Truth to be told, I and others with me often feel as though we are some variety of fantastical creatures; rare and illusive like unicorns and fairies. When someone spots one of us, it's as though a wonderful world never before imagined opens up to them, with myriad new possibilities and ideas. And yet what we symbolize at least at this moment in time isn't something of fantastical discoveries and freedom, but merely yet another tragic chapter of oppression, suppression and eradication in Humankind's history.
For we are intersex individuals. We are born like every other human being, but the society we are born into follows an almost movie-like cliche of binary variation between individual human beings: either male or female. Each is neatly differentiated by a specific set of reproductive organs, surrounded by myths, preconceptions and tired old jokes, expected to find an individual with the other set of reproductive organs and to produce offspring. And all was well.
Unfortunately Mother Nature/evolution doesn't work like that. Things like sex chromosomes, gender, biological sex, determination of sex and hermaphroditism form a fluid continuum throughout the Animal Kingdom. Whatever works goes. Cliches bred in oppressive human systems have no relevance on reality. Yet human society has imposed its own meta-reality on top of this reality. What used to have many shades of grey now only has two very distinct shades of black and white. And thus all of us - the shades of grey - vanish into the Aether.
I'm being forced to defend in just over a week again that I as an intersex individual not only exist, but should also be recognized as such and acknowledged to have the same human rights as every other... well, human. This to me indicates that society in general, or at least the medical and political systems governing it, do not recognize me as being a human being. I do not get those human rights, ergo I'm not human. Just like how African slaves in the old USA and elsewhere were considered to be inferior humans, more beasts, and thus didn't deserve to be treated like a human being.
What I did get offered, was to essentially commit suicide. I'd have to give up my physical body and the emotional and other attachments I might have to it. The brainwashing by physicians and psychologists was supposed to take care of this. This is the same thing which happens to many intersex infants every day again, world-wide. Yet they do not even have the reasoning power or awareness to realize that being forced to adopt a sex and accompanying gender role is a violation of not only basic human rights. It violates the basic tenet of being a living, breathing being: to survive and to thrive.
Yet refuse and you find yourself cast out of society, in so many ways. Sure, I still pay my taxes, have a place I live in and shop at the local grocery store like everyone else, but that's just this shell which is tolerated to exist. Me as a person, a human being, a living, breathing being who might want to feel acceptance and joy at least once in a while...
Giving up this body and mind would lead to acceptance, refusing to give it up, leads to being cast out and shunned. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't.
Revolution has a nice ring to it.
Maya
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