It's been nearly fourteen years since I began this personal blog. Back then I remember it being mostly an outlet for what I was going through at the time, as a way to let others share in my experiences while I was trying to figure out my body and my place in the world as a then presumed intersex person. Above all it felt like a way to not feel so incredibly alone.
Until earlier that year, I had felt that keeping my struggles with being intersex and such a secret was the right thing to do. I didn't need to share it with anyone, because it simply was something you don't talk about. Of course, when a friend back then not only convinced me that it was nothing to be ashamed of, and proved it by dragging me in front of a (virtual) crowd of people, I found a level of acceptance and understanding that I had never thought possible.
When I look back on the many years of blog posts since that time, however, it's hard to be confronted with the thoughts which I wrote down back then, and the actions taken. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see the spiral my life took, down the path of frustration and depression as I got nowhere with getting sensible answers from medical professionals. When I read those old posts, I am reminded of the frustrated attempts at trying to get answers, to get something changed for the better, only to always end up at rock bottom again.
It's not just the medical side either that's hard to read back. Clearly I had no idea or plan how to get out of this cycle, nor did I know what I really needed, or what would have made my life better. While it's easy to argue that I was obsessed with getting answers about my body, or even with getting answers I liked instead of accepting the 'gender dysphoria' and other diagnoses (e.g. autoparagynaecophilia) I did get handed, at the same time one could argue that it was reasonable to expect an honest attempt from medical professionals.
Especially for something as important to a person as the identity of one's body, as it didn't match the descriptions of male or female bodies, and this uncertainty fed back strongly into the uncertainty I felt about my identity and self-image.
The mean part about this psychiatric theory of gender dysphoria is probably how it flips biological reality upside-down. Rather than having the brain as the neutral element and the body as the element that is subject to certain levels of masculinisation, away from the default female phenotype, it assumes that the brain is what defines a person as either 'male' or 'female'. Because of the strongly held beliefs by the gender teams and other experts I consulted that the gender dysphoria and not the biological model was the appropriate one to use with an intersex person, my interest in learning more about my body was dismissed.
Who cares about what your body is like, when all that matters is what you feel it should be like?
Who cares about this 'intersex' thing, tell us whether you want to be male or female.
We can make you into a beautiful woman.
My body is now working its way through what I presume are the final stages of my long-delayed/extended puberty. I'm grappling with the realisation that my body was essentially female all along, and not male as it was assumed even by those specialists. What does this even mean for me? The most interesting realisation here is that I can still be myself, with any expectation of 'feeling' or 'behaving' in a male/female fashion being just ridiculous societal biases. This is a very liberating and empowering feeling.
Clearly, now that my body has gone off on its own like this and wrapped up a female-style puberty, even years after I stopped doing hormone therapy, I think that the question of whether I have an intersex body has been resolved. No thanks to medical healthcare professionals, sadly.
With that one reason for starting this blog has been basically resolved. All I have to do now is finish writing that autobiography and get it published and then I can move on. Easy peasy.
As for the 'not feeling so incredibly alone' part, I'm honestly not sure in how much this blog has contributed to resolving that. Part of me thinks that due to many of the things that I have written over the years, most likely I scared people away, rather than make them feel like I'd be a person they'd want to learn more about. Heck, I don't even like that person I see when I read back those old posts.
That makes me think that perhaps it is for the best if I were to archive this blog. Saving only a copy for my private perusal, to look up details while writing that part of my autobiography. Maybe this blog has served its purpose, if it ever had one.
Maya
Tuesday 31 August 2021
Why I should delete my personal blog
Sunday 22 August 2021
On the health benefits of having a penis and the horrors of sexual obsessions
UTI is an increasing problem that, if left untreated, can lead to renal damage, sepsis and death. [4] While antibiotics can treat most types of UTI, some types are not an effective therapy [5]. It is the most common type of bacterial infection in women [6]. Here the very short length of the female urethra and the proximity of its exit near the vagina and anus highly increase the likelihood of bacteria like E. coli making their way from the GI tract into the bladder.
The obvious conclusion from research like the above is that the female anatomy is somewhat lacking in terms of features. Especially when one considers that the clitoris is literally a vestigial penis, with the developmental pathways that would have led to it fully developing and the urethra extending and merging into the thus formed penis simply not having been triggered. If this pathway would be restored in human females, it could prevent most cases of UTI and save an incredibly amount of suffering as well as medical and other costs.
So why is this not considered a viable research topic?
For me personally the most fascinating aspect about something like this is that because of my chimeric nature - with both male and female stem cell lines making up my body - I get to literally experience such a thought experiment in real life. With the advantage of this long urethra, I essentially do not have to worry about getting a UTI, even though my body is otherwise female. To say that this is a feature that I appreciate would be understating matters.
If I had to name a disadvantage of being essentially a woman with a penis it's the way that society deals with it. Not just those who respond with disgust when they learn of it, but also those who clearly feel that the right way to respond is to fetishise my body for being this way. I can see this being a major reason why most women would not be interested in such a change, even if it meant avoiding medical troubles and possible complications from a UTI.
While to some extent I can understand the curiosity involved, when perfect strangers start gabbing and asking questions about just how my genitals work and what I can or cannot do with it, that's a point where I don't feel like I'm being treated like a human being any more, but rather an attraction at the local freak show. I wish that this didn't happen regularly, but sadly, it does.
So even though through sheer chance I have gained a bodily feature that every woman (potentially) could have, and I have no issues with having been grant a boost in my health and convenience aspects, it has also made me so clearly see the ugliness in humankind, both in its narrow-minded way of thinking about what bodies should look like, and its obsession with sexuality and genitals.
What is one supposed to do with any of this? I'm not sure. For me it is both an interesting factoid and a sad conclusion about the human condition. For others I hope it can serve as a way to learn to think outside the box, and perhaps consider viewing aspects of life from different angles.
Maya
[1] https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/231574-overview
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urethra
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502976/
[4] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/urinary-tract-infection/symptoms-causes/syc-20353447
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4457377/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urinary_tract_infection
Sunday 15 August 2021
Defining oneself by the things that do not matter
Assumptions make life easy. If you replace doubt and uncertainty with rock-solid assumptions, suddenly life seems much happier and easier to navigate. Not that it really changes reality, of course. It merely covers what is there with pretence and deception. Who can say what is real, after all?
And yet we have had the facts staring us down like the headlights on the front of a truck as it barrels towards a deer caught in the sudden light. It's just too bad that the deer is blind and isn't even aware of the light. Just like how some of us find ourselves suddenly caught by the fender of the truck as it tosses our limp body to the side of the road where we get to figure out these facts if we wish to survive.
When the violence and pain subsides and you find yourself truly seeing for the first time in your life, it doesn't feel good. More like waking up from a drug-fuelled trip that had one feeling all good and awesome, only for it to end and leave one trembling and shivering to face the grim reality of the run-down existence one is squatting in, while surrounded by others who are still caught in the cruel lie.
Like Neo waking up in his pod in The Matrix, naked and confused, and confronted by reality. Not the cushy, make-believe world that would be so comfortable to slip back into while forgetting about the real world. Choices have to be made and the consequences of one's actions confronted head-on. After all, only one of these worlds can be allowed to exist, Mr Anderson.
The feeling of being jaded, of having seen it all and yet the charade still continues even after you have lost all interest. After the confusion of escaping the make-believe world about gender roles and gender identity, to look back on all those wasted years is enough to fill me with bitterness along with a strong sense of fatigue as it becomes clear to me that many others are still caught in this delusion, this artificial world of fantastical imaginings that have absolutely no bearing on reality.
When the choice between a male or female body was offered to me, I thought that was all there was. Yet I could feel my mind slowly shattering as I tried to grasp my own identity within that context, to redefine myself as existing as merely an amalgamation of only male and female attributes. The reality of that experience was as pleasant as the one captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation went through while imprisoned and asked to perform one simple task. Merely to state that he saw five lights, when above the head of his torturer it was clear that there were only ever four lights present.
Everything starts with a small lie. Just a small white lie to make the annoying thing go away, or perhaps a larger one. Lies grow and develop, they multiply and procreate, until it develops into a society and a way of living. Up till that point, I had not found myself overly concerned with defining matters in terms of male or female, finding myself perfectly happy just seeing everyone as fellow human beings. All of that got destroyed when I found out about being intersex and began to think about my identity.
How do you define yourself in a society, when this society has no concept of a being like you? As jaded as I am today, I find that none of it matters to me. Not any more. Things are pretty simple, after all. Biologically speaking, male genitals make for a man, female genitals make for a woman. Simple. That is before society then comes in like a party crasher who ends up lighting the whole joint on fire by accident, through segregating by genitals and making up rules and limitations that lead people to believe that there's any meaning to one's biological sex beyond intercourse.
The freedom that I found in the end was this realisation and with it the relief that I have no obligation to define myself using an arbitrary and non-deterministic set of qualifiers. It's fine to just be you and not worry about the genitals of people around you and the possible implications that their genitals may have on your life. Unless you are in fact intending to date them, of course.
Along with this sense of freedom came the release from having to 'pass' as anything. I am seen as a regular female by society, even though biologically I'm male and female, yet none of this matters to me. Just use those female pronouns so that we can skip the bit where I can awkwardly explain to very confused people what this 'hermaphrodite' thing is all about. I'm too jaded to care about any of those things that do not matter.
Of all ludicrous notions that societies have come up with, the notion that one's biological sex would somehow intrinsically play a role in and limit one's capabilities is perhaps the most cruel. Slipping insidious poison needles into one's psyche that make one believe that something should be easy, or hard because of one's biological sex, or to feel like a failure because one does not live up to the lofty expectations tied to those stereotypes.
None of that is real. None of that matters. Most of us just assume that it does, because that's part of the make-believe world we live in. Except for those of us who experience that high-velocity kiss with reality and live to tell the tale, and the rare few who manage this process in a less traumatic way. To wake up to the reality that this obsession with genitals is not helping any of us, and psychiatric intervention is more than overdue.
Maya
Sunday 8 August 2021
Thoughts on getting vaccinated and the buffet of ignorance
Before the recent pandemic, the only major vaccination campaign that I have participated in took place during HS, after a girl in our school had died from encephalitis as a result of some virus that was going around. As a result a mass-vaccination campaign in that region of the Netherlands was set up, which saw me and the rest of my family driving over to a nearby town where a vaccination centre had been set up.
I do not remember hearing of any issues with getting people to show up to be vaccinated, although my younger brother was hesitant on account of the possible side-effects. Once we got at the vaccination centre, however, and he met up with his friends who were also there, they all got vaccinated together. After this vaccination campaign, the viral infection petered out, no doubt helped by a sudden spike in immunity.
For my generation ('Millennials'), being vaccinated never was a topic of debate. As a child you'd of course get vaccinated against measles, mumps, TBC, etc. For our parents the luxury of having effective, safe vaccines against just about any childhood and adult disease was something you'd have to be a fool to pass up. They, after all, had been raised by parents for whom yearly epidemics and outbreaks of everything from polio to smallpox and measles was commonplace. Our parents told us stories of measles-injured children by them at school, who had suffered nerve damage, or of children with permanent injuries from surviving polio.
We're the first generation for whom smallpox is just an entry in the history books, and who were able to grow up unafraid of the spectre of childhood mortality as did previous generations. And yet now this SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has shown us just how fleeting this appreciation is. While people are quick to point out the fraud committed by Wakefield [1] the fact there remains that his goal wasn't to prove that vaccines were unsafe, but only that the combined MMR vaccine was. His goal was to promote the individual vaccine doses by the manufacturer who had paid him to commit this fraudulent study.
What his article did, however, was fuel pre-existing sentiments, and a general movement of anti-intellectualism. First in the 1970s the notion of 'natural living' became mainstream, with a growing group of individuals subscribing to the notion that the post-war style of living was somehow 'unnatural'. That our food, our houses, our clothes and medical science were all in some way harming us. Whether any of that is true was beside the point, because it sounded and felt right. We had to 'return to nature'.
This is how people today end up rejecting medical science, at the cost of their own life such as with Steve Jobs [2], or spin up conspiracies that common seasoning salts like MSG [3] are somehow harmful despite the absence of any evidence that MSG is more harmful than sodium chloride (table salt, which has a 4 times lower LD50). Along with the pseudo-sciences of homoeopathy, astrology, detoxification and kin, there has rarely been a more diverse smorgasbord of choice when it comes to picking your flavour of ignorance.
The best part of this all is that we can do so in nearly perfect safety, because of the sacrifices of those who came before us. The countless children who didn't live to see their first or second birthday. The women who died in childbirth, and the millions who died from what we now regard as easily preventable and curable diseases. Thanks to antibiotics, vaccines, germ theory and other potent weapons of science, we're better protected against the forces of the natural world than ever before.
Yet, as every single zombie and similar monster film teaches us, what we need to be truly afraid of is not what is out there, but what or rather who is amidst us. All it takes is for one person to open that backdoor, then another and another, to slowly have the zombies creep into the complex and eat everyone's brain. But those people who let the monsters in were so sure that they were doing the right thing, that they were willing to die to prove that they were right. Shame that they were wrong.
I must to my shame also admit to having drunk the Kool-Aid at some point, when I was really into supporting Greenpeace and going along in the whole 'nuclear power is bad' vibe. In hindsight this was me peaking on the Dunning-Kruger [4] graph. But Greenpeace was right about saving whales and put their lives on the line there, so they couldn't be bad, right? These days, however, Greenpeace doesn't care about whales any more and just focuses on shutting down nuclear plants while selling climate change accelerating natural gas [5]. This despite that nuclear power is extremely safe [6] and one of the best low-carbon power sources we have.
In hindsight, I should have never sent my pocket money each month to Greenpeace as donation, and instead sought to inform myself a lot more than I did. What that experience taught me was that idealism may feel good, but the assumptions that come with it make one significantly more likely to be a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect rather than a participant in some revolutionary vision. Just because you think you're on the right side of history doesn't mean you are.
In that regard, the articles I write for Hackaday such as a recent one on RNA therapeutics [7] feel both like a sort of penance and an opportunity. As the common saying goes: you do not really understand a topic until you can explain it to someone else and have them understand it.
With the massive amount of information available via the internet since the 1990s and the ease of cross-checking one's sources, the only excuse for being a Dunning-Kruger example is sheer intellectual laziness. Although writing the aforementioned article on mRNA vaccines didn't change my mind on whether I would get a SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) vaccine, it did make me appreciate and understand why these mRNA vaccines are so special and likely to herald a new revolution in medical treatments for everything from viral diseases to auto-immune conditions and cancer.
When I got my second BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine shot now nearly two weeks ago, it made me both very aware and appreciative of exactly what this vaccine was doing inside my body. To get a better-than-natural antibody response to a disease that's still foreign to my body's immune system (so far) without putting myself in any appreciable risk is truly what makes this a marvel of medical science.
It is said that the only thing to fear is fear itself, to which I think I'd like to add that fear is bred from ignorance. Ignorance is best cured with evidence and facts, which then resolves the fear and allows the ignorance-afflicted person to live healthier, happier lives. All it takes for this process to take place is to allow for curiosity and a desire to learn to take hold. Who enjoys living in fear, after all?
Maya
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_problems
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
[5] http://greenpeace-energy.de/
[6] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy
[7] https://hackaday.com/2021/07/26/rna-therapeutics-and-fighting-diseases-by-working-with-the-immune-system/