Now that the immediate urgency of being homeless, various legal matters and health issues have subsided or vanished with me having moved into a new apartment, it seems only fair that other matters would suddenly push into the foreground. Such as this little matter of me being intersex. And not just a weird little genetic gotcha like (C)AIS or XXY, but in the form of a full-blown chimeric condition called a true hermaphrodite in medical terms.
Which is to say that in Western society I do not exist. Theoretically there should be more people like me around in the West, and thousands around the world. Yet I have never met anyone else like me. Among the dozens of doctors and other medical specialists none of them had ever encountered one either, or they had merely opted to ignore the details and just 'normalised' the babies or infants born with both male and female genitals.
I guess I am an oddity in that I managed to reach adulthood without getting tossed into the hellscape of 'intersex treatments' [1] first. Yet as an escapee I still will not learn answers to the many questions I have about my body. About this second puberty that I'm still in the midst of. In how far the abdominal pains that I suffer are normal for someone with a mostly female phenotype. Why old scars are suddenly vanishing and I seem to be getting younger in appearance over the past few years since this second puberty started.
With no answers forthcoming, I'm left to try and live my life. Even ignoring the childhood and other assorted traumas that I got handed, it's so incredibly lonely and frustrating to feel that one is the only person of one's kind in this world. Though I managed to at least improve the dissonance by having my official sex changed from male to female, it's not a fix. It's still not who and what I am.
Because of the many negative experiences I have had over the past decade, I feel both cursed and stuck with this body of mine. True, one is still a human being, but by not having my intersex and hermaphroditic nature acknowledged, it feels as though I'm only allowed to partially exist. As long as I pretend that I'm just a regular woman who has had a regular youth and regular female puberty, I can get along fine. Since I'm physically primarily female, suffer through the same joys of monthly periods and everything as every other woman, I can share in everything minus the part where I have to admit that I was born infertile, let alone that I bleed internally because my labia have merged.
It's as though I am two people: the part that society accepts, and the part which will not ever be acknowledged.
The same thing is true in any relationship. There's always the feeling that there's this cultural divide, with either side growing up in a different world. People will often tell me that they 'get it' what my life must be like as a hermaphroditic intersex person, but do they really? The many years of confusion and fear as one's body does things which do not make sense as puberty kicks in, along with an increasing dissonance as the image society tries to project on your body becomes more and more mismatched.
Naturally, the only way that I could have grown up as a 'girl', officially, would have been if it was discovered when I was born that I am a hermaphrodite and they had opted to chop off the penis and not rip out the vagina and other female bits, which would be roughly a 50/50 bet. That my current situation forces me to consider myself to be 'lucky' is possibly the saddest part of all. I made it without suffering genital mutilation.
There's the knowledge of what still has been done to me, as well as the questions which I will likely never have answered, not to mention the cold certainty of always feeling like a one of a kind, sort of freak of nature. All of this makes me seriously consider whether life has much to offer to me. Whether I'll ever be truly happy, or whether it'll always be this intense feeling of loneliness and sadness that fills my heart. It often hurts so much just to live through another day, let alone for me to consider my future.
Maybe if humanity decided that we could let go of this 'male' and 'female' distinction, and just treated everyone as a human being, without having to conform to unrealistic labels. As things stand, however, all I can do at this point is play along with society's game even as my heart yearns to finally be allowed to be myself, along with all others who are like me.
Maya
[1] http://mayaposch.com/intersex-controversy.php
4 comments:
1. Life offered you to the rest of us as a gift.
2. I get really annoyed seeing hashtags with more and more letters all the time that still leave out the vital -- and unique, but not one-of-a-kind-- letter "I."
3. You're living your life as you, on your own terms, which makes you uniquely you and indispensable.
Liebe Maya,
was Du hier aus Deinem leben schilderst, hat mich sehr berührt. Wenn ich Dich richtig verstanden habe, fällt es Dir schwer, Dich eindeutig für eine Rolle zu entscheiden. Du möchtest in Deiner ganzen Art verstanden und geliebt werden. Ich denke das ist auch so in einer geistig sachlichen Form möglich. Wenn es aber zu einer tiefen emotionalen Verbindung kommt, wird es kompliziert. Selbst in Schwulen Verbindungen gibt es meistens immer eine Seite, die den eher weiblichen Part übernimmt. Durch Dein enormes Wissen und Können bekommst Du sehr viel Aufmerksamkeit und Anerkennung - da bin ich mir sicher - aber das allein reicht Dir nicht und das kann ich verstehen. Die rationale Seite von Dir kann sehr zufrieden sein - die emotionale Seite ist es möglicherweise nicht. Es ist m. E. sehr mutig, dass Du Dich hier so outest. Ich habe mir überlegt, was würde ich in dieser Situation tun. Ich würde versuchen Kontakt zu Menschen aufzunehmen, die ähnliches erlebt haben. Diese sind möglicherweise "ehrlich" in der Lage, Dich besser zu verstehen. Viel Glück Maya und verliere nie den Mut. Du bist in jeder Weise ganz besonders - das ist Dein Schicksal. Mach mit Deiner weiblichen und männlichen Intelligenz andere glücklich - dann wirst Du auch glücklich. LG Frank aus Hannover
I hope that you find someone that can help you medically and I also hope you find someone to share your life and all you have to offer.
Maya,I wanted to tell you that you are not alone. I suffer from a similar condition. I have no proof for that but I have done a lot of research and found out that yes, the monthly discomfort I have every month is my period. I am 15 years old and I have not even told my mom that I get periods as there's no actual bleeding. I just get monthly discharge. No one will believe me as my genitals look like a male's. I have small breasts which a tee still developing but I also have facial hair. My doctor didn't tell my parents my gender when I was born. He asked them to check it on their own. I also have found some reports stating uncertainty about my gender and also, a report where doctor wanted to abort me. But of course,my parents didn't allow.
Post a Comment