The trauma of proving a negative: the transgender delusion

 I think it is fair to say that one's identity is a crucial part of one's overall well-being. To know what your body is, to know your own mind, and to understand one's place in the larger whole. When any of these elements are incomplete or missing, one's mental health suffers.

When I think of myself in the period between me finishing HS and my parents divorcing followed by the repeated moving to new homes, it'd seem reasonable to see this as the time when I first began to firmly lose touch with these aspects of my identity. With new, unfamiliar surroundings, no sense of direction when it came to education or a career, I eventually began to also lose any sense of what my body was about.

This was the time when I began to question a lot of things which I had held as self-evident about my body. Which included my sex. Partially using online research and partially using intuition, I ultimately figured that I had to be intersex. This was based on my assigned sex of male, along with the requisite male genitals yet a lack of secondary male characteristics, and what I identified as female secondary characteristics. The latter including the shape of the pelvis and some breast growth during early puberty.


Looking back on this period now, I can see how this discovery gave me a lifeline in a period when it felt that my whole existence had been cut loose and was just drifting around aimlessly. I would figure out what was going on with my body, and build up my life starting from there. With the knowledge of what I was, it should be straightforward to figure out my position in society and my identity.

Many times I have written about this already on my blog. The dismissive attitude by the Amsterdam gender team whom I contacted about this. The hostile attitude from Dutch GPs, along with a massive lack of knowledge by these experts about what intersex is and how to diagnose it. The Groningen gender team whose radiologist tried to convince me that what could be seen on the MRI scans wasn't a blind vagina, but just some air either outside or inside the large intestines. The refusal by the same radiologist to contact his German colleagues who had diagnosed my intersex condition a few years earlier.


I have lost count of how many times a doctor, psychologist or psychiatrist has tried to convince me that I could only be transgender, because obviously my body was that of a male. The first & second MRI-based diagnosis at private German clinics which showed and confirmed the presence of female genitalia along with a normal feminine skeleton were dismissed and disregarded by every subsequent visit to Dutch and German hospitals. Except one.

There was the orchiectomy procedure which I required to have my legal gender changed from male to female in the Netherlands was only possible in a country like Germany, where it can be an elective surgery if there are reasonable grounds. Since I suffered significantly from having the physical appearance of a woman, but the official identity of a man, this provided the grounds, and I was able to find a German surgeon willing to prepare the procedure.

In addition to the orchiectomy, this surgeon also performed an exploratory surgery in the perineum, confirming in the process the presence of the vagina. This provided the necessary documentation to have my official gender changed in the Netherlands using a never-before used law for intersex births. Finally, I also got the biopsy report for the testicles that were removed, showing them to be underdeveloped and non-functional.


In hindsight, I'm not sure how much good much of this did me. Yes, it is undeniably a good thing that I had those non-functional testicles removed, as they were not providing any useful service and were a potential cancer risk due to their aborted development. I'm also grateful that I got my official gender changed to 'female', just so that I do not have to keep explaining to people why my appearance and listed gender do not match up.

Yet despite all of the evidence I have gathered over the years like this, it does not feel like it really matters. Even though my body has since that surgery continued a female puberty and it's undeniably 100%-female-except-for-the-genitals - i.e. that of a hermaphroditic intersex person - there is still so much that I do not know or understand about my body.


Meanwhile, the weight of being told over and over by people who are supposed to be intelligent, educated specialists doesn't seem to be lessening. While I got over the worst of the uncertainty, such as that experienced when I stood in front of a mirror and tried to pin down whether I could 'pass' as a woman, the whole issue feels unfinished and the mental injuries I suffered raw and bleeding.

For so many years I was essentially trying to prove to these doctors that I was not transgender and could not be transgender. That me taking female hormones until a few years ago was only to fix a hormonal imbalance I felt existed in my body. The low levels of both testosterone and estradiol should have supported that notion, but instead I was told by the first gender team that their tests showed my testosterone levels to be at normal male levels. Something which was physically impossible due to the underdeveloped testicles.


How does one process this? How can one give this a place, and put it into the past? To this day, my body is the very representation of the struggle over those many years. And even though I know my body to be a hermaphroditic intersex person, it feels that this knowledge has further divorced me from society, instead of bringing me closer as I had hoped.

Maybe it's just the bitterness and disappointment that inevitably came with those traumatic and other negative experiences. To have lost most if not all faith in doctors, psychologists and kin. To feel that society does not care about or acknowledge intersex individuals. To feel like a square block in a society of round pegs and spheres. Being different and a minority (true hermaphrodite) within a minority (intersex) does not give one that feeling that it helps with settling on that identity.


Perhaps a major part of the problem is not with me, but with society. Instead of seeking to define oneself using properties which are genuinely individualistic, the average person's identity seems patched together using existing concepts within that society. Yet within that society it more or less works. Pick a template, tweak it a bit and off you go as a newly minted member of that society.

At this point I think I am coming closer to understanding how this all works, and how I can figure out both my own identity, as well as a way to make it work with society without compromising on my own identity, but it's definitely not the 'as seen on TV' simplicity. Like the documentaries which I have seen about e.g. transgender people where all their worries are taken away by having their genitals and secondary characteristics of their sex removed, or BIID patients who get their legs or an arm removed. Just tweak the body and it's all fine.

I'm pretty sure at this point that none of that is how it works at all in reality.


Maya