A country where homosexual football players are publicly humiliated on prime TV. Where violence against homosexual, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual individuals is commonplace. Where the mental healthcare system has no regard for those who do not fit into into the strict sex and gender binaries. A country founded on the principles of regressive, Calvinistic fundamentalist Christianity.
This is the country in which I grew up and lived for almost three decades. Nearly half of it was spent fighting against the medical and mental healthcare systems, as well as uncooperative politicians. Throughout those years I faced outright refusal by doctors and psychologists to acknowledge my intersex condition. Worse, they did their best to make me get back into the gender and sex binary by trying to make me believe that I was transsexual. Other doctors refused to treat me due to being intersex, or called the cops on me. Getting beaten up and humiliated by cops is the stuff of nightmares.
This country is the Netherlands. Of all the things I regret in life it has to be having been born into this particular country.
I do not regret being born intersex. I do not regret being lesbian. I do not regret being gifted. There's nothing wrong with my body, or with me as a person. In many ways I lucked out in the lottery of life with how I got started. However, all of it just could not overcome being born into the wrong country.
I wrote before about how grateful I am that the EU exists, that I could just get a job in Germany, move over and register in my new home country. Thanks to that I finally found the right doctors and other help for my intersex condition. Later this year I will learn what my options are for reconstructive surgery, to fix the closed-off vagina I was born with.
Leaving the Netherlands was the best thing I did in my life so far. I only regret I couldn't have been born in Germany or another country with a similar liberal attitude towards life.
Maybe I just suffered from country dysphoria without realising it for the longest time.
It should all be fine now.
Maya
1 comment:
I often say we are born on the wrong planet. Whatever country one goes to there is this stupid drama and discrimination. Just the only differences are is that some countries are more understanding and less ignorant than others, but mostly are still ignorant when it comes to support for those of use who had forced surgery done, so we can get on with our lives once things are more or less understood, recognised and solved, but even the support is ignorant. I don't know how long either of us can cope like this,
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