Sunday 14 July 2019

Why transsexuality hurts intersex people

It's been nearly fifteen years now since I first visited a gender team. This was in early 2005, when after an extremely confusing puberty I deduced from online references that I was most likely intersex. Part of the evidence involved my skeletal features and my general physique. I figured that I would get medical help with this matter soon. Yet as it turned out, I'd be forced to be my own physician for a lot longer than I had imagined.


My skeleton is absolutely that of a female human, with its wide, tilted pelvis, that causes the thigh bones to rotate inwards to effect the female way of walking. It also causes the inwards curve on the lower part of the 'S' that forms the spinal column. I also have the outwardly set lower arms, which presumably evolution engineered so as to allow lower arms to not hit the sides of the wider hips.

Add to this the lack of any masculine features in the skull, such as an eyebrow ridge, and it's obvious that my skeleton is devoid of any features that are masculine. The other features, however, are all secondary female characteristics that would have developed during puberty. This all seemed to point strongly towards the conclusion that despite the outwards appearance of my genitals, I was in fact not male, but had to be intersex.


At the gender team, however, my opinion wasn't shared. Though first seemingly accommodating, a blood test for testosterone levels and a urologist appointment were scheduled. The first would supposedly show that I had regular male hormone levels, and the second ended with me being told by this urologist after some unenthusiastic external prodding that no sign of me being intersex had been found by him.

Quickly this situation devolved into me being pushed into the transsexuality protocol, with numerous discussions with psychologists and kin revolving around why I'd not just simply accept that I was not intersex, but transsexual. After two years of this, the final drop was a fake-out where a previously extended offer - to start on hormone therapy towards a female hormone balance and skip the transsexual protocol - was brutally retracted and with me subjected to a ten-minute monologue of how I'd have to stop being so difficult and that following the transsexual protocol towards gender-reassignment surgery was the only option for me to get what I want.

Suffice it to say, that was the day when I decided to become my own doctor again. Getting hormone level tests via my GP was easy. Obtaining the hormones via the internet was too easy and even affordable. Calculating the right doses took a bit of effort, but was doable. That was the moment when I figured out that I had neither typical male, nor typical female hormone levels.


Testosterone was being produced at elevated levels for a female body, but not significantly so, while estradiol would be high for a male body, but on the low end for a female body. I also paid out of pocket for an MRI scan of my abdomen. That scan showed me to be a hermaphrodite, with both male and female genitals present, though with a closed-off vagina.

While initially thinking that this MRI scan in 2007 might change things, this quickly resulted again in my getting stonewalled in the Dutch medical system, with doctors there insisting that nothing could be seen on the scans, and that I was just male, and transsexual. After shifting gears in 2011, I would focus on getting my official gender changed from male to female using a Dutch law aimed at intersex people, to finally put an end to the mass-confusion in waiting rooms due to this official gender not matching my phenotype.

I managed to get the required orchiectomy ('castration') that the Dutch law required to prove that I could no longer be fertile as the old gender. The resulting biopsy of the removed testicles showed that they were underdeveloped, explaining why they had never produced significant amounts of testosterone. This just added to the body of evidence about me being intersex, along with the exploratory part of that orchiectomy surgery, where the surgeon opened the perineum and found the entrance of the vagina.

Fast-forward another eight years, and the same pattern repeats over and over. I can try my utmost to find solid evidence about me being intersex, but it will be denied and I will be pushed back into just giving up, admitting to being transsexual and playing that game. Giving up, getting my body cut up and my spirit broken. Never being allowed to just be myself.


When I say that I hate transsexuality [1], it is from the above described perspective. If transsexuality didn't exist, would I have had to spend fifteen years (and counting) suffering through this non-existence with a condition that is more than real to me? Will there ever be an end to this? Is giving into what feels like the tyranny of transsexuality the only option that's being provided other than to simply end one's life? I question this.

And I'm not the only intersex person to feel this way. A good (trans) friend of mine mentioned recently on Twitter how she had been told the same thing by other intersex people she knows: how the insistence of the medical system and society to force intersex people to be like transsexuals is harming them. It feels both positive (confirmation) to hear this from others, though it also makes me feel terribly sad that so many of us intersex people are affected by this.

I will never judge a person for something what they are. I will however judge anyone based on their actions and deeds. I will judge those medical professionals and kin who caused me and so many others like me such untold suffering and trauma. They made us feel disgusted and have our traumas triggered at the mere mentioning of 'transsexuality', and who made being confronted with transsexual people such an awkward and at times traumatic experience.

As mentioned in the linked post as well, I would love to be able to find a place for this trauma, but I cannot do so while the cause behind it hasn't ended. Transsexuality is still hurting us intersex people, and those hateful, ignorant doctors will keep inflicting that same blunt instrument of transsexuality on us intersex people until we finally all submit to it, giving up our own identity.

I cannot find medical help for my intersex condition, even as it changes, causes discomfort and pain, with possible harmful long-term implications from the closed-off vagina. All I can be to the medical world is either a regular woman/man or transsexual. As I'm neither, I do not exist.

Here's to being invisible and hurting in so many ways.


Maya


[1] http://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/06/torn-between-hate-love-and-hope.html

1 comment:

Tom Farrier said...

You never back down from a conflict.

Good.

It seems like the fundamental problem might be the political activism that has been associated with "gender identity" versus the reality of developmental differences that actually create intersex people. Your choice has been not to choose, which I salute.

The unspoken issue may be that trans people obviously want to feel like their bodies match their perception of themselves, but they also want to adopt a gender identity that matches their self-image, straight or gay. You always have charted your own path in that regard. You occasionally have observed that you are attracted to women, but you also have mentioned a few instances where you have drawn appreciative male comments. Both seem completely consistent for you as a person.

For my part, I find Maya Posch a genuinely interesting person who happens to be attractive as well.