Saying Farewell To The Child, Or: How Deeply My Country Has Betrayed Me

In four days time I'll be traveling to Hamburg, Germany, where I will undergo the very first surgery ever in my life and also likely the most important one I'll ever have. With a bit of luck I will not only lose the little bit of true masculinity in my body (semi-functional testicles), but will also gain the last bit of female sexuality which has up till now been hidden and denied to me. This transformation goes far beyond the mere physical. With it I'll also leave behind the last part of the child inside me: the boy who wasn't a boy.

While the mental scars won't fade right away it'll still mean that at long last I have won the war to regain my real identity. In order to win this bitter-sweet victory I also needed outside interference. Part of me still can barely believe that it may really happen this time, that before next week the struggle for medical help and acknowledgement finally ends. I was twenty-one years old when I finally discovered what was going on with my body, and I'm now twenty-eight, with both physical and mental scars to show for it.

Part of coming to terms with these 'lost years' is somehow dealing with the treatment by my own country, the Netherlands. As I have documented in a very detailed fashion on my site and blog, there has been a constant denial of my intersex condition and a constant push to have me accept the lie that I had to be transsexual and was just one sex-reassignment surgery (and 3+ years of 'therapy') away from happiness. Here I can only draw two conclusions, based on the saying "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" [1].

Either the Dutch physicians, psychologists and politicians have acted out of malice, knowing very well the damage their brainwashing attempts would do, or they are so clueless and ignorant that they kept at their misguided attempts to 'help' me even as it became abundantly clear right from the start that it was the wrong approach. Whichever is the case, or whether it's a combination of both, the quick acceptance and help in Germany shows clearly what the right approach is like. If I had lived in Germany back in 2005 when I discovered the issue, I would probably have had medical help that same year and not had to suffer all these years of agony. I am more than just bitter about the way my country has and still is treating me. I feel completely betrayed and abandoned by them and regard the Netherlands as a lethal risk.

I would very much like to change the Netherlands or at least make it easy for intersex people to flee from it to safe country, but I'll need to recover from my ordeal first. Here is to hoping that I'll soon get hired by one of the Canadian companies I applied at or otherwise find my way into that country, or another country where I can be safe and feel welcome.

Now that I have finally reached this point it'd be kind of silly to have to admit defeat and commit suicide or so, right?


Maya


[1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_J._Hanlon