decision which was thrust on them by well meaning but wrong medical professionals: let us fix your child’s body.
Here is the problem…they were usually wrong! Long term research is now available which has followed the lives of people who were mutilated as infants…yes, the word is mutilated. Just because the motives were good the facts of the deed remain the same. When they got it wrong, the mental health and spiritual difficulties of the lives of these victims went off the charts.
We are finally becoming more enlightened, and there are now some medical professionals who advocate just waiting until the child can express themself and tell the world who they are, what they are.
Imagine this: you went to bed, perfectly content in your lil life, imperfect as it may be…and woke up the next morning to discover that your body had been surgically altered!! If that prospect makes you feel eager and happy, welcome to the identity of being transgender! BUT: if that freaks you out and horrifies you? Welcome to the world of a transperson who either is in the wrong body by birth…or who has had their intersex body mutilated and in the exact wrong way!
I am excited for this time and place in our society…we have true opportunity to make a way for future human beings to live in freedom and a greater degree of wholeness…and with those obstacles removed, perhaps more time to spend contemplatively, growing and becoming who They made us to be.
In grace with much hope!
Charissa
Constance, I think the biggest obstacle between most people and acceptance of the multiple gender expressions in our world, is ignorance.
Ignorance.
So, the most effective way to eradicate that obstacle is education. In that spirit I offer yet another reblog of a post that does a great job providing such education. As technology has advanced, the nuances of our universe are increasingly revealed…they have always been there. We have defined things by what we see, what we know…it is only natural to do this.
So…I pray that your eyes would be enlightened and your horizons expanded by the following post.
Love, Charissa
If some people are born neither male nor female, what does that say about our traditional views of sex and gender, and as these individuals will grow up to have sexual orientations, how can those orientations be defined? These are the questions asked by Michael Passaro in an essay which explores the possibility for a labeling system which validates and makes visible intersex individuals.
Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about the gender and sexuality spectrum. I’ve discussed many things, from how we can and should define bisexuality, to whether sexual orientation should be a special class from other attractions. I will most likely do separate posts on each of these but one of the topics which interests me most is that of biological sex. What is sex? What are its defining characteristics? And how does it intersect with our many other characteristics and identities?
Lets start with the very basic. What is sex? Seems obvious to most. Sex is being male or female. Right? Well, yes. But maybe no. At least we can say that this is the widely understood use of the word. Let’s note that sex is not to be confused with gender. Gender is the social construct of categories of people and the behaviors and ways people are supposed to feel and relate to those categories/behaviors. But let’s explore a little bit into what it means to have a sex.
I suppose the simplest way to do this is to ask how do we know what sex you are? This is determined at birth by a doctor and is dependent on your developed sex organs. If you have a penis and testes you are male. If not, female. Simple right? We run into problem with this system when we encounter infants born with differences in their sex organs’ development so that they don’t really have a penis or a vagina or a clitoris. So which sex are these people? Well, doctors have decided in the past that they should be altered to fit into a binary system that cannot represent the form of the child.
As you can imagine, this worked for a time but soon came under scrutiny. People were slipping through the cracks. Because most of the children who were operated on were made into ‘girls’ these cracks were pushed open when people started to experience problems related to men’s health. This combined with the growing science around DNA moved sex’s definition to determined more by the the chromosomes contained within your cells.
This has led to even more interesting areas of what it means to be male or female. Almost everyone knows by the 7th grade that a female has two X chromosomes and a male has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. However like all things in life, things aren’t this simple. There are many variations that can occur. There are people who only have one X chromosome. People who are XXY or XYY. There are XXX people and there are XXY people. What do we make of these? If DNA is the defining factor and there are so many different possibilities why do we only have 2 sexes?
Science has created a circular loop. We look at your physical characteristics at birth, and if needed we look at your DNA, but if your DNA isn’t fitting into the XX or XY categories we then look at your physical development again.
I, and many others, propose that there is a false sense of security in there being only two sexes. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a professor in biology and gender studies at Brown University, put forward that there could be as many as 5 different sex classifications (in a thought experiment). There is growing recognition in the scientific field that intersex is a legitimate claim against a binary understanding of sex. Germany and Australia have officially recognized that sex may not necessarily be only male and female. Australia allows for a sex “X” and Germany allows for children to be born with an indeterminate sex (to be determined at a later time).
There are many issues to deal with for intersex individuals. Issues of gender, issues of recognition, issues of bodily integrity and many more. All of these are best addressed by those who are directly affected by such things. So I would like to look at what this means for the rest of us who are (think we are) conventionally sexed. What does this mean for our understanding of sexuality?
The most glaring complication is what this means for our understanding of sexual orientation. In general sexual orientations are in relation to one’s self and the object of desire. Namely, if they are your sex, or the ‘opposite’. This is complicated when we talk about sexual orientation in terms of gender instead of sex but let’s focus on sex. Because now we do not have a binary what does it mean to be ‘heterosexual’? What is the opposite of male? What is the opposite of intersex? This is further complicated dependent on the number of sexes we allow. Can only some people be heterosexual then?
A further complexity arises when we look at what it means to be bi/pansexual. Again, operating under the assumption of sex as the object of sexual orientation, bisexual and pansexuality are the same (because traditionally there is only two sexes). However with the introduction of intersex this changes. Do we then interpret bisexual to mean two sexes? Do we adopt the view of many bisexual activists and say its attraction to one’s own sex and others? Maybe this would depend too on how many sexes we deem there to be.
Lets assume there are 3 (male, female, and intersex). Is a bisexual person still the same as a pansexual one? A person who is attracted to their own sex and others? Or is it a person attracted to two sexes? Many people might say the latter. To those I raise this question: Suppose I am a male, and I am attracted to females, and attracted to intersex individuals. BUT let us also say that I am only attracted to intersex people who resemble females. What is my sexual orientation? I seem to be bisexual. Because technically I am attracted to two sexes. However, am I really attracted to intersex people or am I actually attracted to their female-ness? It seems inaccurate to say that I am attracted to intersex people as a whole because its really only some.
This seems to justify breaking sex down further than only 3 sexes. Lets say we adopt the 5 sex system put forward by Fausto-Sterling (or even more sexes). Now how do we deal with the bi/pansexuality issue? Does/should bisexuality apply to those who are attracted to 2, 3, 4 sexes (and on and on)? Or ought we have trisexuals, quadsexuals, etc.? I’m not sure.
For clarity’s sake maybe classification ought be specific to the number of sexes you are attracted to. But is it the same for a male to be attracted to a female and a male as it is for a female to be attracted to females and female-presenting intersex? I’m not sure. Maybe we ought overhaul our entire classification system? Maybe the number is not the important bit but the specific sexes we are attracted to. Is it better to have a more complicated but also more comprehensive/accurate system?
Its clear that the system that we have doesn’t work. We can’t decide how to determine sex, let alone tell how many there are. The current binary places people into tiny boxes and clearly others many. It has been used to justify altering infants bodies unnecessarily, not only dangerous for the child then but then altering their entire life (forcing them to take hormones and still have the risk of medical complications later). As for sexual orientations – as a classification system we need to make a judgment call as to what it is that is important. Is the defining characteristic the number of sexes your attracted to? Or is the sex of the person important? If all we want is simplicity then clearly numbers is the way to go but I would question the value of a classification system that doesn’t accurately reflect the diversity that exists.
Read more about sexuality here.
This essay was originally published at Issues of Humanity. Republished with Permission. Image via Shutterstock.
Very well written and good article. Please read it, and continue to learn about the amazing continuum that human gender is. Ya know, the rainbow was given as a promise from God…it is a continuum as well!
I know the more I have learned, the more better I feel! :)))
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Jim Ambrose was born in 1976, with, he wrote last year, “genitals that frightened my parents and caregivers.” He had one X and one Y chromosome, but his sex organs were ambiguous, resembling a large clitoris or a small penis. Doctors have an easier time eliminating tissue than adding it, and so they decided to surgically remove the organ and the nearby testes. The baby was raised as a girl, named Kristi Bruce.
When Ambrose was twelve years old, he began to take female hormones. At eighteen, he prepared to undergo a vaginoplasty, the surgical reconstruction of the vagina. Suffering from depression, Ambrose contemplated suicide. “I knew that I wasn’t a girl,” he later told a reporter. The following year, Ambrose obtained his medical records, and discovered what had happened to him as an infant: “I was sterilized at birth—and no one ever told me.” Ambrose was born with a condition that inhibited testosterone production; after adolescence, he began to take testosterone shots, and had surgery to remove his breasts.
Approximately one in every fifteen hundred to two thousand children born each year is diagnosed with a disorder or difference of sexual development. (Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, because it is difficult to measure degrees of physical and hormonal difference, and because many, like Ambrose, may not know they were diagnosed as such.) Some advocates believe the numbers are even higher: by the broadest measurement, one out of every hundred children has some subtle form of “sex anatomy variation.” Parents whose newborn babies have indeterminate genitalia typically follow what has long been the standard medical advice, to have doctors perform surgery to help the child conform to one or the other fixed gender category. Traditionally, the choice has been which gender to assign to the baby, not whether to put a baby through invasive surgery at all.
Today, we pride ourselves on letting children defy antiquated gender stereotypes. Boys can now have dolls, and girls Erector sets; we agree that the salient differences between genders are social constructs, and give little leeway to those who insinuate that, say, women have less aptitude for science and engineering. Yet, even as many fight against the persistence of rigid gender norms, we still separate the sexes as soon as kids are old enough to be potty-trained; when gym class arrives and locker rooms are needed, we push the boys and girls even farther apart. For all the progress that has followed from the enlightened credo that gender is but a construct, we keep hesitating at the notion that sex, too, does not obey strict binaries. Some people aren’t just pushing away from prototypes of sinewy maleness or delicate femaleness; they were born with bodies that don’t conform to the “M” or the “F” boxes on the census form. There are children, in other words, whose genes have not defined for them which bathroom to use, or where to change for gym class; babies can be born with XX chromosomes in certain cells, and XY chromosomes in others—mosaic genetics.
Attention to the complexities of biological variation is growing. Two weeks ago, the New Jersey legislature passed a bill that would grant citizens the right to change the gender on their birth certificate without having gender-reassignment surgery. The bill “revises the requirements for obtaining an amended certificate of birth due to a change in sex,” which can now be done through an official form indicating “that the person has undergone clinically appropriate treatment for the purpose of gender transition, based on contemporary medical standards, or that the person has an intersex condition.”
In early November, Germany—which, in part to combat the legacy of the Third Reich, has deliberately asserted the rights of marginalized groups—became the first country in Europe to allow a third gender designation: X, for indeterminate or intersex. (Australia introduced a similar measure in July.) If a baby is born with ambiguous sex characteristics, it won’t be forced to undergo a normalizing operation just so that nurses can tick “male” or “female” on its birth certificate. The legal acknowledgment of a third category should mean that fewer doctors urge parents to have sex-assignment surgery performed on their newborns. Fewer children should suffer the plight described by one person quoted in a report that helped lead to the new law, a German born with ambiguous genitalia in 1965, who spoke of being a “patchwork created by doctors, bruised and scarred.”
The law has angered some intersex-rights groups, who object to its stipulation that a child “assigned to neither the female nor the male sex … is to be entered into the register of births without such a specification.” The new designation, they argue, still presents a requirement rather than a choice; they want the determination to be a personal decision, not the result of doctors making judgments on the basis of observed physical characteristics.
These advocates feel that the law will do little to combat stigma, and may, in fact, inspire parents to push harder to avoid a formal intersex designation for their children. The law doesn’t solve the problem, in their words, of “the externally determined gender assignment, the practice of sexed standardization and mutilation, as well as medical authority of definition on sex.” The only real solution, some suggest, would be to ban gender-assignment surgeries for infants, which would provide intersex persons with the opportunity to decide, later in life, whether to identify with one gender, or neither.
While certain religious groups argue that sexuality is a choice (and certain sexual lifestyles are therefore sinful), no one makes that argument about biology, which might suggest a certain logic to granting rights to genetic difference before sexual preference. A report filed to the European Commission in June, 2011, implies that the case of intersex persons is more clear-cut than that of gay or transgender individuals: “Intersex people differ from trans people as their status is not gender related but instead relates to their biological makeup (genetic, hormonal and physical features).” By this token, Germany’s measure is a conservative one, addressed to questions of biology rather than identity, and not necessarily linked to the L.G.B.T. movement. Same-sex marriage is not legal in Germany (although civil unions are recognized), and the ruling on a third gender category does not clarify how the intersex designation might affect marriage laws.
While broader cultural developments have begun to clear space for the expression of formerly unorthodox sexualities and gender identities, those who would have once been called hermaphrodites remain even more marginal than transgender persons. But the order in which old taboos dissolve varies without much logic: the movement for gay rights and same-sex marriage has helped the admittedly slower recognition of transgender issues, while intersex rights have sometimes been granted in statutes, like the one in New Jersey, that enhance transgender rights. On December 17th, the Netherlands approved a law that will allow transgender people to change their gender on identity papers without undergoing sex-reassignment surgery, amending an earlier statute that did not grant individuals the autonomy to define their own gender identity. The Dutch law does not include a provision for intersex rights; in November, Maya Posch, a Dutch woman who is intersex and has fought for a decade to have her status acknowledged, announced that she planned to move to Germany. A lesbian in Berlin who wanted to marry might make the opposite move: the Netherlands was the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.
Whatever the sequence, diverse expressions of gender and sexuality are becoming mainstream. In March, Margaret Talbot wrote in the magazine about Skylar, a transgender teen-ager who grew up with doting parents in an affluent suburb, a milieu vastly more open to his gender identity and decision to undergo surgery than would have been imaginable decades ago. “Like many ‘trans’ people of his generation,” Talbot wrote, “he is comfortable with some gender ambiguity, and doesn’t feel the need to be, as he puts it, a ‘macho bro.’ ” Talbot’s story about Skylar is about transgender identity being far less of a story than it used to be.
In 2000, when Jim Ambrose was twenty-four and still living as Kristi, he was one of the subjects of a short documentary, “XXXY,” by Porter Gale and Laleh Soomekh. Ambrose was a bike messenger then, and told the filmmakers that riding all day was an inhumane ordeal: “Vaginoplasty is so fucking disgusting and so barbaric, it’s starting to come out—the inner part of the intestine is starting to come out, stick out.” The film includes an interview with Ambrose’s parents, who seem quite helpless. His father recalls that doctors didn’t present much of a choice: they said—without malice, he notes—that they could simply correct the problem. And that was that. When their child found out about the surgery, Ambrose’s father says, “we tried to explain that we thought this was the best thing, with the doctors. But she was not very happy at all.” His mother adds, “She was real angry.”
Ambrose no longer sounds angry at his parents. In the film, he speaks about forgiveness; more recently, he wrote that parents “were often led to believe they were doing the best thing for the child.”
“XXXY” also contains a startlingly personal interview with Howard Devore, a clinical psychologist who is intersex. Devore speaks candidly about the emotional devastation of growing up as someone doctors consider a freak, someone the medical establishment tried to “repair” at birth. He has spoken with thousands of intersex people around the world. “I don’t know one intersex individual who is happy with the treatment they have received from the physicians they have consulted with over the years—not one,” Devore tells the filmmakers. “One’s sexual feeling, ability to feel like they can couple with another human being, is literally destroyed by some doctor’s idea of how genitals are supposed to look.”
In childhood, as soon as he realized that other kids spent their summer vacations at Yellowstone, Devore says, “I learned to lie. I couldn’t tell other kids I went to the hospital and had my genitals chopped up again.” He lived with a plastic tube attached to his genitals so that he could stand to pee; his urinary opening came at the base, not the tip, of his penis. Cosmetic surgery should not be performed on infants, he insists. “If they choose, later, to have a surgery—if it’s their choice. If I’d had the chance to do that, I wouldn’t have gone quite so horrible an adolescence, quite so difficult an identify formation as an adult.”
Today, Jim Ambrose works at the Interface Project, a nonprofit sponsored by Advocates for Informed Choice, a legal group that champions people with intersex conditions. Ambrose is a fellow of remarkable good humor, on display in a video introduction where he hails the effects of testosterone, “which makes my voice deep, and gives me this hair on my face, and”—he points—”is killing my hairline.”
“I have chest hair; I have much bigger muscles than I did before, because before,” he takes a beat, “I was living as female. And I was living as female because when I was born, I was born with a very small penis, and internal testes, and XY chromosomes. And my parents were very upset, my doctor was very upset, and the only information that they had out there to treat a problem like me was to remove my penis, and take out my reproductive organs, because they didn’t like the way it looked.”
“Remember: your kid is going to want his genitals. Your kid is going to want her genitals,” Ambrose tells the camera. “My mother regrets having my penis cut off and my testes cut out so, so much.”
Watching Ambrose’s testimonial today, it galls to think of this person in 2000, when he went by Kristi, saying that these surgeries would stop within his lifetime. In “XXXY,” he said it like a pledge, and today it’s becoming true: little by little, doctors and parents—and even politicians, from New Jersey to Germany to Australia—are questioning, delaying, and cancelling cosmetic genital and gender-assignment surgeries.
“I’ll get to talk to little hermaphrodites running around, I’ll get to hold them in my arms,” Ambrose says, choking up, in “XXXY.” “I’ll get to tell them—I’ll get to tell their parents how wonderful their children are.”
Photograph by Anastasia Taylor-Lind/VII.
Hi everyone…this is a very good article on a phenomena that is far more common than anyone realizes. If I recall, I think it is more common than cleft palate! If you would, please treat all humans you run into with kindness, gentleness and compassion. You will be better off for it, and so will they! 🙂
One in 2,000 babies does not fit neatly into male or female categories. Sarah Morrison meets four members of a new group that’s campaigning to change attitudes and to help others feel less alone
Saturday 30 November 2013
It has taken Holly Greenberry, Sarah Graham, Dawn Vago and Elizabeth Jo Roberts years to go public with their stories. Born into a world that insists on dividing people into two sexes, they did not always know how they fitted in. They were born to typical families in typical areas of Britain, but none of them developed into typical male or females. They are intersex.
An estimated one in 2,000 babies is born with an intersex condition or a (controversially named) disorder of sex development (DSD), which means that they are born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not fit the typical definitions of female or male. This can include atypical genitalia, chromosomes or internal sex organs.
The women argue that their very existence has been “eradicated” by British society. Generations of children have been operated upon to “normalise” their genitals or sexual anatomy, while official documentation, from birth certificates to passports, requires a male or female box to be ticked. They argue it’s one of the last “human rights taboos” in the western world.
The women have a type of androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), which means they have XY chromosomes, but are partially or completely insensitive to testosterone – they are all infertile.
The group has come together to launch a campaign, calling for the Government to urgently review the way intersex people are treated. Following on from Germany’s decision to allow newborn babies to be registered as neither male nor female, their recommendations include the option to leave the sex on British birth certificates blank, measures to protect babies or young people from irreversible and non-consensual treatment and surgery, better emotional support and increased education.
“We are at a tipping point,” said Greenberry, co-founder of Intersex UK. “Most intelligent human beings would be completely surprised and utterly dismayed at the civil inequality and human rights abuses that healthy intersex children and young adults are facing.”
She added: “We need to sit around the table with the Government because we have lived through it. We are positive role models, and professional and intelligent women, who want to represent the needs of children so that the problems we experienced aren’t replicated.”
In the 1960s, it became the norm to operate on children with atypical sexual anatomy at a young age. Doctors assigned the child’s gender and operated to reinforce it. Although attitudes started to change around the turn of the millennium, and clinicians say they have moved to a more “multi-disciplinary” approach, there is still no record of the number of operations carried out, according to Professor Sarah Creighton, consultant gynaecologist at University College London Hospitals.
This year, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture condemned non- consensual surgery on children to “fix their sex”, saying it could cause “permanent, irreversible infertility and severe mental suffering”.
XXXora, a 33-year-old intersex artist from London, who supports the women’s campaign, refused an operation. She was born with ambiguous sex organs and raised as a boy, but describes herself as “super-feminised from the beginning”. She said: “I never had surgery or hormones. We talked about it, but then I wouldn’t be me. I don’t want to morph into a blue or pink box; I want to stay in my silver box.”
But the campaign is not all about surgery. Certain intersex people, such as Greenberry, are struggling to correct the sex marked on their birth certificates, which makes it impossible to marry and more difficult to adopt children.
Lord Wilf Stevenson, opposition whip and former special adviser to Gordon Brown – who has a more common DSD called hypospadias – supports the campaign and has raised concerns with ministers. “The issue is that the current law has been overtaken by medical technology,” he said.
There is also a need to provide long-term emotional support for intersex people. Ellie Magritte (not her real name), the mother of a girl with AIS and a member of the support group DSD Families, said adults “need and deserve much greater investment in adult DSD care, focusing not on gender, genitals and genetics, but on health, wellbeing and happiness”. She said not all people with a DSD define themselves as intersex, but added: “The main challenges for families and kids is the social context in which we live with these conditions.”
Pia Clinton-Tarestad, head of specialised commissioning at NHS England, said that the NHS is “working to assess the services we commission for intersex people”, and that it understood that “issues surrounding the timing of, and consent to surgery, are controversial”. She added that best practice involves “co-operation and agreement” between child, parents and a multidisciplinary clinical team.
Holly Greenbury
When Holly Greenberry was born, almost four decades ago, doctors spotted a degree of sexual ambiguity. She has XY chromosomes, but also partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, leaving her partly insensitive to testosterone. She was assigned a male sex on her birth certificate, but she did not develop secondary male characteristics during puberty. She knew her gender was female and underwent treatment and surgery throughout her teens. Now, the businesswoman, from south-west England, is in the process of adopting a child. Because she is unable to change her name or sex on her birth certificate, adoption is harder and marriage impossible.
“I’ve never been completely male nor completely female in my genetics. I didn’t masculinise the way a male was expected to, and my body feminised in certain areas. I didn’t have the words to express myself; I didn’t know how I fitted in. It left me feeling really isolated and, while I tried to identify as male, I couldn’t do it. It was like having a series of repetitive panic attacks. Surgery was horrifically damaging and led to huge number of follow-up surgeries. It all could have been prevented if there had been more medical understanding and if there had been less haste in trying to guess which label best fitted. I should have been allowed to be an ambiguous teenager with the freedom to express my natural gender.”
Dawn Vago
Thirty-three years ago, when Dawn Vago was born, she looked like a typical baby girl. But when she was a young child, doctors told her parents that she had testes which would have to be removed. The married singer and programme director from Warrington, Cheshire, is genetically XY and has complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, which means she is totally insensitive to testosterone. She has been on oestrogen replacement therapy since she was 11.
“The doctors told my parents there was no one else in the UK with this condition. I felt alienated from all of my classmates. I always identified very much as female, but had issues accepting myself. When I first read my file and saw my diagnosis, my world completely exploded. I found a support group and all of a sudden, felt like I wasn’t alone. The moment of joy turned into anger. I was in my early twenties and had spent my whole life and childhood feeling alienated. I realised that it doesn’t have to be this way.
“The doctors told my parents that they should push me into a career and make me become a busy woman, so maybe I wouldn’t have time to settle down and have a family. They said I would find it very difficult to find a partner. Two and half years ago, when I walked down the aisle to my incredibly handsome husband, deep inside I was sticking a middle finger up to the entire medical establishment. I am very proud of who I am and I love my body, but I hate the journey that I’ve been on.”
Elizabeth Jo Roberts
Elizabeth Jo, a 29-year-old freelance journalist from Edinburgh, was brought up as a girl. At three years old, when doctors discovered undescended testes, they removed them without her parents’ consent. She was told at the age of 10 that she was infertile and, in her mid-teens, that she had androgen insensitivity syndrome, having been born with XY chromosomes. She met other people with intersex conditions for the first time only a few weeks ago.
“My parents told me I couldn’t have children at 10 years old. I took it pretty badly. It’s like when you’re winded and all the air is sucked out of you. It destroyed my adolescence. I got bullied quite a lot. When I was 10 or 11, I was first given oestrogen pills, but I used to forget to take them, so I never really developed significantly.
“I struggled with identity issues throughout my adolescence and even in my twenties. I’ve left it late on in life to meet others like myself. It has been one of the best things I’ve done; emotionally cathartic. I suffered quite heavily from depression. I want to help others to not feel the same way. They don’t have to feel bad about themselves. Social change takes years to happen, but we should be living in a society where people don’t feel bad about their identity because they have chromosomes that are variations on the norm. They should have freedom to express themselves.”
Sarah Graham
Sarah, 44, did not find out the truth about her diagnosis until her early twenties. The counsellor from Surrey has complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. She presented at birth as a baby girl and was raised as one, but she has XY chromosomes and was born with internal testes, instead of ovaries. When doctors removed them, at the age of eight, they told her they were removing her ovaries to protect her from cancer and imminent death.
“They should have told my parents the truth about my diagnosis. The lies were enormously damaging to me and affected my life. They put me on oestrogen replacement therapy when I was 12 years old but, if they had left my body intact, I would have produced hormones naturally. Every six months, I was prodded and poked by an army of medical students.
“Once I saw my diagnosis, I felt like a total freak, like I didn’t belong, and was offered no support. I felt like the only person in the world with the condition and that no one would love me. I went into a massive period of self-hatred and self-destruction, which fuelled a drug and alcohol addiction. Children need to be able grow up intersex if they want and parents shouldn’t be so pressured to make a decision. We must be given the space to exist.”
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