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