On whether intersex is compatible with life

Is being born intersex the worst thing that could happen to you? Misery is a pretty miserable field to compete in, so I will not even attempt this. Yet of all the things which have personally affected me as a human being - living in human society - I would however have to say that being born intersex is the one thing which has made my life quite consistently into a miserable experience. Sure, there's the post-traumatic stress disorder from what would appear to be early childhood trauma, the details of which I can only remember as fragments and vague impressions, but so many people have childhood trauma that it almost feels like something you can comfortably share and relate to. Also, you're an adult now, so we can get you treatment and therapy, to give it a place. It'll be fine.

Finding it hard to make friends and to find a career path because of having been born gifted is also pretty miserable, as is having your parents divorce and you losing touch with the place where you grew up. I would not want anyone to go through those experiences, but so many marriages end in divorce these days, that anyone can relate to it, and even make fun of it. Similarly, being gifted is a hindrance, yet it's one of those things where once you learn how to deal with this handicap, it can become one of your strengths after that moment of self-realisation. It's just a part of who you are, and society has a place for us, even if us nerds get bullied and beaten up at school.

I so strongly wish that I had never been born intersex. Especially with something as pronounced as true hermaphroditism, which is both rare and also the hardest to ignore form of intersex. If you're one of the many XY women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, it's not a real big deal, unless you really insist on getting pregnant. Similarly with other forms, like XXY where you're still a regular woman, just with a bit more pep in your step because of elevated testosterone levels. That honestly doesn't seem like such a bad deal, even if society gets pretty uppity about it.

However, when your form of intersex is one of those whereby your body is literally neither female nor male, or perhaps both - depending on your perspective - just where do you fit in with society? You don't fit in with the liberal view of a binary body and binary brain gender that can flip between male and female, nor with the conservative view of women having a female brain and men having a male brain. From experience I know that there's no such thing as a 'brain gender', also after more than a decade of being pushed to 'choose' between undergoing surgery to become either male or female. To be purely a man or a woman, basically. This is the curse of hermaphroditism.

A woman with a penis. A futanari, as it's also known among connoisseurs of Japanese hentai. Also a freak of nature, an abomination. A trannie if people get their slurs confused. A pre-op transgender person, according to one highly educated Dutch urologist. Those are just some of the names and responses that get associated with my... condition.

An intersex woman with CAIS or XXY chromosomes can use a public dressing and shower room, or a sauna without any odd glances. That is not me. I have to hide my body and who I am, because of the stares, the shame, the humiliating, ignorant and lewd comments. My body isn't allowed to exist, or only as the subject of other people's obsessions.

When I want to talk about my horrible experiences of being treated as a transgender person by so-called medical professionals, and being forced to accept their ideas of treatment and surgery, I don't even get to finish my sentence. Usually I get called 'transphobic'. Just another slur to add to the list.

When I want to open up and find others who can relate to my experiences, there is nobody. I tried for years, but it's been all futile. Maybe there is nobody. Maybe I'm too numb at this point to even want to talk about it any more. It still hurts so much, even though I'm so numb from all the pain.

Maybe I should have done what so many other intersex people have done, which is to pretend to be transgender. Get that surgery to cut off the bits that do not match your binary phenotype, and be happy. In my case I wouldn't even need to do hormone therapy or such, as my body already does the female hormone thing, including monthly cycles. I just need to get rid of the 'male' appendage. Though they'd most likely want to rip out the vagina too, and make an fake one. It never mattered to the doctors that I have female reproductive organs as well, except to the one who did the exploratory surgery. What use is medical evidence if it is ignored by other doctors? You're just a lowly patient, after all.

Aside from more intimate settings, I can already fake being just another regular woman. It's after all just a small part of my outward appearance that's different. Yet if I deny the rest of myself that is not this outward image, along with the experiences that I have had, and the fact that I'll likely never be able to consult a doctor on medical issues beyond the body's basic functionality, what is there to live for? A life that is basically a charade, where I hide the trauma, the disturbing parts about my body and everything else that might inconvenience others? A life where the thought of finding love is inconceivable because you're first and foremost prime meat in the freak show?

What kind of life is that, and is it a life that I wish to keep living?

Thus it is that having been born intersex is the worst thing that has happened to me. It's miserable and lonely, yet there's no point in crying about it. Either you find a way to live with it, or you do not. At least there are some options, unpleasant as they are.

Maya

On gender ideology and why there's just one side

 It's been a while since I last posted on this blog. I have been writing a bit on a new blog that I started on my personal website, as part of my attempt for a year or so now to get away from the whole legacy of both this blog that I began in 2007, and the countless unpleasant memories that I made along the way. Suffice it to say that perhaps as part of writing my autobiography (which should actually be ready this year) I have had an opportunity to reflect on many things, thoughts and events along the way.

Perhaps most interesting about these reflections was being able to finally put the sore finger on why exactly it is that gender ideology and associated groups manage to rile me up so much. After all, aren't intersex people supposed to be on the exact same side as those of various sexual persuasions and those more gender ideologist of all: the transgender folk? This never felt right to me, and the reason for it is actually pretty simple: the binary is a lie.

When I watched Matt Walsh's 'What is a Woman?' [1] a few months ago, I realised just how incredibly cathartic it felt to see Matt tear apart the whole delusion that was constructed around the nonsensical term of 'gender identity', something about which I have ranted previously on this blog. Yet in the intro to this documentary and reading up on Matt's overall views on gender/biological sex, it would also seem quite clear that he's a strong believer in men and women being very different mentally and emotionally, leading to each having distinct roles in society. Naturally, that doesn't quite jive with my own experiences, or my physical reality.

What is however an interesting notion that becomes apparent here is that in order to believe in gender ideology and the notion of 'gender' being somehow distinct from biological sex, you can be either on the conservatory side - like Matt Walsh - or be a fervent proponent of transgenderism. The only significant difference between these two groups is whether or not they believe that this 'gender identity' is intrinsically tied to a specific biological sex or not. In the end the distinction between these two groups is about as clear as between Catholics and Protestants: although they love to lock horns, they're both still part of the same overarching belief system.

Yet much like the Christian dogma, so too is the gender ideology's dogmatic system devoid of scientific evidence. There exists no clear evidence that would support the notion of a 'gender identity' any more than we have been able to identify a 'soul' within the confines of the human brain, and generally speaking, nurture seems to be the deciding factor in gender roles, rather than nature.

For me as an intersex person this feels like something that should have been obvious, yet much like a 'former' Catholic who escaped the Church's clutches, you can run from the dogma, but it's hard to fully shake off its effects after being exposed to it since you were a child. Whenever I see the 'I' of intersex meshed into the alphabet soup of LGBTQI+ and what not, it is mostly as a reminder of how little intersex people like me have to do with any of those groups.

Transgenderism and conservative views on gender both fly in the face of factual reality for intersex individuals, especially those of us who have been forced to navigate all sides of the gender role spectrum, and for those of us who have bodies that are both male and female. After all, how would you even go about defining terms like 'homosexual', 'bisexual', or heavens forbid 'heterosexual' within this context?

In the end those are all just convenience terms that have been assigned to fit within a narrow spectrum of personal interpretations of physical reality, yet this also means that they deny reality the way any dogmatic system does.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_a_Woman%3F

The transgender curse

If dreams are indeed a way for our subconsciousness to communicate with our conscious mind, then some dreams are as subtle as taking a brick to the face. Case in point last night's dreams, or perhaps closer to nightmares. In them I found myself in a number of scenarios in which I felt shamed for having (exaggerated) masculine features, such as (excessive) leg hair, or ways that served to remind the me in the dream that I was not a 'real woman'.

Upon groggily awakening from this delightful ordeal it still took me a few hours to really process its message, but in hindsight I don't think that it's that complicated. I think that at its core lies the way that I was made to look at my own body, and the messaging alongside this about 'passing' as a specific gender. A lot of what I went through in my dealings with medical and other specialists was after all about 'proving' that my body isn't that of a male. It would be one heck of a way to hypersensitise me to anything about my body that wasn't in line with this notion.


Compared to yesterday when I went to bed, I can feel the shift that occurred somewhere in my way of thinking, and also in how I perceive myself, both via my senses and when looking at myself in the mirror. It feels as if some level of desynchronisation has been resolved and I'm now (mostly) back in contact with my physical body instead of whatever distortion was in the way before.

The ironic thing is perhaps that I have said so many of these things before, but I just didn't seem to really believe in them, perhaps. Some lingering fear that I might suddenly wake up one day and all of these things would turn out to be just a dream and all clarity is gone again, perhaps?

Since I'm pretty sure that I am in fact awake right now, and nothing will change about factual reality any time soon, I feel confident in reaffirming that my body was always the way it is today. The abnormal situation that was in place for many years was that my body was perceived as that of a male, when the actual, normal situation was in fact that it always was that of a hermaphroditic intersex person, with a clear female phenotype. A hermaphroditic woman, for short.


When I regard my struggles to look at the body I inhabit today as real, I can also see and remember the many specialists who told me that I am male, that I have a male body, but that I 'want to be female'. This whole mess with the transgender protocol and the many years that I spent trapped in its bowels are clearly a type of brainwashing that was inflicted on me when I was in a very fragile state, emotionally. When you seek help and answers, and instead of finding those things, you are absorbed into this abusive, cult-like system which cares nothing about you as a person, instead only injecting its ideologies and lies into your veins like venom.

Looking back, it's hard to deny that things would likely have been a lot easier if I hadn't had this 'transgender curse' put on me. A curse that made me worry about nonsensical things like 'passing' as something which I already am by birth. A curse which took away many years of my life, and denied me medical help and answers because I refused to comply with The Protocol and submit to it.


The abnormal situation in which I started my life was that neither my environment nor myself were aware of my intersex condition, not helped by my body struggling to kickstart the whole 'puberty' thing which massively delayed the development onset of the secondary female characteristics. When this development ultimately did start a few years back, it especially has helped me to establish the normal, healthy situation which I am learning to accept now, and slowly shake off this 'curse' that was put on me.


Maya

The gendered brain myth and excusing sex-based discrimination

 Everyone knows that women are more emotionally sensitive, while men have the emotional capacity of a turnip. It's also a common fact that men have better spatial awareness, can read maps unlike women, and this is then portrayed as an evolutionary left-over from our hunter-gatherer days. Back then, it is said, women would stay back at the camp to take care of the children while the men would take their grizzled selves out to take down more big prey.

In many ways it's a comfortable fantasy, one which supports the current societal notion that men and women are simply different, and thus it is only natural to assume that they will have different interests and paths in life. While some changes here are noticeable - such as in most societies granting women personhood in the form of voting rights and not requiring a guardian to handle their affairs - the notion that a child is confronted with even before they are born is that men and woman are simply different.

Although the generally less muscular nature of women is used with these arguments too, primary to this statement is that male and female brains are somehow 'different' (dimorphic). Essentially this is a modern-day version of phrenology, the once seriously considered pseudo-science that assumed that it could deduce anything of worth from a person's skull and related features. Phrenology supported everything from slavery (as non-Caucasians were deemed 'inferior') to the treatment of women as less than men, along with other pseudo-scientific views that excused what was essentially wide-scale discrimination against anyone born with female genitals.


Many years ago, I was indoctrinated in this way of thinking as well. All of these statements about how men and women were supposedly different rang true for me, even though neither I nor my brothers were raised in a gender-discriminating manner by our parents. It was just the way that the world supposedly worked. What changed my views there were the years that I spent dealing with the discovery of my intersex body, and coming to terms with the fact that my body was not as assumed previously male, but phenotypically primarily female.

What did this mean for my brain? Based on what I had been told, and what I had grown up with, the assumption was that this meant that my brain had to be either male or female. For years I would struggle with this notion, while being reassured by psychologists and medical professionals that I just had to figure out whether I 'felt' more 'male' or 'female' so that I could decide on what my body should look like to match my brain's gender.

The irony here is perhaps that while initially I translated my discomfort with my situation into the notion that I 'felt female', while having a male body, and even began hormone therapy to establish female hormone levels, at some point my body reasserted its own female hormone production and I was hurled straight into a proper female puberty. My 'male' body turned out to be a hermaphroditic intersex body, with naturally female phenotype and hormone levels. Some biochemical messages had apparently just been delayed by years.


When it came to figuring out the 'feeling' part, one of the biggest revelations came to me in the form of a study by Daphna Joel et al. (2015) [1], which examined the brains of male and female participants with an fMRI scanner to see whether in their brain activity any indications could be found of this purported 'male/female divide' within the human brain.

As it turns out, they couldn't find any indication of this, with each individual brain forming its own unique mosaic of activity. Alongside my own experiences this completed the picture of each human being having their own unique brain, without any sign of dimorphism, together with a body that showed many degrees of variation as well.


Today's society still seems to insist on discriminating between individuals based on their genitals and presumed 'brain gender', with no sign of letting up on this practice. Yet as science shows, this is an outdated practice, with no basis in reality. Individuals are denied or granted privileges purely based on this presumed 'gender', and societal gender-based roles are the norm rather than the exception. All of which raises the question of just how far society has truly progressed since the first cries for equal rights for men and women.

What was instructive for me here was how many years I could live as a 'male' in society with only the occasional bouts of confusion due to my more feminine build. When asserting a female identity, however, society's views and treatment of me as a female person changed noticeably, even though I did not.

This raises the uncomfortable question of why society continues to discriminate between men and women, when in the end the only aspect that truly differs between them is their reproductive system and associated hormones. If that is the aspect that matters, then intersex people would necessarily be partially carved off into their own 'societal gender roles'. After all, where does a person like me with female hormone levels, but both male and female genitals fit in with?

Any division made here that doesn't acknowledge people as their own person without segregation feels both unnatural and unethical.


Maya


[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468

A non-binary body is a body too

 Dealing with a non-standard body is not easy. When society has decided that you are either male or female, and biology largely concurs with that sentiment at least from a reproductive point of view, it's a tough point to argue. But here I am, with a body that is both, and neither. How much of that really matters to me today, after so many, mostly unpleasant years?

I'm still grateful that my body finally sorted out this whole 'puberty' thing at last, after getting stuck in some weird standby mode for over a decade. Having had those changes towards an adult female body, it's interesting to note the remaining male characteristics alongside this, even if this pertains essentially just to the genitals.


Most recently I have felt this sense of longing, back towards the less complicated state of being 'male'. In some ways I guess that this is because of the added complexities of a female body, from monthly cycles to having those lumps of mostly fat dangling from your chest, serving mostly as a painful spot to bump into doors by accident, it would seem.

Even so, I don't feel any antagonism towards any part of my body. For me I think the biggest part of the experience was actually getting to know my body, to finally have that meet-and-greet and to be able to compare our mutual notes on expectations and requirements. Gone is the external pressure of many years ago inflicted on me by society, of conforming to one or the other body type, with the lure of having an 'Awesome Genuine Female Body' as promised by the transsex ideology.

The strong notion that I had to choose, that somehow my brain 'knows' whether my body has to be a Genuine Female or Genuine Male body. That pseudo-scientific notion has been well and truly shot down at this point. Not just by scientific studies, but also by my own experiences. My brain just contains my personality, my memories, dreams and hopes. And an appreciation for having a healthy body.


Does it matter which genitals this body has? Not really. That neither side is fertile doesn't bother me either. It does not reduce the value of my body, nor that of me as a person. A healthy mind in a healthy body. That's really all that one can ask for.

Most of the problems only appear with societal and cultural traditions, which I have largely resolved for my own purposes by being registered as 'female', to match the mostly female phenotype of my body. Yet I still get annoyed at the widespread discrimination between the sexes, even when it makes zero sense to do so when it doesn't concern the physical characteristics. Like, giving preferential treatment to either, or by essentially forbidding that either doesn't get to wear certain clothing items, or even like things that have a particular colour, or things that are 'cute'.


I'm not male. I'm not female. I'm both. I'm neither. The liberation of being able to let go of the madness of too many years and literally just accept things for how they are is immense. The realisation that the only authority I answer to whether my body is okay, and whether clothing is okay on this body, is me.

That whatever preconceived notions society has about what behaviour is 'proper' for someone with my gender designation and social status is absolute bunk. I'll decide that myself, thank you very much. If that gets me a called a 'tomboy' and such, then so much the better. I'm still that 'boy' who grew up doing 'boyish' things because they were fun, and I carry zero regrets for having a good time.


The short version is that society can basically stuff it when it comes to dictating to individuals what they can and cannot do or like, as it pertains to themselves. Society doesn't teach you how to be yourself, or how to be happy. Those are things that you have to figure out yourself, with the experiences by others potentially helpful in that discovery process.


Maya

On being accepted as a person

 Sometimes a new perspective comes from unexpected influences. Suffice it to say that the past years I have spent plenty of time thinking and writing about what I think the relationship between me, society and reality is. Yet it's so hard to see clearly when you have your nose pressed virtually into the tarmac of some aspect of reality. To regain this global perspective, you have to get back up onto your knees, onto your feet, so that you can finally take that look around you. Make sense of what happened.

When I got confronted with Dave Chappelle's newest Netflix special 'The Closer' and decided to give it a whirl to see what the fuss was about, it hit me in a way that I had not seen coming. The comedy show starts off coarse, with very uncouth jokes that are sure to offend anyone with a disposition for easy triggering. Yet when Dave starts digging deeper into his experiences with the LGBT community and especially his friendship with a transgender person: Daphne Dorman and her struggles with making sense of life. [1]


What hit me the most about this story was that Dave Chappelle does not believe that a transgender person who starts off male can become a biological woman. Gender is a fact, in the sense that biological sex (gender) is something that at this point in time cannot be altered. And yet none of this has any bearing on these transgender people. He has his views, others have theirs, and yet he doesn't have a stake in the LGBT community. Instead he is more than happy to respect others for the people they are.

The key point here is that one does not have to agree with the other person's views and opinions in order to treat them as a person.


We cannot expect that everyone around us understands the larger parts of what makes us into the person we are, never mind the infinite number of small details, but the one thing we can expect and ask for is to be respected as a person. Someone living their own life and going through their own human experiences.

The liberating and perhaps cathartic part of listening to this part of Dave's show was in how it made it obvious that I do not care about this LGBT community either, and never have. What was instead happening to me was the very human experience of coming to terms with my intersex body, amidst the strong desire to - just once - feel that I was being accepted as a person. My frustrations and perhaps jealousy when I was spending so many years of my life on getting nowhere with the struggle to get answers about this curious body of mine, even as in my eyes this LGBT community got all the help and attention they could ask for.

When you feel invisible and mostly ignored. Even when appearing on talkshows and in the media it didn't feel in hindsight that I was there as a person, but more as a curiosity. Who truly cared about me as a person?

Certainly not the doctors who dismissed me as being 'transgender', and who tried to push me into that direction. A direction I didn't want to head into, because it didn't feel right and didn't make sense, and yet it appeared that nobody was interested in my opinion. I felt so terribly alone and frightened for all those years.


Now, years later, with a body has well and truly asserted that it was - in fact - always that of a hermaphroditic intersex person, I have been able to at least put a lot of those questions to rest. It's easier for me to look at what remains at this point. As I get back up on my knees, and onto my feet, I can see with clarity now how everything related to gender and biological sex ties together. The main source of confusion for so many years. Now it's clear to me how the brain is just this neutral entity that has no specific preference for a particular arrangement of genitals. Which is a good thing since I was worried for years that I might have to pick a set to have removed.

But above all, that my brain, and the person inside it is just that: a person. Something that transcends basic things like gender and sexual preferences, skin colour and the languages one speaks. In learning to accept myself as a person, I have also learned to accept others as such. EAch of them individuals with their own lives and experiences.

While I may not agree with everyone's views and opinions, and cannot understand everyone's motivations, that shall never take away the basic notion that every person is deserving of sympathy and respect. You owe it to yourself to respect yourself as a person, as much as others deserve it to be respected as such. Respect and sympathy do go both ways, after all.


Maya


[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/dave-chappelle-backed-by-family-of-late-transgender-comedian-daphne-dorman-from-the-closer

Why I should delete my personal blog

 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

Self-image versus reality

 What do you really look like? It's not a question which many people struggle with. After all, we grow up with ourselves and see this face and body every single day of our lives. Some of us could probably even draw their own face from memory. Yet despite this what really hits me more and more as I try to be more... extroverted, expressive and I guess myself, I find myself constantly running into the realisation that I do not really know what I look like, and that this is a major problem.

The clearest indication of this problem was probably in 2007, when I could literally see my reflection in the mirror shifting between what I apparently imagined I look like and at least part of the actual reflection. Experiences like those remind me of just how much our experience of 'reality' is coloured by our interpretation of this reality. Everything we see, touch, hear, taste and smell is filtered through these layers of experiences and memories. And traumas.


I was supposed to look male, but as it turned out I did not as the people around me simply do not see me as such. My body has been further hammering that home the past six years by rapidly continuing this female puberty so that the curves and such are even more pronounced female. And yet I find myself struggling to make sense of any of this. Of course it doesn't help that part of my memories are of this 'male' part of my life, when it was assumed that was what my body was, and I merged that into my self-image because it made sense.

Then decades of doubt and uncertainty, as my environment struggled to see me as male, me finding out about being intersex and a hermaphrodite, and yet the constant efforts by those professionals who were supposed to have my back medical and psychologically to make me accept and believe that somehow my body was actually male, but I just wanted to see my body as being female.

Cue the 'autoparagynaecophilia' nonsense and the brainwashing attempts with the 'transgender' thing. Many years of trying to figure out what this 'feeling male' or 'feeling female' thing even was supposed to be about, even as my body got thus classified into a kind of superposition of both male and female. So many hours that I spent in front of a mirror, looking at my reflection and trying to make sense of what I thought I saw.


Having the feedback from people whom I felt I could trust to be as impartial and objective as possible was incredibly helpful during that period, as it provided some kind of lifeline and form of stability. That I wasn't deluding myself into seeing my body as something which it wasn't. Here I felt disturbed by the idea from mental healthcare professionals and doctors, but also from some regular people that it would be okay to 'just be what I felt like'.

To me that never really made sense, because I never really felt like anything but confusion. Maybe if I was a case like those who suffer from the notion that they need to have certain limbs or genitals removed or resized, tucked and nipped because seeing their body in the 'before' condition makes them unhappy. Have they ever really seen their own body, I wonder.


When I go through the motions of setting up a new recording studio as recently and I find myself confronted with having to look at myself, and listening to audio samples of me talking... that's tough. I really notice how I have some days when I feel fine with how I look, whereas other days I can only see some kind of horrible freak which barely looks human. Is that weird?

Even today, there are still medical professionals who would classify me as being 'transgender' or having some other psychological disorder. Regardless of the state of my body. Clearly their opinion is irrelevant. Yet where there should be clarity, where I should be able to just look at myself in the mirror and see only my body there, what I really see are those decades of confusion and trauma.


A body is so much more than just 'male' or 'female'. That's a nonsensical simplification, really. Your body is you. Every part of it is a bit of your past, present and what will carry you into your future. When I look at myself in the mirror, I cannot just see a body, but I see all those years reflected back at me. Although the most recent memories and reflections are much better, some days I mostly see those bad years and memories reflected back at me.

When this dissonance between reality and one's self-image gets too strong, only dissociation can follow. Where one's mind tries to protect itself against this inability to make sense of the body and what it is or means. It's just a thing, a robotic contraption that moves the mind around. Something that doesn't mean anything and whose reflection is irrelevant.


Perhaps me endeavouring to keep doing video logs and more is a good thing, in that it may slowly help to rebuild that healthy self-image that is so damaged and tattered. Yet what would be simple tasks for others, like watching back footage and editing it suddenly turns into a minor retraumatisation event as I have to relive all those memories that seeing my body and hearing my voice bring back.

You can't escape yourself, I guess.


Maya

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

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

The comfort in identifying oneself as something

Perhaps one of the most accepted and vile crimes committed by humankind is that against the emotional well-being of the individual. If one takes an individual to be a being of both rational intellect and unfathomable emotional depths, then it shouldn't be difficult to see how attempting to convey either in simplistic terms is to deny its very existence and with it the whole that makes up an individual.

In light of such thoughts, it's rather telling when I consider that I still cannot put a name to who or what I can see in the mirror. Even as I can feel myself becoming more... myself, in the sense that my thoughts and actions feel more like my own, it's still an impossible task to put what I am, who I am and all the countless details around this into words.

In the end we are all our own person, beyond question. As easy as it would have been for me to pick an identity or accept one of the identities that got picked for me over the decades, to do so would have meant betraying the person whom I am inside. The very concept of identifying as anything when this does not match up with reality is to embrace self-delusion as a life-style.


The identity of being male. Of being female. The endless questions about my preferences when it comes to romance and more, about why I don't like using make-up regularly, and so on. All questions that establish some kind of identity, but which are not about me as a person. At some point it begins to dawn on you that many of those identity things are just behavioural things that are common to a specific culture. Things like what type and colour of clothing one is or isn't allowed to wear, whether men are allowed to use make-up or not, whether seeing someone of the opposite sex naked outside of a romantic encounter is a reason to get sexually excited or not.

After removing all of this cultural decoration, it's really not a lot what you're left with. Identify all you want, but in the end a man is someone with a body that has solely male characteristics, and vice versa for women. Ergo I am neither. And both. Also sexual attraction is just weird and probably isn't supposed to make sense.

The question there for the longest time was probably in how far I should even care about any of those things. I used to think I did care, but over the years it has faded in importance. What I have come to feel stronger is a longing for the parts of 'me' back as a child and teenager which I now feel were my genuine identity.


In the past I have mentioned the sensation of a 'child me' being stuck in this dark, quiet room. Crying and traumatised. I'm pretty sure that was a visualisation of the traumas and PTSD which I have been collecting since I was five years old. Back then it felt as if every single sensory impression and every thought passed through this traumatised child, to be interpreted and parsed.

Even after freeing the child from the room, I could still feel its presence in my mind. Distorting, twisting and subverting my own thoughts and impressions. Over the past months I have fought a battle against this presence, pushing it away when I felt it clouding my mind and thoughts again. With the traumatic presence no longer as strong, it feels as if my thoughts no longer are guided through a convoluted maze. Instead there's just... me, I guess.


The only honest thing to identify as is yourself.


Yet even as I come closer to identifying myself, it becomes more and more painfully obvious that society will not grant me the same favour. When society has collectively decided to abandon its senses with pseudo-scientific concepts like 'gender identity' and its doubling down on the scientifically incorrect dimorphic nature of the human brain, what hope is there for those who do not wish to betray themselves with such delusions?

I have a body which medical science at this point struggles to explain. Simultaneously I feel the complete disconnect with society when it comes to the aforementioned delusions and what I as a chimaeric intersex person have and continue to experience. What can I do with this but to accept that there's no real place for me in society?


The irony is perhaps that by finally accepting myself the way I truly am, I may end up losing that last link with society as my existence escapes its ability to quantify and understand me. When the only way that I can formally exist in society is by pretending to be something which I am not, is that truly an existence worth fighting for?


Maya

Vlog: On quitting hormone therapy as an intersex person

 

The torn thread between child and adult self

 You look at yourself in the mirror. You see a woman who is not a woman. Hermaphrodite. That was the word. Intersex. Neither male nor female. Yet a body that looks female but for some minor details.

Flashes of what could be memories or fragments of nightmares. Cold doctor's offices, soul-less hospital wards and uncaring, emotionless eyes and voices. A feeling of being cast aside and called terrible things that hurt so much.

Memories of a child you. Mostly unaware of existing trauma. Still living a life that is mostly care-free and happy. Scenes of happy family life. You want to reach out, touch the memory, connect to it. But you cannot.

The child is male. You are not. The child never was male? What happened between then and now? Are you the child, now, today?


A flood of memories. Fragmented. Shattered. Incomplete. Just so many loose threads shattered in the winds of time. Memories of terrible things that happened to you. Terrible things that you did. No cause or reason. Each piece of thread, each memory seemingly disconnected from the others.

Looking at yourself in the mirror now, you can look at your hands, flex them. Feel that they are really there. That they are truly a part of you. That this is all real. Everything before was a dream? A nightmare?

Most of it likely really happened. Maybe all of it. As well as the bits of thread that are now lost forever. The emotional agony when you reconnect the pieces of thread, try to trace back the path to childhood. Feeling the pain inflicted on you and by you for the first time. Is this what one wants to remember?

You do not remember being this person, this... thing that inhabits these thread fragments between that memory of the child and the you today. You do not want to be that person. That person frightens you, disgusts and revolts you. Even as you pity it as you would a wild animal that is trying to survive in a world completely foreign to it.


Others do not see the torn thread. Others see your self as an unbroken thread from birth to your final days. Yet you look at yourself in the mirror, and that is not what you see. Your body changing over time in ways that should have been impossible. The harsh response from society at each change and discovery.

You look in frustration at this mirror image which seems to taunt you with your lack of understanding, of knowledge and acceptance. You feel sickened by the realisation of what lies between the child you and adult you. What does life offer you?


You feel anger at this past self, at the world that let things get out of hand so far. But it's futile to be angry at the past. There is only the now and the future that still has to be made.

You can look at the past, force yourself to mend these pieces of thread. Ignoring the pain and suffering that this brings. Or you can let the thread between child and adult mend itself, over time, fed by the energy from a new, unbroken thread that spans into the future.


Looking at your hands again, feeling that strong connection with reality, you realise that you can live your life looking forwards or backwards.

Maybe it's not necessary to piece together this entire thread between child and adult right now and there. Maybe you'll never know exactly why your body turned out like this, or the myriad of ways in which it differs from males and females, but maybe that doesn't matter.

What matters is that you have a future. A future you can shape instead of letting others shape it for you this time around. A future with a healthy body.

All you really want is to see yourself smile in the mirror and feel the smile inside.


Maya

The cost of proving that one isn't transgender

 Sometimes one cannot help but marvel at how the road to Hell is paved with only the most exquisitely well-intended words and actions. Even as I try to write this all down in the knowledge that I really have to get this off my chest, that is something important, it's hard not to feel like I am committing some kind of social offence. Who am I to dismiss popular opinion, after all?

Fact of the matter is that as much as I just wish to 'move on' with my life, it is hard to ignore a certain elephant in the room. One which has been standing there for a while now, and surely isn't going to budge merely by the power of me ignoring it. It's not an easy elephant to name, though its nickname could be 'transgender accusation trauma'. Perhaps not a very short nickname, but it will have to do.


It's both funny and scary how when one looks back, one can clearly see how naive and simplistic one used to be about certain topics. If you had asked me about the topic of transgender/transsexuality fifteen years ago or so, I would have given you the popular opinion spiel about the body and male and female identity of the brain.

That was before I discovered that I am intersex. Yet with the doctors still telling me that I had to be transgender. The MRI-based evidence that I got from a private clinic, which showed me to be have a hermaphroditic intersex body was cast aside, and it was insisted appointment after appointment, year after year that I had to be, nay, could only possibly be transgender with my obviously male body and with my insistence that my body was not male.

Only what I was asking them was to examine my body and tell me what I already knew inside: that it is in fact not a male body, nor a female one. But they would always circle back to me having to be transgender in their professional opinion, with the evidence about my body not being male dismissed as 'insufficient', 'unclear', 'open to interpretation' and so on. They kept asking me: "But you want to be a woman, right?", even as I required no hormones or surgery to appear and sound for all intents and purposes female already.


How does one go about disproving that one could be transgender? Years of running in this endless treadmill led me to investigate what all of those terms really meant. From 'gender' to 'feeling like a woman/man' to the intricacies of physical and psychological identity. Along the way I was forced to admit that popular opinion was wrong. The reason why I couldn't pin down 'feeling like a woman/man' was because it's a nonsensical notion that as I have referenced in previous posts is not based on science [1], with 'gender' in the modern sense being instead a symptom of transgenerational trauma [2].

What I was feeling was just the way that I am, and the person I want to be. I cannot feel 'like a woman' or 'like a man', because those statements mean nothing. Only in the context of a physical body does 'male' or 'female' make sense, and there too is too much variety to create just two groups. Even among individuals with purely male or female genitals there exists a wide variety, and there are those who suffer certain pains and defects, some involving infertility, others with varying levels of period pains and PMS. The 'female experience' isn't binary, with each woman getting a unique experience on account of the unique combination of their female body and associated hormones and reproductive organs.

Where this overlaps with the hermaphroditic experience, hermaphrodites and women can definitely swap tales and tips on how to deal best with the downsides of womanhood [3]. This realisation made it easy for me to accept that I am not a woman, nor a man, but a hermaphrodite, and unique again among hermaphrodites and human beings in general. Therefore I only have to be myself to be okay in my own eyes and 'pass' as myself.


Yet over a decade of having doctors, psychologists and other know-it-alls try to hammer their opinions home have left their scabbed over wounds. I feel that any trust that I could have had in such people has evaporated, perhaps never to return again. Perhaps worse is that I can no longer share blissfully in popular opinion. How does one go about informing people that their views on what it means to be male or female, not to mention gender are incorrect? That the diagnosis of 'transgender/gender dysphoria' is flawed and without scientific basis?

Should one even tell people about it? While I am glad that I have figured things out for myself, I feel that in doing so, many doors have been closed between me and much of society. There is a lot that I can no longer talk about now without either sharing my own thoughts, or hiding them. These days I seem to lean more towards avoiding it, it seems.

Together with the topic of intersex itself, all of it feels like dead ends to me [4]. It's easiest in many ways to not deal with something unpleasant, even if it means that one may have to actively avoid it, for example by using filter lists on social media to avoid certain content.


I think it is also essential that I get to escape from these topics for a while at least. When it has formed a significant part of one's life for far too long, and caused mostly grief and sorrow, it is essential to give it a rest. Put it on a shelf and focus on the other parts of oneself for a change. My womanhood can stay confined to the discomfort of periods and PMS for now. Even if it's a right bother sometimes, it is still a part of who and what I am. And that's fine.

There is still life beyond the sharing in popular opinion, after all.


Maya


[1] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/your-brain-doesnt-care-what-genitals.html
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/11/gender-as-special-type-of.html
[3] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/08/when-intersex-woman-isnt-just-woman.html
[4] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/02/so-i-got-denied-medical-care-because-of.html

Gender as a special type of transgenerational trauma

 Whereas the term 'sex' unequivocally refers to an individual's biological sex, i.e. their body's physical properties which pertain to the function of reproduction, the term 'gender' [1] has changed or assumed different meanings over the past centuries. Originally referring to a group of people or things which share a certain trait, it came to mean the same as 'biological sex' around the early 15th century as a way to differentiate it from the physical act of procreation that had become associated with the term 'sex' by that time.

The currently common meaning of 'gender' to mean 'social role' in the feminist sense dates to the early 1960s. This claims the existence of distinct masculine and feminine attributes that would define an individual as being part of either a masculine ('male') or feminine ('female') role in society, seeking to define the identity of a person's ego in only those perceived qualities.


Here I would like to postulate that this definition, and the perception of 'masculine' and 'feminine' properties to make up the ego of an individual, is indicative of transgenerational trauma [2]. Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that the very notion of such properties does not hold up to scientific scrutiny [3], with studies showing the brains of volunteers to display a mosaic of properties, with no distinct sets of properties that would indicate a propensity towards either a 'male' or 'female' pattern. Effectively, neither the presence nor absence of specific hormones or chromosomes appear to have any effect on the development and final functionality of the human brain.

While for animals as well as insects, their biological sex has a significant impact on their expected role in courtship rituals, an important distinction to be drawn here is that of instinct and behaviour versus reason and intelligence. No matter how enlightened a species may be, the basic courtship rituals and the instincts that drive them are still present. This underlies much of human societies, with in particular societies founded on Abrahamic religious foundations only relatively recently accepting that women are in fact individuals with the right to self-determination.


The societal patterns that have been sustained over the millennia as a result of these base rituals persist to this day, as do the traumas that accompany them. Despite there being no scientific evidence to support any dimorphism between human brains, it's still held as common knowledge that men and women are 'different'. Along with the feministic pseudo-scientific 'gender' theorem we can see this supposed difference being used as justification by some for segregation, or discrimination ('affirmative action', 'gender quota'), with no backing scientific evidence that would justify this.

Other ways that this societal trauma appears is in the form of individuals crossing those perceived masculine and feminine societal roles, either dressing up in a way that is generally perceived to be only acceptable for individuals in the other role. More extreme is the appearance of individuals who feel that they cannot live with the reproductive organs with which they have been born ('gender dysphoria', or GD) and must have these organs surgically removed. Here a considerable overlap with Body Identity Disorder (BID)[4] seems to exist [5]. Similarly to cases of non-neurological BID, individuals diagnosed with GD can grow out of the disorder, go through with surgery and end up regretting it ('detransition') [6], or find that the surgery did not alleviate the effects of the psychological disorder.


In the comparison with BID and GD one can see a pattern of trauma appear. For non-neurological (i.e. no deficiencies found within the brain) BID, there appears to be often some kind of impressive experience, often in the childhood of the person. This can be something shocking, such as seeing someone with an amputated limb. For GD the trauma appears to overlap significantly with transgenerational trauma.

Even before a child is conceived, the parents and their environment will hold certain beliefs about what is right and proper for a child, depending on the biological sex it is born with. This continues with the birth of the child, their clothes they receive, the toys they play with and the other children they see and how their environment expects them to play with others. At each stage along their development, they grow up in an environment in which their behaviour and preferences are cultured, promoted, punished and promoted until they are deemed 'appropriate'.

Here the parents and the environment are often unaware of their own actions, or would be at a loss to explain why they feel it is 'correct'. This is in many ways similar to the behaviour seen by the victims of childhood abuse, some of whom who will go on to inflict similar abuse to their own children. The distinction here is that this transgenerational trauma about societal roles or in its current nomenclature 'gender' isn't something that affects just some unfortunate families. This level of trauma affects entire societies and nations, generation after generation.


This also helps to explain to some extent the attitude towards intersex individuals. Falling outside the convenient boundaries of a binary sex, they either suffer early mutilation (intersex genital mutilation) to force them to conform, or will suffer the trauma of dealing with a society which is too traumatised to be able to accept that its concepts of masculinity and femininity are not only beside the point, but also comprehensively, scientifically incorrect.

To heal from this trauma, societies will first have to learn to accept the reality and scope of this trauma before they can begin to let go of fictional narratives. This would be a long, arduous process. If this concerned a singular patient, a psychiatrist would seek to slowly ease the patient out of their delusions and circular reasoning, so that they might see and grasp the reality. To do that with entire societies is however a whole different level.


Maya


[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma
[3] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/your-brain-doesnt-care-what-genitals.html
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3326051/
[5] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269697839_Body_integrity_identity_disorder_and_Gender_Dysphoria_A_pilot_study_to_investigate_similarities_and_differences
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detransition

Healing, growing, accepting

 I would say that a healthy point in the healing process while recovering from psychological trauma is when you not only feel disgusted with the thought of being a victim, but feel motivated to reclaim your life. Previously I have talked about the sensation of feeling like a victim, and how much I dislike that. Sure, I could complain all day and everywhere about how society keeps hurting me, and moan about their debt towards me, but that's not the person who I want to be.

Things happened. I can fix this, because it's what has to be done. Because I can see what has to be done. Even as it feels like parts of my brain are still slowly sliding and clicking into place after having been chopped up and reshuffled by repeated trauma over the decades, I can feel myself growing stronger. I am healing.


I still don't get what my body exactly is. Even if I'm less confused about it than doctors, for whom intersex bodies seem to be completely outside of their field of expertise. I had no choice but to make this my field of expertise, as this is the only body that I will ever have.

Chronologically, my body has a specific age. Yet when people are asked how old they think I am, the answer seems to roughly vary between 15 to 25 years old. From what I can tell, my body is still going through puberty. As the harm from the unintentional years-long starvation process fades, my body seems to enthusiastically return to wrapping up this 'puberty' thing. I had no idea that my body would end up looking this feminine. Nor did I figure it would display a kind of reverse ageing process. Or maybe I'm just looking healthier now. It's hard to tell sometimes.


I have to acknowledge the years of fruitless attempts at searching for medical help and answers, and unsatisfying or even harmful psychological help. I tried and did my best there, but it was not meant to be. I still feel unhappy with the fact that nobody seems to care about me being forced to use my abdomen as a monthly sanitary pad, and feeling the resulting ickiness squishing inside my perineum, along with other unhappy symptoms. But this is discomfort, not hazardous to my life. I think. I hope.


Looking back, it's hard not to admit that the past years have focused a lot on dealing with and coming to terms with these and other things. Yet it was necessary, I think. One cannot just move on when every thought feels like it had to crawl its way through glass shards.

Then comes the time when one feels that one can, no, wants to move on. Continue fixing up one's mind, while seeking positive interactions and accomplishments in the big world out there. Because life waits for nobody.


Maya

A fractured self courtesy of the gender delusion

 The past weeks I have begun to notice something curious in my way of thinking and the way I regard my own behaviour. As awareness and acceptance of my actual, real, physical body grows, so do the thoughts of how it could also move and look. It's a weird thought, that perhaps doesn't make a lot of sense to those who did not get forced into this 'gender' mess that society has concocted.

Basically, I'm free to behave in a way that is considered 'feminine' now. Yet for many years I was supposed to behave in a way considered acceptable for 'men'. Even as my body changed during puberty into that of a woman and my environment got terribly confused trying to place me in the binary system, as I did continue the 'male-approved' hair and clothing style even though my body did not fit that look.

Although I have since found the freedom to find my own look as a woman (because anything goes, pretty much), it's still weird to think about what mannerisms and way of moving and so on truly fit me. What was easy in the beginning enough was the realisation that I was not using my body properly, and possibly damaging it in the process. This included the way I used my vocal tract and how I walked. In both cases I used my body as though it actually was a male body, with a male vocal tract and male pelvis. Suffice it to say that one's body doesn't take kindly to such abuse.

Where things get trickier are the small details. Only when looking at photos and videos of myself did I begin to grasp what it was that others were seeing, and why I was getting so much attention from heterosexual men. Especially in photos of me next to other women, it would suddenly be obvious to me that my build is very feminine, with the shoulders, arms and upper body. That also means that similar ways of moving my body makes more sense, rather than assuming that I have a clunkier, more masculine body, as I had always (falsely) assumed.


During this readjustment process I also find myself loathing the horror show that I was put through by doctors and psychologists on account of perpetuating the gender delusion, and the supposed existence of 'transbinarism' (i.e. 'transsexualism'/'transgenderism'), which itself can only exist if one assumes that a brain is either 'male' or 'female'. Which we know they are not. Nor are bodies, even if the distribution there forms an inverse Bell curve which could give the false impression that physical sex is purely binary.

Minds, however, are as unique as they come, with each its own mosaic. That means that despite society's insistence that there is a way to 'feel' like a woman or a man, there truly is no such thing, and the best you can do is accept your body and work with it. That was the realisation which took me the longest to fully work through, I think, as the string of posts on this topic on my blog attest to.

The result of society's meddling in this process, however, has meant that I was forced to do the equivalent of puzzling a mirror back together using tiny shards, all of them stuffed into a fresh midden. Even if one has little choice but to keep working on puzzling oneself back together, tedious and disgusting.

Who are you after all, but what you are?

Your body, what you were born with, what you grew up with, what you experience and what you live through. Your mind, which experiences through your body's senses, growing and changing with each new experience and thought.


Yet the more I feel myself progressing towards completing the puzzle of self, the more I feel disgusted with the gender delusion. I am free to talk and move my body in any way that works for me. There should be no social pressure to feel inhibited or otherwise restricted in that area. Nor with what bits of fabric, the styling of said bits of fabric, or the colour of these bits of fabric I cover up the shameful parts of my body.

I find it here fascinating to talk with friends of the male persuasion, as we compare notes on what they are allowed to wear and what I am allowed to wear. While as a woman you can easily nick your husband's or boyfriend's knickers, pants, shirts and so on, with people calling this 'cute' or 'tomboyish' behaviour, doing the same the other way around gets you called a 'creep', 'pervert' or something worse, like 'homosexual'.

The same is true for the ways in which one is allowed to walk, sit, move one's hands or otherwise move one's body. What I think I'm feeling at this point is the realisation that those shackles have fallen off my ankles and wrists. That I'm now free to behave and move and talk and do whatever. The way that works for me.


And somehow I feel like a fur farm fox after being rescued who is blinking stupidly at an open cage door and a wide expanse of grass beyond it.


This may take some time.


Maya

PTSD; Binarism; A reality to believe in

All too often life seems to be composed out of a collection of inevitabilities. Society being one of those things, and one's course through them. If one is lucky, one ends up on a boring path. With a standard issue healthy body, standard genetics, standard intelligence and growing up in a standard environment with standard friends, family, education and job prospects. This is a simple life, albeit without many personal challenges and opportunities to grow.

When I look back on my life so far, I really do think it'd be easier and briefer to list the things which were 'standard' for me, because everything else just had to be 'different' for some reason. I guess my appearance is pretty standard. Assuming I keep my clothes on, or at least a swimsuit. Just a normal looking Caucasian woman.


Obviously all of the physical, mental and sexual abuses that occurred since I was a young child are not 'standard issue'. Nor is me being a chimera, a hermaphrodite and intersex. Growing up in a world that worships binarism, growing up believing that one belongs to one part of this binary system, only to find out that one's curious puberty was the result of said chimaeric body, with the female side of the hybrid female/male stem cell lines ultimately asserting itself much stronger.

That's my reality. One of chimaeric bodies. Of the unique nature of the individual mind. The sickening awareness of how indoctrinated people in society are. Their delusions about binarism, with a binary gender, binary sex, of individuals belonging only to one side. That one's body down to one's very brain has to follow one of either pattern. With it the complete annihilation of my existence.


Their reality is not my reality.


They call it post-traumatic stress disorder. What it does is reshape your brain itself. Reform it forever. Change your view of the world so that you'll never feel safe or comfortable again. Try as you might, you're basically an alien trying to integrate into human society. You'll never get all of the nuances, even when your brain doesn't freak out over some perceived threat and starts dragging your mind back into reliving the past with flashbacks which feel more real than reality itself.


The reality I want to believe in is one where it is possible to feel safe. Where every person is treated and regarded as an individual. Not classified by their reproductive organs or convictions about their state in the Binarist system.

Where a person like myself can actually get medical help. Help that's still needed, as the recurrent traumas remind me of. To have it acknowledged that I'm a chimera, that I'm a hermaphrodite, that I do in fact have 'male' and 'female' reproductive organs. Those are things that have happened and which are more or less in my past now. But beyond this? I had to go through so many different channels to just get those things investigated and acknowledged.

In many ways I feel like an FGM victim. Although my vagina wasn't mutilated by doctors, I was born without even the small hole that'd allow fluids to drain. Instead my abdomen had to become a sanitary pad, while I apparently am denied even the option of intercourse, painful as it may be. Trying to get the reconstructive surgery to have anything done here at all has led to nothing for over a decade and counting. Instead I'm reminded over and over by doctors that I do not belong in their reality. I'm just a disorder, a freak, a rare disease. Something that isn't their problem.


What is my reality?


Having my mind regularly torn apart by another PTSD episode? Struggling to make ends meet every month? Dream of finishing my autobiography one day and this solving all my problems? Keep telling myself that life is worth living? Drift away from my body into a less painful version of reality?


Recently, in an online group I was hanging out in, a guy told about us about this one tenant who had lived in a flat his parents owned. When he and his mother went to check up on a tenant who was behind on her rent, they found out that she had committed suicide. Weeks earlier. He'd never forget the sight and smells in the bathroom where she had OD'ed on some pills. She was only in her early twenties.

We found ourselves wondering about what her life must have been like for things to end in such a gruesome fashion. It was a poor area of the city, so likely to do with poverty, crime and drug use. People who find themselves captured by a reality that's too bleak to face sober, until one day they either escape from it, or have the bleakness forever capture their heart.


Reality. Dreams. Wishing. Trauma. Pain. Life. Longing.


Much like butterflies we all wish to fly around freely. But some of us are captured. Trapped under glass. Pinned to bits of cork with cruel needles through our bodies. Prey for hungry predators.

Unless you're on the boring path, who is going to tell you how to play the game?


Maya

Violent truth; An intersexed freak; A hidden self

Sometimes one gets hit with a sudden moment of clarity when one least expects it. Usually this is probably because there's no real way to predict that would trigger those moments. I have been aware of me regaining a lot of old memories (good and bad) and going through flashbacks the past weeks. More eroding of mental barriers that kept traumas and other assorted bad stuff at bay, basically.

In hindsight it probably was only a matter of time before a big 'reveal' event would happen like the one which I had earlier, and which is the reason why I'm typing this just after midnight instead of being sound asleep after going through all the trouble of preparing for bed earlier.


Going to bed is one those things which are both pleasant and unpleasant to me. Resting is good, because being sleep-deprived is a terrible thing. Yet it also means the confrontation with my body in the dressing mirror. How will I feel about my body today? Will I be able to trick myself into thinking that I look okay and that I can happily go to bed? Or will it be another trigger in the cascade where as I lie in bed the thoughts begin to churn and churn until I'm all tensed up again and can no longer fall asleep?

Perhaps ironically, tonight was one of those times when things seemed to go well in that respect. Feeling a bit restless, maybe, due to all the work that still needs doing the next day. But generally feeling okay and ready to rest. Having a lot of big thoughts on this new anime series from 2014 which I started watching called Sword Art Online and some scenes from it which left major impressions.

Another thing that can happen while in bed with the lights off and feeling comfortable is that of fantasising about things of a sensual nature. While for most people this is probably a fairly straight-forward process, I'm still learning to deprogram the preconceptions I have of what my body looks like, what it's supposed to do and how it should respond. The trick then is to try and abandon those preconceptions and just listen to what one's body tells one. Everything should happen naturally from there onwards.


Of course, along with the preconceptions, more mental barriers must have crumbled and after having satisfied the flesh, I was flooded with the most unhappy and upset feelings and sensations. I could feel and see just how I had shielded myself from this truth that my body so readily told me. What my body truly is like, and with it how this duality of my body is something unforgivable.

Feeling how my body responds when left to its own sensual devices, and how natural it all feels to have what others would perceive as a hybrid body of sorts. Yet there is the top part that is all female, but there's something that doesn't belong there. Freak. Unforgivable. A violent dismissal.

Then the other thing that would match the upper part of the body in a binary world. I can feel it's there, inside of me. Responding. Existing. Yet it's covered with skin on the outside so it might as well not be there. Freak. Failure. Unforgivable.


When the heights of euphoria are followed by intense regrets, pain, agony and thoughts, feelings and memories which I wish didn't exist. Just like my body, in that case. The horrific realisation that my body is unforgivable. That I shall never receive the blessing. That I have still cordoned off this part of my mind where my body truly is mine and normal in my own eyes. Something which seems so obvious, yet which isn't.

To experience my body in such a normal fashion, and then remember how my body got dismissed by everyone including medical professionals. To feel the shame and humiliation of having my body dismissed. To feel the never-healing wounds inside my mind. To realise how I have tried to ignore my own body just so that I could 'move on' with my life.


Only you cannot 'move on' and past your own body. It'll be there until the day you leave this mortal coil. You either confront and accept it, or you can live in outright refusal of the truth. For me accepting the truth means dropping those preconceptions about my body, and accept the agony and humiliation of society's refusal to accept my body and me along with it.

I can only be myself. That's all who and what I'll ever be. No matter what society thinks, demands, threatens or begs from me. I'm all that is on offer.

That's why I had to refuse offers from medical professionals to mutilate my body into something which it is not through genital mutilation. That's why I will still have to keep hoping that perhaps one day I can get the reconstructive surgery for the perineum. Because doing so means accepting my body.

Because it is the right thing to do.


Maya