Race, religion, gender and the cruelty of segregation

 I'm fairly certain that little more has to be added to the topic of racial segregation: this is a situation where the social concept of 'race' is taken and used to discriminate against the people who find themselves in one of those groups. Got qualified as 'coloured' or happen to be Irish? Sucks to be you. Happen to be Japanese or Chinese during certain parts of US history? Bad choice.

Yet this is just one level of segregation, if not the most well-known and infamous. Yet things get much more confusing and distressing when an individual belongs to multiple of these groups simultaneously. Happen to be the child of coloured and white parents? Good luck figuring out which of these two worlds is least likely to accept you. What is your identity even?


During the Dark Ages in Dutch history, i.e. until the 1960s, segregation based on one's affiliation with a specific church (Reformed, Catholic, etc.) or political system (e.g. Socialism) was the rule of the day, called 'verzuiling' (pillarisation) [1]. Children growing up in these dark times could only play with children from the same group ('zuil' in Dutch), and adults were only permitted to marry within that same group.

This led to tragic stories where some lovers were unable to get married or even meet up in public, simply because their parents went to different churches. Each of these groups had their own churches, schools, soccer clubs, radio stations and so on. The only way to exist within this system was to either adhere to it and belong to one group, or to find oneself essentially cast out of society. What is your identity even?


The cruelty here lies in the absolutism of these identities. You have to be part of exactly one of these groups, and that is the only option that exists today, tomorrow and at any point in the future. You can try arguing with it, but the existence of these groups, and the way that society expects individuals in these groups to behave is something which changes only very slowly and only under immense pressure.

This leads us to the other form of segregation and associated discrimination. The one based on gender (biological sex). For the longest time in human history, most societies have treated women (i.e. female humans) as being not only distinct from men (male humans), but considered the former to be inferior, infantile and thus to be kept away from anything involving responsibility, such as participating in a democratic process.

During the 19th and early 20th century, suffrage movements advocated for women to be treated as equals to men. By the late 20th century this had essentially happened in most countries, but it left intact the two pillars of man and woman. How can there be true equality if these pillars exist, and the individuals in it are treated as being different from those in the other pillar?


Even more so, watch what happens when someone does not fit into either group, as is the case with intersex people. In my own experiences as a hermaphroditic intersex person (a person who is a true hermaphrodite), these pillars in society are disheartening to say the least. Having lived in either pillar for years, it's hard to see the point of the division of public utilities like restrooms and dressing rooms, as well as sections in toy stores and clothing stores into 'men' and 'women'.

What is your identity even?

To belong to the 'coloured' group, you must be from a coloured family. To belong to the 'white' group, your parents must be white. To belong to the Catholic pillar, your parents must be Catholic. To belong to the 'male' group, you must be in possession of male reproductive organs. To belong to the 'female' group, your reproductive organs must be of the female type.

What if you're from mixed race parents? What if your parents are from the Catholic and Reformed pillars? What if you have both male and female reproductive organs?


Society's answer to the first two dilemmas was to demolish the institutions behind them as 'racist', 'discriminatory' and 'unethical'. What society's answer to the latter dilemma will be still remains to be seen. To this day the 'fixing' of this last dilemma is usually performed surgically. Just remove either set of reproductive organs and the problem is gone.

That this 'fix' is about as ethical as colouring a mixed-race child's skin tone lighter or darker depending on the choice made by the parents or a doctor seems to be a comparison that society is still more than happy to avoid.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation

On finding and acknowledging your own body

 When I look back upon the years during which I was dealing with gender teams and other medical and mental healthcare professionals as a result of my intersex condition, I think that which hits me the most is the antagonistic attitude towards one's own body that was so prevalent in the communication and general attitude in this world and community around it. The idea that whatever you think that your body should be, that this is what it should be, without any consideration for what one's body is. In hindsight this attitude probably made it inevitable that I'd have such a hard time communicating my simple need to find out details about my body, instead of anything what I wanted it to be like.

When the most common question you get asked is 'what do you feel like?' along with 'what do you want to be?', accompanied by endless stacks of questionnaire forms asking you details about your preferred societal gender role and your feelings about various topics which have distinct male and female connotations in society, then one may begin to suspect that the last questions that these specialists are interested in are questions like 'do I have an intersex body?'.


I remember brushing those questions aside as irrelevant, and filling in those forms to humour the gender team, as I assumed that they were just working through some procedures. Yet as the years dragged on, I began to feel ever more stonewalled and not taken seriously. Even the few tests and examinations that ended up being performed turned out to be not factually correct, as later evidence fully contradicted their findings. Details such as the testosterone levels in my blood, and the presence of female reproductive organs and related in my body, along with indications of my distinct female phenotype.

It's of course impossible to say that any of this was done on purpose, but when I heard from this one rather friendly urologist that my name had come up during some congresses he had been to, and that when he had finally met me I wasn't at all what he had expected, that would strongly suggest that at the very least there's a subconscious bias among these medical professionals that did not work in my favour.


During those years I often found myself confronted with the question of whether maybe I was the one being incorrect here, or confusing matters. Maybe the right way forward was accepting these professionals as the authority on this matter instead of pursuing my own internet-researched and semi-educated guesses. Maybe they were right about my body being that of a regular male and that what I really wanted was to be female. Yet the more I dug into these questions, the less certain I became of anything they claimed.

Even aside from the heavily contradicted medical claims about my body alongside my own objective measurements and e.g. the hormone level reports I got via my GP, and the MRI scan and biopsy findings obtained via private clinics, I found myself struggling with these core questions of what 'they' meant with things like 'wanting to be female', and 'feeling like a woman'. Although at face value I thought that I knew what that meant, the more I looked at it, the less sense any of it made to me.


At some point it begins to dawn on you that all of it was just a kind of smokescreen, or a societal illusion, or whatever you want to call it. Every society defines its own concepts of gender roles, often adding additional categories based on not only one's genitals, but also one's skin colour, country of origin, chosen religion if any, wealth of one's parents, college or university one went to, etc. None of this is real, but we are taught from a young age that all of this matters and all of this is something on which we are supposed to be judged and on which we shall judge others.

For me the breakthrough came when I realised that I didn't need to have society tell me what my body should be like, or what presumed social role I'd have to conform to. That this straitjacket that had been laid out for me in the form of 'corrective' genital surgery and the narrow-mindedness of whatever role society deems fit for people with my ethnicity, education level and current genital set was not a straitjacket that I had to put on and wear. I could instead just be my own person.


There is now an increasing body of scientific evidence that corroborates with these conclusions that I reached after more than a decade of feeling lost and adrift, supporting the notion that each human brain is a unique mosaic, and that none of us are bound to some label or stereotype. That beyond the genitals and reproductive organs we are born with, there is nothing tying us to 'being male' or 'being female'. They're merely descriptors for a part of our bodies which provide no meaningful difference in daily life, least of all at one's workplace or at other public events.

From this we can conclude that the only reasonable approach here is to accept one's body and mind as-is, as to do otherwise would be to restrict oneself to a society's views of what is right and proper. To accept a societal role is to limit oneself as an individual, removing possibilities and a future that could have been. This can be observed in things such as 'female' and 'male' behaviour, along clothing, decorations, toys and even specific colours which a society will restrict to specific groups in society.


For myself, when my body decided to wrap up this 'puberty' thing and finalised the development of female secondary characteristics which it had been chiselling away at for more than two decades, it didn't mean that I lost anything. For me it feels like I do not have a dual nature. Duality would imply that there's some kind of difference, or conflict.

Despite my body being the amalgamation of both a female and male stem cell line, it is still in balance. To me it is a perfect symbol of how ultimately there's no duality between 'male' and 'female'. Both develop from the same DNA, after all, with as e.g. the CAIS intersex condition illustrates merely one (SRY) gene away from pursuing the development of a female or male phenotype. For a CAIS woman her phenotype is female, yet her genotype is male (XY).


Ultimately, nature as well as society are highly complicated structures and systems. Yet the only question which really matters to the individual is whether they can accept themselves for who and what they are, not whether society deems them worthy. Without personal acceptance, there can be no personal happiness.


Maya

We'll always have tomorrow

Memories of the past and visions of the future. That's how we find ourselves moving from childhood into adulthood, gathering more of the former and watching the latter evaporate like a Fata Morgana. In the background there lingers the thought to revisit pleasant old memories and follow their trail. Tomorrow we'll do something with that, we'll tell ourselves.

As our lives wind their paths through the often murky and shadowed depths of the future, we come across many things that demand our attention. To become an adult is a demanding task, albeit one mixed with many pleasures and dangers. While navigating through this new world, our childhood's memories and dreams fade away into the mists, accompanied by the longing echo of 'tomorrow...'.


When the blinding light tears away the fog and shadows, we can suddenly see the full scope of these comforting illusions that have accompanied us during our journey into adulthood. When the message arrives that suddenly there is no more 'tomorrow'. When that person in those memories is no more and the door to retracing that past forever barred.

The choking realisation of the end that awaits all of us as we cling to those evaporating fragments of sweet childhood delusions. Nevermore, sayeth Death, as it swings down its scythe to sever another thread that binds us to our past.

Standing at the grave, all that is left behind are silent memories and turbulent thoughts.


Farewell.


Maya