With everything that has transpired recently it seems easy to overlook the points where my situation hasn't improved much or at all. Beyond my financial and living situation there's one major issue I wanted to have address back in 2005 already and which still hasn't been addressed. It was part of my original set of questions: do I have a vagina, and if so, can it be made usable? The first part of the question was answered with a 'yes' and the second part is still a definite 'maybe'. It's agonizing me that I can not get help with answering that question.
How long will it take before that second part of the question gets answered? When I'm 30? 35? 40? Never? No specialist capable of answering that question has looked at my case yet. The German surgeon who did the exploratory surgery wasn't a reconstructive surgery or otherwise versed in such knowledge. I am not aware of any specialist who can help me at this point. Most definitely there isn't one in the Netherlands. So yes, I can call myself female, and I have a vagina, but I'll never be able to actually use it. That's just bitter.
I had hoped that I could get medical help as a result of the media attention, but the Dutch media has issues grasping the situation, preferring to focus on the bit of happy news and leaving it at that, and as a result the foreign media isn't picking up on it at all. It was my hope that the foreign media would provide salvation, but the earliest that may happen is by the end of this year. If I'm lucky and the lawsuit against the first Dutch hospital (VUMC) goes well, that is.
When it comes to medical help there's exceedingly little I can get here in the Netherlands at all. I do not have a family doctor at this point and have only had negative experiences with family doctors in the past. They seem to be consistently incapable of diagnosing even basic things and rarely take me serious in any fashion. Combined with the above issue I distinctly feel that my existence is still as ridiculed and irrelevant as it was before. In the end nothing bloody changed...
I am currently trying to raise more attention for the intersex cause and with it my own situation via another project, namely the World Intersex Society for Humanity (WISH). At the moment I'm collection stories from other intersex individuals so as to provide a single, coherent voice to the impossible situation society has forced us into. You can see the overview and submission rules here: www.mayaposch.com/wish.php?p=stories.
Another project I have high hopes for is a more scientific one, called the High-Level Algorithm Artificial Intelligence (HLA-AI), a new approach to mapping and reimplementing a human-level intelligence on a computer system. So far I have mapped mostly sections of the visual and auditory cortex including their memory cores and the interactions with the so-called linguistic center. The current prototypes revolve around natural language processing/understanding and synthesis. My hope that this project will give my career a major boost. It is also a major self-esteem thing as I have been working on AI projects in some form since the late 90s ever since I caught the AI bug. I'll be blogging about this soon on my Jinzou Ningen/Artificial Human blog.
So yeah... I'll see what happens, I guess.
*sighs*
Maya
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