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
Showing posts with label medical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medical. Show all posts
Monday, 9 November 2020
Healing, growing, accepting
Friday, 18 September 2020
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
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
Tuesday, 28 July 2020
How to starve yourself to death in two easy steps
For people who do not live in regions of this planet that are regularly hit by famine, it seems almost imaginable that anyone around them or they themselves would become nutritionally deficient in any way. Despite this, incidents of scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) are becoming ever more prevalent in rich nations, seemingly due to poor dietary choices.
When I found myself struggling with what appeared to be extreme abdominal swelling over the past years, I was initially unsure what to think of it, and the different GPs and other doctors whom I consulted couldn't tell me anything useful either. Some suggestions being offered included eating less, or cutting gluten and lactose out of my diet and see what happens. At the time I suspected it to be ascites [1], based on the 'ripple' effect across my abdomen, indicating the swelling to be due to fluids. Ascites hereby is of course a symptoms, not a cause.
During last year and until earlier this year, I found myself dealing with an ever increasing swelling of the abdomen, combined with significant weight gain, a feeling of lethargy, regular diarrhoea and weird patches on my skin. When a new GP earlier this year told me to take some medication against gas in the abdomen and a second GP at the same clinic told that he couldn't see anything out of the ordinary on an ultrasound of the abdomen, I decided that it had to be something in my diet.
I tried low-salt, no gluten, no lactose. I reduced my calorific intake to a bare minimum and saw a drop in my weight. Yet I began to feel worse and worse. I got frequent headaches, my stool got all watery and pale and at some points I basically felt like I was dying.
This all continued until it hit me that I had seen this symptom of a grotesquely distended abdomen before: on photographs of starving children, with pot bellies and not a shred of fat left on their bodies. Googling this led me to the form of malnutrition called Kwashiorkor, named after the Ga language from Ghana. It describes a type of selective starvation, where a lack of protein intake among other factors result in a gradual breaking down of various of the body's systems. This includes the lymph system and the ability to regulate the water in the body.
As a result you get an excess of water collecting in the body, usually in the abdomen, between the organs, but also in the limbs. It also affects your body's ability to maintain itself. I began to notice weird muscle pains, extreme weakness, as well as chest pains after even mild exercise, presumably from my body increasingly harvesting itself to maintain critical systems. Muscles are highly optional resources of protein and such, after all.
It seems that by the time I figured out what was going on, I had been moving into Kwashiorkor territory for years. I could pinpoint my reduced protein intake to around 2015, when my personal situation led me to stop cooking proper meals at homes and my work moved to a new office without the Chinese restaurant right next door with their tofu-filled dishes. It was around that time that I had begun to notice some abdominal swelling, which would gradually worsen over the next few years.
As a result of then reducing my calorific diet in a desperate attempt to get some grip on the situation, I seem to have been coaxing my body into a marasmus [3] state of calorific deficiency. Basically I was starving myself to death.
Since realising this now about a month ago, I have begun to pay proper attention to getting every single nutrient which my body requires. While me taking multivitamins is a good start, they do not contain essential amino-acids, and not all food sources are complete sources of protein. I had been neglecting to eat significant amounts of legumes and soy, which are the two main sources for people who are vegetarians, like myself. The animal protein which I consumed via yoghurt and milk was not enough to stave off the inevitable, nor were the peanut butter sandwiches. The latter are not a complete enough source of protein, even though they are generally a good source in addition to regular intake of legumes, soy and animal protein from dairy and meat (for those who are so inclined).
Since drastically changing my diet this way, the headaches have ceased, the abdominal swelling is reducing along with my weight, while I'm still eating three full meals a day. Which is much more than I used to eat over the past years. I also have a lot more energy during the day, my thoughts aren't hazy and slow any more, and after getting a proper workout on my bicycle on a grocery shopping run through the hilly terrain around here, my chest doesn't hurt and I feel like I could go for another run.
I will have to see over the coming months whether this fully fixes the ascites, or whether there are more underlying causes that didn't get addressed yet. Nevertheless, this has been a highly educational experience for me. Through a combination of stress, depression, homelessness and other unpleasantness happening around me I neglected to get the nutrition which my body needs. Perhaps worse is that not even the doctors whom I consulted over those five years noticed what was going on.
To me it serves as a warning. To always put your body first, because it is so easy to neglect it. And much like an abused machine it can continue without proper maintenance for a long time. Until suddenly it doesn't.
Be kind to yourself.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascites
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marasmus
When I found myself struggling with what appeared to be extreme abdominal swelling over the past years, I was initially unsure what to think of it, and the different GPs and other doctors whom I consulted couldn't tell me anything useful either. Some suggestions being offered included eating less, or cutting gluten and lactose out of my diet and see what happens. At the time I suspected it to be ascites [1], based on the 'ripple' effect across my abdomen, indicating the swelling to be due to fluids. Ascites hereby is of course a symptoms, not a cause.
During last year and until earlier this year, I found myself dealing with an ever increasing swelling of the abdomen, combined with significant weight gain, a feeling of lethargy, regular diarrhoea and weird patches on my skin. When a new GP earlier this year told me to take some medication against gas in the abdomen and a second GP at the same clinic told that he couldn't see anything out of the ordinary on an ultrasound of the abdomen, I decided that it had to be something in my diet.
I tried low-salt, no gluten, no lactose. I reduced my calorific intake to a bare minimum and saw a drop in my weight. Yet I began to feel worse and worse. I got frequent headaches, my stool got all watery and pale and at some points I basically felt like I was dying.
This all continued until it hit me that I had seen this symptom of a grotesquely distended abdomen before: on photographs of starving children, with pot bellies and not a shred of fat left on their bodies. Googling this led me to the form of malnutrition called Kwashiorkor, named after the Ga language from Ghana. It describes a type of selective starvation, where a lack of protein intake among other factors result in a gradual breaking down of various of the body's systems. This includes the lymph system and the ability to regulate the water in the body.
As a result you get an excess of water collecting in the body, usually in the abdomen, between the organs, but also in the limbs. It also affects your body's ability to maintain itself. I began to notice weird muscle pains, extreme weakness, as well as chest pains after even mild exercise, presumably from my body increasingly harvesting itself to maintain critical systems. Muscles are highly optional resources of protein and such, after all.
It seems that by the time I figured out what was going on, I had been moving into Kwashiorkor territory for years. I could pinpoint my reduced protein intake to around 2015, when my personal situation led me to stop cooking proper meals at homes and my work moved to a new office without the Chinese restaurant right next door with their tofu-filled dishes. It was around that time that I had begun to notice some abdominal swelling, which would gradually worsen over the next few years.
As a result of then reducing my calorific diet in a desperate attempt to get some grip on the situation, I seem to have been coaxing my body into a marasmus [3] state of calorific deficiency. Basically I was starving myself to death.
Since realising this now about a month ago, I have begun to pay proper attention to getting every single nutrient which my body requires. While me taking multivitamins is a good start, they do not contain essential amino-acids, and not all food sources are complete sources of protein. I had been neglecting to eat significant amounts of legumes and soy, which are the two main sources for people who are vegetarians, like myself. The animal protein which I consumed via yoghurt and milk was not enough to stave off the inevitable, nor were the peanut butter sandwiches. The latter are not a complete enough source of protein, even though they are generally a good source in addition to regular intake of legumes, soy and animal protein from dairy and meat (for those who are so inclined).
Since drastically changing my diet this way, the headaches have ceased, the abdominal swelling is reducing along with my weight, while I'm still eating three full meals a day. Which is much more than I used to eat over the past years. I also have a lot more energy during the day, my thoughts aren't hazy and slow any more, and after getting a proper workout on my bicycle on a grocery shopping run through the hilly terrain around here, my chest doesn't hurt and I feel like I could go for another run.
I will have to see over the coming months whether this fully fixes the ascites, or whether there are more underlying causes that didn't get addressed yet. Nevertheless, this has been a highly educational experience for me. Through a combination of stress, depression, homelessness and other unpleasantness happening around me I neglected to get the nutrition which my body needs. Perhaps worse is that not even the doctors whom I consulted over those five years noticed what was going on.
To me it serves as a warning. To always put your body first, because it is so easy to neglect it. And much like an abused machine it can continue without proper maintenance for a long time. Until suddenly it doesn't.
Be kind to yourself.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascites
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marasmus
Thursday, 27 February 2020
Giving the despair about not qualifying for medical help a place
I recently wrote about my trip to a local German hospital [1] and the outright refusal to have the abdominal symptoms examined on account of my intersex condition, or 'rare disease', as it's apparently designated in Germany. A few days later I also recorded this video about it:
Briefly, at this point the symptoms include the swollen abdomen as its most prominent feature, accompanied by constant discomfort to pulsating pain, the latter mostly when lying in bed. The source of the pain appears to be centralised in the area where the uterus would be, just below the navel. Previously, gently pushing on this area would cause strong discomfort and the feeling of my breathing stopping for a moment. Currently the same action causes sharp waves of nauseating pain throughout my abdomen. In addition, there's constant discomfort to pain in the perineum as well.
Understandably, dealing with chronic pain like this is costing a lot of energy. The uncertainty about the underlying cause(s) and what it may develop into take most of the energy that is still left after that, and further ruins my sleep. Are these symptoms benign? Are they indicative of something horrible, like cancer? I can only speculate without medical data to clarify things.
At this point I still have my GP who is willing to help me, and I'm fairly confident that I can at least get an ultrasound with about a month. That's still a month to bridge in low-power mode, however, so it better get some results at least.
Just another month of trying to give hope [2] a place. What if it doesn't produce any results indicative of something wrong?
Life would be so much easier if I hadn't been born with an intersex, chimera body. Then I would have received medical help ages ago already.
Life would have been easier if I had given into the lie of being transsexual and had my genitals chopped up. I just wouldn't have been able to live with myself in that case.
What's more important, being able to live with yourself, or being able to live with society?
Maya
[1] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/02/so-i-got-denied-medical-care-because-of.html
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/02/hope-versus-happiness.html
Briefly, at this point the symptoms include the swollen abdomen as its most prominent feature, accompanied by constant discomfort to pulsating pain, the latter mostly when lying in bed. The source of the pain appears to be centralised in the area where the uterus would be, just below the navel. Previously, gently pushing on this area would cause strong discomfort and the feeling of my breathing stopping for a moment. Currently the same action causes sharp waves of nauseating pain throughout my abdomen. In addition, there's constant discomfort to pain in the perineum as well.
Understandably, dealing with chronic pain like this is costing a lot of energy. The uncertainty about the underlying cause(s) and what it may develop into take most of the energy that is still left after that, and further ruins my sleep. Are these symptoms benign? Are they indicative of something horrible, like cancer? I can only speculate without medical data to clarify things.
At this point I still have my GP who is willing to help me, and I'm fairly confident that I can at least get an ultrasound with about a month. That's still a month to bridge in low-power mode, however, so it better get some results at least.
Just another month of trying to give hope [2] a place. What if it doesn't produce any results indicative of something wrong?
Life would be so much easier if I hadn't been born with an intersex, chimera body. Then I would have received medical help ages ago already.
Life would have been easier if I had given into the lie of being transsexual and had my genitals chopped up. I just wouldn't have been able to live with myself in that case.
What's more important, being able to live with yourself, or being able to live with society?
Maya
[1] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/02/so-i-got-denied-medical-care-because-of.html
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/02/hope-versus-happiness.html
Saturday, 22 February 2020
Body antagonism
I think it's fair to say that the past decades for me have been a period of growing closer to my body. From having literally no idea what my body even looked like, to getting to know it the way it really is. This period of getting over being estranged from my body has given me a lot of food for thought, also because of the many things which I have seen and experienced during those years.
For me, the reasons for becoming estranged from my body are many. Partially due to childhood abuse and bullying, partially due to my intersex/chimeric condition, the result was that by the time I became aware of this and tried to change it, I had some seriously incorrect ideas about my body. I had been told what my body looked like, and taken that to be the truth, but as I tried to match that up with what I saw in the mirror back in 2005, I both could and couldn't see it.
The thing was that I was projecting what I thought my body and face looked like onto the image which I saw in the mirror. Only through objective measurements, and through the feedback from people who had not known me before that time, was I able to begin adjusting this self-image. This was a time when I was seeing the image which I thought I saw in the mirror literally shifting between the projection and reality. This period taught me that sometimes what I think I'm seeing is in fact not what my eyes are seeing. Question your own perception.
Throughout the following years, I would be taught to dislike and hate my body. The medical and mental health professionals at the gender teams were very clear about me having to hate everything 'masculine' about my body, and to work towards the goal of complete 'feminisation'. Because I wanted to become a woman on account of being 'transgender/transsexual'. The conclusion of my body being that of a man was repeated over and over. I looked like how a male would, was the conclusion based on that. But that's not what I saw. Nor what many others saw.
When I first let my hair grow out during the period that I still thought that I was male, ironically to look 'tougher', this practically immediately caused my environment to stop identifying me as male. Instead I would get asked whether I was a girl or a guy, would get told to leave the male public restroom by cleaning staff, and basically got identified as a woman without ever having tried to be identified as such. After many years of this, I had to quit trying to get my intersex condition diagnosed for a while as I simply had to get my official gender social contract changed from 'male' to 'female' as the constant misidentification and smoothing over of resulting issues was getting to me.
At the same hospital where a specialist diagnosed me with 'autoparagynaecophilia' ('liking to think that one looks like a female, when one is not'), the first remark by a urologist who got called in during an examination was: "She really looks like a girl!" when she saw me. Well, then.
When did I feel the most hostile and antagonistic towards my body? When those 'specialists' and 'professionals' were pushing me to accept conclusions which did not match up with what my own body was telling me. When I felt uncertain about what my body really was and felt frustrated about this. I remember feeling okay with having those butchers cut up my body and 'normalise' it to fit society's views of what a 'woman' looks like. Yet this wasn't my own free choice. One's own free choice is never to have one's body cut up or harmed.
What I hold for true is that any act that results in one's own body getting harmed in some way, whether it's for social or personal reasons, is an act of body antagonism. It says that one's body isn't good enough, that it is imperfect and needs to be 'fixed'. It doesn't matter whether it's a tattoo, piercing, or more invasive body modifications including genital mutilation surgery, all of it is an assault on one's body. It's not an act of love or a caring gesture. It's a declaration of war and the usually permanent alteration of a body without cause.
A caring gesture, or body amity, is to take of one's body. To keep it healthy. To not smoke or use drugs. To not drink alcohol and stay out of the Sun to protect one's skin. To have blemishes taken care of to improve its natural looks. Body amity is to have accepted one's body or being in the process of doing so. It is an essential part in the unification of mind and body.
Thus, body antagonism is the exact opposite of body amity. It is to treat one's body with disrespect. To pollute and harm it. To mark it with graffiti and metal fencing. To rip out parts and replace them with something that is a mockery of what used to be. To override and enforce control. Body antagonism can be born from societal pressures to conform, but also from a variety of mental disorders, or a combination of both.
In the end, body antagonism is the opposite of the unification of body and mind. It is an open declaration of war between one's body and mind, which just happens to be a war which neither side can ever truly hope to win.
I'm glad that my body accepts me. I'm glad that I can accept my body. I want to respect my body, same as it does its utmost to respect me, the mind.
Maya
For me, the reasons for becoming estranged from my body are many. Partially due to childhood abuse and bullying, partially due to my intersex/chimeric condition, the result was that by the time I became aware of this and tried to change it, I had some seriously incorrect ideas about my body. I had been told what my body looked like, and taken that to be the truth, but as I tried to match that up with what I saw in the mirror back in 2005, I both could and couldn't see it.
The thing was that I was projecting what I thought my body and face looked like onto the image which I saw in the mirror. Only through objective measurements, and through the feedback from people who had not known me before that time, was I able to begin adjusting this self-image. This was a time when I was seeing the image which I thought I saw in the mirror literally shifting between the projection and reality. This period taught me that sometimes what I think I'm seeing is in fact not what my eyes are seeing. Question your own perception.
Throughout the following years, I would be taught to dislike and hate my body. The medical and mental health professionals at the gender teams were very clear about me having to hate everything 'masculine' about my body, and to work towards the goal of complete 'feminisation'. Because I wanted to become a woman on account of being 'transgender/transsexual'. The conclusion of my body being that of a man was repeated over and over. I looked like how a male would, was the conclusion based on that. But that's not what I saw. Nor what many others saw.
When I first let my hair grow out during the period that I still thought that I was male, ironically to look 'tougher', this practically immediately caused my environment to stop identifying me as male. Instead I would get asked whether I was a girl or a guy, would get told to leave the male public restroom by cleaning staff, and basically got identified as a woman without ever having tried to be identified as such. After many years of this, I had to quit trying to get my intersex condition diagnosed for a while as I simply had to get my official gender social contract changed from 'male' to 'female' as the constant misidentification and smoothing over of resulting issues was getting to me.
At the same hospital where a specialist diagnosed me with 'autoparagynaecophilia' ('liking to think that one looks like a female, when one is not'), the first remark by a urologist who got called in during an examination was: "She really looks like a girl!" when she saw me. Well, then.
When did I feel the most hostile and antagonistic towards my body? When those 'specialists' and 'professionals' were pushing me to accept conclusions which did not match up with what my own body was telling me. When I felt uncertain about what my body really was and felt frustrated about this. I remember feeling okay with having those butchers cut up my body and 'normalise' it to fit society's views of what a 'woman' looks like. Yet this wasn't my own free choice. One's own free choice is never to have one's body cut up or harmed.
What I hold for true is that any act that results in one's own body getting harmed in some way, whether it's for social or personal reasons, is an act of body antagonism. It says that one's body isn't good enough, that it is imperfect and needs to be 'fixed'. It doesn't matter whether it's a tattoo, piercing, or more invasive body modifications including genital mutilation surgery, all of it is an assault on one's body. It's not an act of love or a caring gesture. It's a declaration of war and the usually permanent alteration of a body without cause.
A caring gesture, or body amity, is to take of one's body. To keep it healthy. To not smoke or use drugs. To not drink alcohol and stay out of the Sun to protect one's skin. To have blemishes taken care of to improve its natural looks. Body amity is to have accepted one's body or being in the process of doing so. It is an essential part in the unification of mind and body.
Thus, body antagonism is the exact opposite of body amity. It is to treat one's body with disrespect. To pollute and harm it. To mark it with graffiti and metal fencing. To rip out parts and replace them with something that is a mockery of what used to be. To override and enforce control. Body antagonism can be born from societal pressures to conform, but also from a variety of mental disorders, or a combination of both.
In the end, body antagonism is the opposite of the unification of body and mind. It is an open declaration of war between one's body and mind, which just happens to be a war which neither side can ever truly hope to win.
I'm glad that my body accepts me. I'm glad that I can accept my body. I want to respect my body, same as it does its utmost to respect me, the mind.
Maya
Wednesday, 12 February 2020
So I got denied medical care because of my intersex body
Previously I talked about hope, and how I have come to see it as something primarily negative. In that sense it seems somewhat ironic that after all the convincing that others and myself did that yesterday's appointment at the hospital would be different, it appears that this negative view got validated once more.
I had to wait two and a half hours before the doctor saw me, after originally having been told that it'd take about one and a half hour after I had some blood drawn and sent to the lab for testing. At that point I wasn't really that fresh any more, but nevertheless tried. I summarised the symptoms for the doctors, showed the reports so far, from anything from the abdominal scans, the spinal and brain scans, the endoscopic examination and the abdominal exploratory surgery in 2018. I got berated on not having everything in chronological order and no reports for all of the MRI scans.
The abdominal distension, gathering of fluids in the abdomen and weight gain got brushed aside, with me being referred to the gynaecological department for 'potential endometriosis', with the doctor talking to me like I had never heard of endometriosis and never asking me any questions. Then there is the persistent pain in the perineum that is highly reminiscent of vulvodynia[1], with symptoms gradually worsening since I was 11, with the past three or four years ramping up the pain, to it being continuous for the last few months.
Maybe because I mentioned it hurting like hell every time I go to the toilet, the doctor just focused on that aspect, insisted on poking up my bum to confirm that yes, it hurts like hell when you press on the perineum. I got referred to the proctologist, to basically repeat the same research of 2018 once again. Checking for fissures and such, after this had been discounted already. That appointment would be in well over a month from now, likely the prelude to an appointment weeks later when I'd have the endoscope shoved inside me again.
As for the actual symptoms, the abdominal distension, weight gain and fluid in abdomen in particular, when pushing the doctor on this, his response was that they 'have no experience with rare diseases like intersex, so they cannot help me'. Meanwhile the ultrasound machine was ready to be used behind me. A quick ultrasound scan would have taken literally minutes. Instead I felt treated like my abdomen was some freakish no-go zone.
It would take me a few hours for the comment about intersex being a 'disease' ('seltene Krankheit') to sink into my exhausted brain. It's the kind of language that has been popular since the beginning of last century [2], only then it was used by National Socialists and kin who liked their racial purity theories. Eventually during yesterday I would go from feeling rather numb to bursting out crying as reality began to hit me. Last night I slept poorly as a result, with the effects of re-traumatisation hitting hard.
So then, instead of having the actual symptoms addressed, I'd get pacified with 'something', that would involve humiliating and invasive examinations, while not doing anything about the actual symptoms with which I came to the hospital. Even though my GP also agrees that endometriosis is an option, she and I are more worried about the monthly fluids that would be gathering in my abdomen - to hopefully get reabsorbed - since my female reproductive organs got jumbled during development. Endometriosis treatments would not address this.
In the end then, there is no medical help for me. Not even for diagnosing something that isn't necessarily even related to my intersex condition. I very likely got fluid in my abdomen and bowel obstruction. Every person has an abdominal cavity with some organs in it. Every person has intestines. Presence or absence or configuration of reproductive organs should not be a consideration in this kind of basic diagnosis involving the abdomen as a whole, and the state of one's intestines. Yet apparently being intersex immediately disqualifies one for any kind diagnosis there.
This is the end of me trying to find medical help, then. While these symptoms that I have will very likely keep persisting, it's futile for me to try and find help with it. Because the moment it's discovered that I do not have a standard male or female body, I'm instantly disqualified. I guess the best I can hope for with this diseased body of mine is that the dentist will still want to check my teeth.
Will these symptoms worsen? Maybe. Am I risking my life and health by leaving it untreated? Maybe, what choice do I have? Clearly I was born in the wrong body for society, ergo I was on my own to begin with.
Maya
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/vulvodynia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353423
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/01/surviving-auschwitz-on-sins-of-being.html
I had to wait two and a half hours before the doctor saw me, after originally having been told that it'd take about one and a half hour after I had some blood drawn and sent to the lab for testing. At that point I wasn't really that fresh any more, but nevertheless tried. I summarised the symptoms for the doctors, showed the reports so far, from anything from the abdominal scans, the spinal and brain scans, the endoscopic examination and the abdominal exploratory surgery in 2018. I got berated on not having everything in chronological order and no reports for all of the MRI scans.
The abdominal distension, gathering of fluids in the abdomen and weight gain got brushed aside, with me being referred to the gynaecological department for 'potential endometriosis', with the doctor talking to me like I had never heard of endometriosis and never asking me any questions. Then there is the persistent pain in the perineum that is highly reminiscent of vulvodynia[1], with symptoms gradually worsening since I was 11, with the past three or four years ramping up the pain, to it being continuous for the last few months.
Maybe because I mentioned it hurting like hell every time I go to the toilet, the doctor just focused on that aspect, insisted on poking up my bum to confirm that yes, it hurts like hell when you press on the perineum. I got referred to the proctologist, to basically repeat the same research of 2018 once again. Checking for fissures and such, after this had been discounted already. That appointment would be in well over a month from now, likely the prelude to an appointment weeks later when I'd have the endoscope shoved inside me again.
As for the actual symptoms, the abdominal distension, weight gain and fluid in abdomen in particular, when pushing the doctor on this, his response was that they 'have no experience with rare diseases like intersex, so they cannot help me'. Meanwhile the ultrasound machine was ready to be used behind me. A quick ultrasound scan would have taken literally minutes. Instead I felt treated like my abdomen was some freakish no-go zone.
It would take me a few hours for the comment about intersex being a 'disease' ('seltene Krankheit') to sink into my exhausted brain. It's the kind of language that has been popular since the beginning of last century [2], only then it was used by National Socialists and kin who liked their racial purity theories. Eventually during yesterday I would go from feeling rather numb to bursting out crying as reality began to hit me. Last night I slept poorly as a result, with the effects of re-traumatisation hitting hard.
So then, instead of having the actual symptoms addressed, I'd get pacified with 'something', that would involve humiliating and invasive examinations, while not doing anything about the actual symptoms with which I came to the hospital. Even though my GP also agrees that endometriosis is an option, she and I are more worried about the monthly fluids that would be gathering in my abdomen - to hopefully get reabsorbed - since my female reproductive organs got jumbled during development. Endometriosis treatments would not address this.
In the end then, there is no medical help for me. Not even for diagnosing something that isn't necessarily even related to my intersex condition. I very likely got fluid in my abdomen and bowel obstruction. Every person has an abdominal cavity with some organs in it. Every person has intestines. Presence or absence or configuration of reproductive organs should not be a consideration in this kind of basic diagnosis involving the abdomen as a whole, and the state of one's intestines. Yet apparently being intersex immediately disqualifies one for any kind diagnosis there.
This is the end of me trying to find medical help, then. While these symptoms that I have will very likely keep persisting, it's futile for me to try and find help with it. Because the moment it's discovered that I do not have a standard male or female body, I'm instantly disqualified. I guess the best I can hope for with this diseased body of mine is that the dentist will still want to check my teeth.
Will these symptoms worsen? Maybe. Am I risking my life and health by leaving it untreated? Maybe, what choice do I have? Clearly I was born in the wrong body for society, ergo I was on my own to begin with.
Maya
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/vulvodynia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353423
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/01/surviving-auschwitz-on-sins-of-being.html
Friday, 7 February 2020
Hope versus happiness
The concept of 'hope' is usually postulated as something positive, as a driving, positive emotion or feeling that keeps one going in times of adversity. Yet, as I have on many occasions found, 'hope' is generally the prelude to disappointment, setbacks or worse. I would classify it as a primarily negative feeling, as it explicitly makes clear that things aren't right or fine, with one banking on a chance that things will somehow turn out okay.
Hope and happiness are also mutually exclusive as a consequence. If one feels hope, one is not and cannot feel happiness, at least not in any sense that conveys permanence and doesn't feel like daydreaming. Happiness implies permanence, stability and a sense of being at peace. Hope implies uncertainty, nervousness and the possibility of accepting bad news, an upheaval in one's living situation, or worse.
I find myself pondering these thoughts as I have somehow found myself back in the medical system after previously having settled on leaving the diagnosing of my intersex condition's characteristics as an unfinished project. Whether or not my current symptoms have anything to do with said condition I do not know. That's rather the point of this upcoming exercise, after all.
At my current GP's office it has quickly become clear that these symptoms of weight gain, a distended abdomen with apparent fluid inside it, along with bowel obstruction and persistent pain and discomfort in the perineum require a quick and thorough diagnosis. Which is why I have been referred to a larger hospital that has the resources and capability to handle such a case. Next week is the first appointment and the presumably first series of tests.
It's hard for me to pin down what my thoughts on this all are. On one hand I'm relieved of course that something is happening, and what's happening inside my abdomen will be diagnosed. On the other hand I'm both struggling with my too many memories of medical systems over the years, as well as a range of emotions including uncertainty and hints of fear. One never knows what will be found, after all.
What's different this time around is that I'm not at the hospital to have an intersex condition diagnosed, but for worrying medical symptoms which could have any number of underlying causes. It's in one way reassuring, because it means that it is not connected to those years of unpleasant medical experiences, yet it is very much the opposite of reassuring in the sense that something is decidedly wrong with my body, just that it hasn't been determined yet what is wrong and how to fix it.
Thus hope remains.
Depending how things go these coming weeks, it could all turn out fine, in which case I'd feel a lot happier. This is what I hope for, obviously. But hope doesn't come with guarantees. Reality is not concerned with what my wishes, hopes or dreams are. I only get to accept whatever comes my way. Whatever that may be. After over a decade of 'just taking it', it's not something that comes easily to me any more.
Between the relief of my body finally making its way through the final stages of puberty, and these worrying symptoms, I'm not sure what to think or feel. Is there a correlation? Is it a sign of something positive that just needs some surgical tweaking? One's thoughts just keep spinning in a circle. Hoping. Feeling uncertain. Trying to ignore it.
All I can do is hope and wait until next week's appointment. Meanwhile continue as normal. In so far as possible.
Admittedly it would be pretty cool if part of these symptoms are me growing that mature uterus and ovaries. First case in the medical literature, for sure.
Maya
Hope and happiness are also mutually exclusive as a consequence. If one feels hope, one is not and cannot feel happiness, at least not in any sense that conveys permanence and doesn't feel like daydreaming. Happiness implies permanence, stability and a sense of being at peace. Hope implies uncertainty, nervousness and the possibility of accepting bad news, an upheaval in one's living situation, or worse.
I find myself pondering these thoughts as I have somehow found myself back in the medical system after previously having settled on leaving the diagnosing of my intersex condition's characteristics as an unfinished project. Whether or not my current symptoms have anything to do with said condition I do not know. That's rather the point of this upcoming exercise, after all.
At my current GP's office it has quickly become clear that these symptoms of weight gain, a distended abdomen with apparent fluid inside it, along with bowel obstruction and persistent pain and discomfort in the perineum require a quick and thorough diagnosis. Which is why I have been referred to a larger hospital that has the resources and capability to handle such a case. Next week is the first appointment and the presumably first series of tests.
It's hard for me to pin down what my thoughts on this all are. On one hand I'm relieved of course that something is happening, and what's happening inside my abdomen will be diagnosed. On the other hand I'm both struggling with my too many memories of medical systems over the years, as well as a range of emotions including uncertainty and hints of fear. One never knows what will be found, after all.
What's different this time around is that I'm not at the hospital to have an intersex condition diagnosed, but for worrying medical symptoms which could have any number of underlying causes. It's in one way reassuring, because it means that it is not connected to those years of unpleasant medical experiences, yet it is very much the opposite of reassuring in the sense that something is decidedly wrong with my body, just that it hasn't been determined yet what is wrong and how to fix it.
Thus hope remains.
Depending how things go these coming weeks, it could all turn out fine, in which case I'd feel a lot happier. This is what I hope for, obviously. But hope doesn't come with guarantees. Reality is not concerned with what my wishes, hopes or dreams are. I only get to accept whatever comes my way. Whatever that may be. After over a decade of 'just taking it', it's not something that comes easily to me any more.
Between the relief of my body finally making its way through the final stages of puberty, and these worrying symptoms, I'm not sure what to think or feel. Is there a correlation? Is it a sign of something positive that just needs some surgical tweaking? One's thoughts just keep spinning in a circle. Hoping. Feeling uncertain. Trying to ignore it.
All I can do is hope and wait until next week's appointment. Meanwhile continue as normal. In so far as possible.
Admittedly it would be pretty cool if part of these symptoms are me growing that mature uterus and ovaries. First case in the medical literature, for sure.
Maya
Friday, 17 January 2020
Erasure of intersex identity through enforcing of transsexuality identity
The questions regarding my treatment as an intersex person at the hands of medical and mental health professionals over the past years have been, and still are, a strong motivator in researching exactly what it was that made this group of professionals persistently apply the wrong diagnosis ('transsexuality') even when the medical evidence made it obvious that my body is indeed that of an intersex person. As has become abundantly clear by now with the changes to my body's phenotype (courtesy of a nearly finished puberty), my intersex condition most closely matches that of a true hermaphrodite, in the rare sub-form without ovotestes, but with separate testicular and ovarian tissue.
What was it that made these professionals consistently fail to diagnose this condition, even after two independent medical opinions based on a 2007 MRI scan both confirmed this condition, followed by a 2011 exploratory surgery which again confirmed this intersex condition?
While understanding the true motivations behind their decisions and reasoning will never be truly possible, to me the most worrying aspect is that the underlying motivations can only truly be based on either ignorance or malice. Here ignorance can lead to the subject doing harm while being convinced that they are doing the right thing. Malice on the other hand has the subject well-aware of the fact that their actions are doing harm, but an overriding factor (ego) makes this harm seem irrelevant in light of higher goals.
So then, what reason could one have to so consistently get things wrong? One conceivable reason is that when I first visited a Dutch gender team, in 2005, I had nothing but suspicions, and their knowledge of intersex was limited to the harmful drivel in the WPATH standard and kin [1]. As back then my puberty hadn't really progressed yet into a level where my female phenotype was undeniable, I seemed to not fit into their 'intersex' category ('true hermaphroditism' being quite rare), and thus got put into the 'transsexual' category instead.
This is supported by the subsequent talks with psychologists at that gender team, who all kept pushing me to finally admit that I was a boy who wanted to become a girl, even as I struggled to see myself as anything other than a child at that point in time. Just a child who wanted to understand their body.
Across multiple Dutch gender teams and a number of specialists both in the Netherlands and elsewhere, the same assumptions were made:
The Dutch gender teams had refused to communicate with their (German) colleagues who had judged the first MRI scan. Instead they would come up with contradicting opinions to the original reports, refuting any points that would disprove this assumption of me having a male biology. The results of the 2011 surgery (surgery report & biopsy findings of the testicular tissue) would end up not swaying their opinions either.
The second point was something which I had never expressed. My question to the gender teams and other specialists had been to help me figure out what was going on with my body, as it had become quite apparent to me that it wasn't a male body. Yet for some reason this got ignored. It is very likely that in the end it was cognitive bias on the end of the people who I talked to and who judged over my case that made them incapable of understanding what I was asking of them.
By one psychiatrist especially it was hammered in that I couldn't be intersex, and that if I wanted to get any help, I had to pretend to be transsexual. By that time I was feeling so emotionally worn out that even faking being transsexual seemed like an acceptable alternative to getting answers to all the questions which I still had about my body. Even if looking back I knew it would have been a catastrophically poor choice.
So the cognitive bias, that makes these specialists try to cram everything and everyone into a 'transsexual' category seems to be at fault, then? In the most forgiving, in a 'the road to Hell is paved with good intentions' kind of sense, definitely. While one cannot discount the possibility of malicious intent, it would not have changed the damage that would have been inflicted by a scenario due to sheer ignorance and the blinders of cognitive bias.
This concerns damage that centers mostly around the following:
Feeling in contact with one's body is essential if one wants to be emotionally resilient [2]. By reinforcing the illusion of me having a male phenotype, I became more susceptible to their suggestions as I began to question what my own senses could perceive. By questioning my intent they attempted to coax me towards accepting their suggestions [3]. Ultimately I would have lost my own sense of self, of purpose and direction. Identity erased.
The irony in all of this probably has to be that as part of a transsexuality diagnosis, one gets accosted with accusations about one's gender, when no such thing exists [4]. I wouldn't be able to tell you back then whether I felt more 'male' or 'female' and these days the question seems even more ridiculous to me. All I ever wanted to be was myself, and that hasn't changed. After all, one's brain couldn't care less about one's phenotype or genitals, being all sex-less [5].
And that's it, I guess. Just one more shining example of human intelligence struggling to outperform its own shadow. Cognitive bias and ego getting in the way of providing help and answering questions. Just me at what appears to be the end of that particular medical and mental roller coaster, with nothing gained but PTSD and what feels like most of my life so far tossed away for no good reason.
It almost makes one want to cry.
Maya
[1] http://mayaposch.com/intersex-controversy.php
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-body-anchors-reality.html
[3] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-eternal-war.html
[4] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/gender-is-social-contract-not-part-of.html
[5] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/your-brain-doesnt-care-what-genitals.html
What was it that made these professionals consistently fail to diagnose this condition, even after two independent medical opinions based on a 2007 MRI scan both confirmed this condition, followed by a 2011 exploratory surgery which again confirmed this intersex condition?
While understanding the true motivations behind their decisions and reasoning will never be truly possible, to me the most worrying aspect is that the underlying motivations can only truly be based on either ignorance or malice. Here ignorance can lead to the subject doing harm while being convinced that they are doing the right thing. Malice on the other hand has the subject well-aware of the fact that their actions are doing harm, but an overriding factor (ego) makes this harm seem irrelevant in light of higher goals.
So then, what reason could one have to so consistently get things wrong? One conceivable reason is that when I first visited a Dutch gender team, in 2005, I had nothing but suspicions, and their knowledge of intersex was limited to the harmful drivel in the WPATH standard and kin [1]. As back then my puberty hadn't really progressed yet into a level where my female phenotype was undeniable, I seemed to not fit into their 'intersex' category ('true hermaphroditism' being quite rare), and thus got put into the 'transsexual' category instead.
This is supported by the subsequent talks with psychologists at that gender team, who all kept pushing me to finally admit that I was a boy who wanted to become a girl, even as I struggled to see myself as anything other than a child at that point in time. Just a child who wanted to understand their body.
Across multiple Dutch gender teams and a number of specialists both in the Netherlands and elsewhere, the same assumptions were made:
- I was biologically male.
- I wanted to become a woman.
The Dutch gender teams had refused to communicate with their (German) colleagues who had judged the first MRI scan. Instead they would come up with contradicting opinions to the original reports, refuting any points that would disprove this assumption of me having a male biology. The results of the 2011 surgery (surgery report & biopsy findings of the testicular tissue) would end up not swaying their opinions either.
The second point was something which I had never expressed. My question to the gender teams and other specialists had been to help me figure out what was going on with my body, as it had become quite apparent to me that it wasn't a male body. Yet for some reason this got ignored. It is very likely that in the end it was cognitive bias on the end of the people who I talked to and who judged over my case that made them incapable of understanding what I was asking of them.
By one psychiatrist especially it was hammered in that I couldn't be intersex, and that if I wanted to get any help, I had to pretend to be transsexual. By that time I was feeling so emotionally worn out that even faking being transsexual seemed like an acceptable alternative to getting answers to all the questions which I still had about my body. Even if looking back I knew it would have been a catastrophically poor choice.
So the cognitive bias, that makes these specialists try to cram everything and everyone into a 'transsexual' category seems to be at fault, then? In the most forgiving, in a 'the road to Hell is paved with good intentions' kind of sense, definitely. While one cannot discount the possibility of malicious intent, it would not have changed the damage that would have been inflicted by a scenario due to sheer ignorance and the blinders of cognitive bias.
This concerns damage that centers mostly around the following:
- Ignoring phenotype: enforcing the illusion of an incorrect phenotype.
- Ignoring intent: assuming desires that are not present, ignoring actual intent.
- Identity erasure: the use of brainwashing to accept the other side's suggestions as their own will.
Feeling in contact with one's body is essential if one wants to be emotionally resilient [2]. By reinforcing the illusion of me having a male phenotype, I became more susceptible to their suggestions as I began to question what my own senses could perceive. By questioning my intent they attempted to coax me towards accepting their suggestions [3]. Ultimately I would have lost my own sense of self, of purpose and direction. Identity erased.
The irony in all of this probably has to be that as part of a transsexuality diagnosis, one gets accosted with accusations about one's gender, when no such thing exists [4]. I wouldn't be able to tell you back then whether I felt more 'male' or 'female' and these days the question seems even more ridiculous to me. All I ever wanted to be was myself, and that hasn't changed. After all, one's brain couldn't care less about one's phenotype or genitals, being all sex-less [5].
And that's it, I guess. Just one more shining example of human intelligence struggling to outperform its own shadow. Cognitive bias and ego getting in the way of providing help and answering questions. Just me at what appears to be the end of that particular medical and mental roller coaster, with nothing gained but PTSD and what feels like most of my life so far tossed away for no good reason.
It almost makes one want to cry.
Maya
[1] http://mayaposch.com/intersex-controversy.php
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-body-anchors-reality.html
[3] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-eternal-war.html
[4] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/gender-is-social-contract-not-part-of.html
[5] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/your-brain-doesnt-care-what-genitals.html
Saturday, 4 January 2020
The eternal war
After so many interrogation sessions, they begin to blur together. Sometimes there's one person sitting at the other side of the rickety table. Sometimes two or three. There's always the folder with your files on the table. Sometimes they start off all cheerful and full of promises, other times they try the bad cop, good cop routine. Always there's the knowledge in the back of your mind that they are not your friends and just want you to confess. Spill the beans.
Through the blinds you can somewhat make out the outside world. It feels like such a long time ago since you have last seen the sky. Felt the sun on your skin. Smelled the air after a rainstorm. Instead it's just another sterile room that's still filled with the silenced cries from other unfortunate souls. And the predatory grin at the other side of the table. Just another day spent in eternity.
The theme is always the same. If you cooperate with us, you'll be out of here in a jiffy. Why are you making things so hard for yourself? Who or what are you protecting? It's not worth it. It's not real. This is you here now. In this uncomfortable chair, in a place where you do not want to be. In this prison. We are here to help you, but you must cooperate.
Just tell us the things we want to know, and you'll be out of here, on your way home before you have time to even grab your coat.
Catching my reflection in the standing mirror as I get dressed in the morning, I can still feel how part of my soul is stuck in those interrogation rooms. Hear the alternatingly enticing or accusing voices. About helping me, about me being difficult. About why I cannot simply accept the facts that they put in front of me. Facts which I know to be false.
The claims made by them, about how my body was that of a male, with no indications of an intersex condition. Though they could absolutely help me with the transsexuality which they were convinced that I had.
Looking at my unclad body in the mirror, I can only smile bitterly at those memories. Following with my eyes the contours of my wide hips, narrow waist and still-growing chest that took no medication and no artificial hormones to grow. The years that my body actively resisted responding to hormone therapy for some reason which I still do not understand. The relief when my body decided to continue with puberty and increase its production of female hormones. The cessation of hormone therapy. This body which I see in the mirror is the only fact that I have to accept. This is my body. Not the delusion they tried to make me believe in.
In many ways, my body continuing to develop like this feels like the only way that I could have escaped from those interrogation sessions. It feels like salvation, just when I thought that I was about to lose my sanity, my mind and probably many other parts of myself which I would rather keep.
Though I have had to go back to doctors again recently to catch up on some lingering issues - mostly because getting a gynaecologist to accept you as a true hermaphrodite intersex woman is tougher than nails - I have some hope now that this time it will be different. Nobody can tell me those same lies again. I escaped all of that. This time will not be like before.
Part of me still feels like it'll forever be trapped in those interrogation rooms.
How do you take the war out of a person?
Maya
Through the blinds you can somewhat make out the outside world. It feels like such a long time ago since you have last seen the sky. Felt the sun on your skin. Smelled the air after a rainstorm. Instead it's just another sterile room that's still filled with the silenced cries from other unfortunate souls. And the predatory grin at the other side of the table. Just another day spent in eternity.
The theme is always the same. If you cooperate with us, you'll be out of here in a jiffy. Why are you making things so hard for yourself? Who or what are you protecting? It's not worth it. It's not real. This is you here now. In this uncomfortable chair, in a place where you do not want to be. In this prison. We are here to help you, but you must cooperate.
Just tell us the things we want to know, and you'll be out of here, on your way home before you have time to even grab your coat.
Catching my reflection in the standing mirror as I get dressed in the morning, I can still feel how part of my soul is stuck in those interrogation rooms. Hear the alternatingly enticing or accusing voices. About helping me, about me being difficult. About why I cannot simply accept the facts that they put in front of me. Facts which I know to be false.
The claims made by them, about how my body was that of a male, with no indications of an intersex condition. Though they could absolutely help me with the transsexuality which they were convinced that I had.
Looking at my unclad body in the mirror, I can only smile bitterly at those memories. Following with my eyes the contours of my wide hips, narrow waist and still-growing chest that took no medication and no artificial hormones to grow. The years that my body actively resisted responding to hormone therapy for some reason which I still do not understand. The relief when my body decided to continue with puberty and increase its production of female hormones. The cessation of hormone therapy. This body which I see in the mirror is the only fact that I have to accept. This is my body. Not the delusion they tried to make me believe in.
In many ways, my body continuing to develop like this feels like the only way that I could have escaped from those interrogation sessions. It feels like salvation, just when I thought that I was about to lose my sanity, my mind and probably many other parts of myself which I would rather keep.
Though I have had to go back to doctors again recently to catch up on some lingering issues - mostly because getting a gynaecologist to accept you as a true hermaphrodite intersex woman is tougher than nails - I have some hope now that this time it will be different. Nobody can tell me those same lies again. I escaped all of that. This time will not be like before.
Part of me still feels like it'll forever be trapped in those interrogation rooms.
How do you take the war out of a person?
Maya
Friday, 27 December 2019
The body anchors reality
What do you feel like? What do you want to feel like? What do you feel, experience, dream about? What do you see your body as? What do you think your body is? What do you want your body to be? Why?
Most of my life seems to have consisted out of these questions being asked over and over again. By myself. By others. Some of them mostly after I found out about my body being intersex, and suddenly it was assumed that I would have to question all of those things about my body and my sense of self. About which genitals I prefer. What clothing I am into. Why I'm not wearing make-up if I do the 'female' thing. Which gender I prefer. Which pronouns I wish to be addressed with. When I'm getting surgery to fix this wretched body of mine.
I can see now that they were all just veils, illusions that were covering up the truth. Designed to trap a person in a maze with no exit, only to keep them wandering around forever more in a world that almost makes sense. The concept of gender, for one, is merely a social contract [1] that has no bearing on an individual's intrinsic qualities. Yet it skillfully traps a mind the way a spider's web would trap an unsuspecting fly.
In that sense, the question of 'do you feel more like a man or woman?' is not a question that can be reasonably answered, especially when taken into account that the brain does not encode a preferred biological sex [2]. The turmoil which I experienced therefore in my mind the past years was not due to me having to get into touch with my True Feelings or such, but rather because I kept getting asked questions which do not have an answer.
I cannot feel like a man or a woman, because that's not a valid question. I can only ever feel like myself. Because every brain is a unique mosaic with unique memories. Similarly, every human body is different. Because of one's DNA. Because of one's phenotype because no body develops the same way. This makes every individual and every individual's body uniquely them.
Similarly, the question of which genitals I would prefer to have is a nonsensical question. Why would I want to remove what my body has unless there is a medical need to do so? If I felt that way, I would question the feeling instead. I have had years to ask myself whether I would be okay with having not just female but also male genitals. After I pushed away society's expectations, I found that I could easily accept and love my body the way it is. How could I not? Because it's 'different'? I grew up with this body, so to me it is per definition 'normal'.
This body that I was born with, with its unusual phenotype, is as much of a valid phenotype as any other, because it exists. My body may be more unique than that of most people, perhaps, but it anchors me to reality as much as any other body would. With my senses I can experience reality. With my limbs I can move around and manipulate the world around me. This is reality. This is me, my body, in reality.
Turns out, reality is pretty simple. It are the delusions that make it complicated.
Maya
[1] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/gender-is-social-contract-not-part-of.html
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/your-brain-doesnt-care-what-genitals.html
Most of my life seems to have consisted out of these questions being asked over and over again. By myself. By others. Some of them mostly after I found out about my body being intersex, and suddenly it was assumed that I would have to question all of those things about my body and my sense of self. About which genitals I prefer. What clothing I am into. Why I'm not wearing make-up if I do the 'female' thing. Which gender I prefer. Which pronouns I wish to be addressed with. When I'm getting surgery to fix this wretched body of mine.
I can see now that they were all just veils, illusions that were covering up the truth. Designed to trap a person in a maze with no exit, only to keep them wandering around forever more in a world that almost makes sense. The concept of gender, for one, is merely a social contract [1] that has no bearing on an individual's intrinsic qualities. Yet it skillfully traps a mind the way a spider's web would trap an unsuspecting fly.
In that sense, the question of 'do you feel more like a man or woman?' is not a question that can be reasonably answered, especially when taken into account that the brain does not encode a preferred biological sex [2]. The turmoil which I experienced therefore in my mind the past years was not due to me having to get into touch with my True Feelings or such, but rather because I kept getting asked questions which do not have an answer.
I cannot feel like a man or a woman, because that's not a valid question. I can only ever feel like myself. Because every brain is a unique mosaic with unique memories. Similarly, every human body is different. Because of one's DNA. Because of one's phenotype because no body develops the same way. This makes every individual and every individual's body uniquely them.
Similarly, the question of which genitals I would prefer to have is a nonsensical question. Why would I want to remove what my body has unless there is a medical need to do so? If I felt that way, I would question the feeling instead. I have had years to ask myself whether I would be okay with having not just female but also male genitals. After I pushed away society's expectations, I found that I could easily accept and love my body the way it is. How could I not? Because it's 'different'? I grew up with this body, so to me it is per definition 'normal'.
This body that I was born with, with its unusual phenotype, is as much of a valid phenotype as any other, because it exists. My body may be more unique than that of most people, perhaps, but it anchors me to reality as much as any other body would. With my senses I can experience reality. With my limbs I can move around and manipulate the world around me. This is reality. This is me, my body, in reality.
Turns out, reality is pretty simple. It are the delusions that make it complicated.
Maya
[1] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/gender-is-social-contract-not-part-of.html
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/your-brain-doesnt-care-what-genitals.html
Sunday, 15 December 2019
Your brain doesn't care what genitals you have
The concept of a sexually dimorphic brain has been a popular concept over many centuries, including as part of the nature-versus-nurture debate and related, such as when trying to explain the far higher rate of men committing (and becoming the victim of) crimes [1]. For the latter the current statistical trend shows that this big difference is becoming ever smaller. Much like with things such as cigarette smoking, it appears that social factors are mostly behind such differences, and not anything innate.
This is supported by recent research on whether there are any characteristics in the human brain that would allow us to differentiate brains into a 'male' or 'female' category [2]. The executive summary is that there is no such thing. As the PNAS study points out, human brains are mosaics of features and characteristics, with some more pronounced or formed in a particular way, but as a whole human brains are incredibly diverse.
While one could argue that some structures in the brain are more readily formed when, for example, specific (hormonal) triggers are present during brain development, and there is definitely sufficient evidence that shows that the development of the brain before birth is affected by a myriad of external factors, the human brain is essentially unisex.
This poses the interesting question of how this lack of dimorphism translates into the often used phrases about 'feeling like a woman', or 'feeling like a man'. Here, too, the social component appears to be responsible [3], with a 'gender social contract' or GSC forming an essential part of most societies. These GSCs essentially define what being a 'man' or 'woman' in that particular society entails.
Indeed, to the brain itself, the actual mapping of the body including the genitals does not differ between individuals with male or female primary sex characteristics. They are after all merely different configurations of the exact same organs, innervated by the exact same nerves. During sexual activity, brain activity is different between men and women, but this difference vanishes upon reaching orgasm [5], which considering especially the differences in the activation of the motor cortex in these studies could be argued to be mostly due to the different mechanical control requirements on the sides involved.
In a 2011 review study by Sedda [6] on the possible neurological causes behind Body Integrity Identity Disorder [7] (BIID), it is indicated that disruptions in the brain's somatosensory integration of the body's limbs may be due to some issue in the right parietal lobe, which would cause some parts of the body to be regarded as 'foreign' to the brain. Even though they can feel and see the affected limb, the parietal lobe issue causes the integration to fail.
Interestingly, body schema can also be affected with BIID in addition to body image. Here body schema refers to the dynamically updated awareness of where one's limbs and body are positioned in space at any given time. Body image is simply a description of the body. It is however argued that the terms of body image and body schema are too simplistic to fully cover the way that the brain integrates and maps the entirety of the body.
Fascinating about BIID is that the desire to have a limb amputated can change or even vanish. This might indicate a recovery of the SPL (superior parietal lobe) or other affected parts which originally caused the integration issue. All of this leads to the conclusion that perhaps the correct treatment for a disorder like BIID is not to perform the desired surgery, but to attempt to correct the underlying (neurological) cause without any surgery.
The mapping of the body to the brain is something which does not differ between individuals, as we all have the same basic body configuration. This is why something like phantom pains in people who have had limbs amputated is such a problem. Even with the physical limb gone, the mapping in the brain still exists and the parietal lobe among other parts of the brain keep trying to integrate it into one's perception.
This does however also mean that as long as the body part is still there, in whatever form or shape, the somatosensory experience is intact. In the case of individuals with more unique body configurations, such as true hermaphrodites (possessing both male and female genitals), the possession of both a vagina and a penis is of no concern, as there is no relevant innervation of the vagina, the penis is identical to the clitoris, and the presence of breasts is identical between men and women, despite absence of major fatty tissues and glands in the former.
As a hermaphroditic intersex person myself, this matches my own experiences quite well. My experience of 'gender' and the question of which sex I 'felt like' caused a great struggle for me, as I tried to make sense of these questions and concepts. In the end it became painfully obvious to me that none of those concepts and questions had any relevance to me, other than in a social context.
There are many things which I could change about my body's appearance within the context of sexuality, such as whether to have the penis reduced to a clitoris, undergo a mastectomy to have the (naturally developed) breasts removed, and of course have labia created in addition to having the (closed-off) vagina attached to the perineum (creating an entrance). Of these only the latter makes any sense to me, considering the negative consequences of having this closed-off vagina. Having labia is something completely optional to me, but since there's still skin literally hanging around there that serves no other purpose, one may as well.
The other two surgeries mentioned, they are about removing and reducing, involving invasive surgery, scarring and essentially damaging the body. They are surgeries which I would only consider in the context of something medically urgent, such as breast cancer. As my body did develop the way it did, however, I have no issues with accepting it the way it is. I feel no urge to conform to any kind of social standards, to be a 'typical woman' or 'typical man'. I got no need to compare my body in the context of 'male' or 'female'.
While reading through the studies that are now being published on this subject, and the strong evidence that the human brain does not in fact encode any kind of preference for a body configuration beyond essentially the expectation of at least having four limbs and five-fingered hands in addition to a few other bits hooked up, it makes one again understand why it's so easy for an intersex person to feel at home in an 'unusual' body, and for people born with extra parts or functionality (like the tetrachromats [8] among us).
There is also a limb attached to our body which we aren't normally aware of, even though it's still present: our tail. Though it ends in a little stump as it does for all ape species, if one were to make the appropriate genetic modifications, a human could have a fully developed tail, and it would feel as normal to have as one's arms.
All of this is to say that to try to cram the human body and its brain into one of two tiny boxes is to do a disservice to its amazing diversity, as well as the fascinating scientific reality that is only now unfolding for us.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime
[2] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468
[3] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/gender-is-social-contract-not-part-of.html
[4] https://www.bccn-berlin.de/news/unisex-genital-maps-in-the-brain.html
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19219848
[6] Body Integrity Identity Disorder: From A Psychological to A Neurological Syndrome (DOI 10.1007/s11065-011-9186-6)
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
This is supported by recent research on whether there are any characteristics in the human brain that would allow us to differentiate brains into a 'male' or 'female' category [2]. The executive summary is that there is no such thing. As the PNAS study points out, human brains are mosaics of features and characteristics, with some more pronounced or formed in a particular way, but as a whole human brains are incredibly diverse.
While one could argue that some structures in the brain are more readily formed when, for example, specific (hormonal) triggers are present during brain development, and there is definitely sufficient evidence that shows that the development of the brain before birth is affected by a myriad of external factors, the human brain is essentially unisex.
This poses the interesting question of how this lack of dimorphism translates into the often used phrases about 'feeling like a woman', or 'feeling like a man'. Here, too, the social component appears to be responsible [3], with a 'gender social contract' or GSC forming an essential part of most societies. These GSCs essentially define what being a 'man' or 'woman' in that particular society entails.
Indeed, to the brain itself, the actual mapping of the body including the genitals does not differ between individuals with male or female primary sex characteristics. They are after all merely different configurations of the exact same organs, innervated by the exact same nerves. During sexual activity, brain activity is different between men and women, but this difference vanishes upon reaching orgasm [5], which considering especially the differences in the activation of the motor cortex in these studies could be argued to be mostly due to the different mechanical control requirements on the sides involved.
In a 2011 review study by Sedda [6] on the possible neurological causes behind Body Integrity Identity Disorder [7] (BIID), it is indicated that disruptions in the brain's somatosensory integration of the body's limbs may be due to some issue in the right parietal lobe, which would cause some parts of the body to be regarded as 'foreign' to the brain. Even though they can feel and see the affected limb, the parietal lobe issue causes the integration to fail.
Interestingly, body schema can also be affected with BIID in addition to body image. Here body schema refers to the dynamically updated awareness of where one's limbs and body are positioned in space at any given time. Body image is simply a description of the body. It is however argued that the terms of body image and body schema are too simplistic to fully cover the way that the brain integrates and maps the entirety of the body.
Fascinating about BIID is that the desire to have a limb amputated can change or even vanish. This might indicate a recovery of the SPL (superior parietal lobe) or other affected parts which originally caused the integration issue. All of this leads to the conclusion that perhaps the correct treatment for a disorder like BIID is not to perform the desired surgery, but to attempt to correct the underlying (neurological) cause without any surgery.
The mapping of the body to the brain is something which does not differ between individuals, as we all have the same basic body configuration. This is why something like phantom pains in people who have had limbs amputated is such a problem. Even with the physical limb gone, the mapping in the brain still exists and the parietal lobe among other parts of the brain keep trying to integrate it into one's perception.
This does however also mean that as long as the body part is still there, in whatever form or shape, the somatosensory experience is intact. In the case of individuals with more unique body configurations, such as true hermaphrodites (possessing both male and female genitals), the possession of both a vagina and a penis is of no concern, as there is no relevant innervation of the vagina, the penis is identical to the clitoris, and the presence of breasts is identical between men and women, despite absence of major fatty tissues and glands in the former.
As a hermaphroditic intersex person myself, this matches my own experiences quite well. My experience of 'gender' and the question of which sex I 'felt like' caused a great struggle for me, as I tried to make sense of these questions and concepts. In the end it became painfully obvious to me that none of those concepts and questions had any relevance to me, other than in a social context.
There are many things which I could change about my body's appearance within the context of sexuality, such as whether to have the penis reduced to a clitoris, undergo a mastectomy to have the (naturally developed) breasts removed, and of course have labia created in addition to having the (closed-off) vagina attached to the perineum (creating an entrance). Of these only the latter makes any sense to me, considering the negative consequences of having this closed-off vagina. Having labia is something completely optional to me, but since there's still skin literally hanging around there that serves no other purpose, one may as well.
The other two surgeries mentioned, they are about removing and reducing, involving invasive surgery, scarring and essentially damaging the body. They are surgeries which I would only consider in the context of something medically urgent, such as breast cancer. As my body did develop the way it did, however, I have no issues with accepting it the way it is. I feel no urge to conform to any kind of social standards, to be a 'typical woman' or 'typical man'. I got no need to compare my body in the context of 'male' or 'female'.
While reading through the studies that are now being published on this subject, and the strong evidence that the human brain does not in fact encode any kind of preference for a body configuration beyond essentially the expectation of at least having four limbs and five-fingered hands in addition to a few other bits hooked up, it makes one again understand why it's so easy for an intersex person to feel at home in an 'unusual' body, and for people born with extra parts or functionality (like the tetrachromats [8] among us).
There is also a limb attached to our body which we aren't normally aware of, even though it's still present: our tail. Though it ends in a little stump as it does for all ape species, if one were to make the appropriate genetic modifications, a human could have a fully developed tail, and it would feel as normal to have as one's arms.
All of this is to say that to try to cram the human body and its brain into one of two tiny boxes is to do a disservice to its amazing diversity, as well as the fascinating scientific reality that is only now unfolding for us.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime
[2] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468
[3] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/12/gender-is-social-contract-not-part-of.html
[4] https://www.bccn-berlin.de/news/unisex-genital-maps-in-the-brain.html
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19219848
[6] Body Integrity Identity Disorder: From A Psychological to A Neurological Syndrome (DOI 10.1007/s11065-011-9186-6)
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
Some medical progress
Last Friday's GP appointment was both a big emotional step - once more stepping into the medical system - and surprisingly productive. The doctor with whom I had the appointment was friendly, open and was able to tell me a great deal more about what exactly is happening inside my abdomen.
The main cause of the extreme abdominal distension turned out to be not fluid, but gas that had gathered in the intestines. My previous GP had previously also noted that my intestines had sounded unusual, but on Friday the GP noted that the normal happy gurgling that intestines do was practically absent. This is indicative of bowel obstruction [1].
A possible cause of this bowel obstruction, the still present ascites and the other assortments of abdominal and perineal pains would be a combination of endometriosis and the still closed-off vagina which keeps menstrual fluids trapped inside the abdomen.
At this point I have to get the MRI scans and reports that are in my possession to the GP's office, after which the GP will contact me about the next steps, with ideally the fixing of these abdominal troubles and the reconstructive surgery for the vagina, all of which should help with ending the medical issues which have troubled me since I was eleven years old.
Thanks to this new knowledge I now know to drink a lot of peppermint tea and apply heat to the abdomen to control the worst of the abdominal issues. This should help me with waiting for these next steps and hopefully whatever comes next. Feeling optimistic about my chances here seems still very early day, but who knows, maybe things could work out after all?
Maya
[1] https://www.everydayhealth.com/digestive-health/diagnosing-and-treating-bowel-obstruction.aspx
The main cause of the extreme abdominal distension turned out to be not fluid, but gas that had gathered in the intestines. My previous GP had previously also noted that my intestines had sounded unusual, but on Friday the GP noted that the normal happy gurgling that intestines do was practically absent. This is indicative of bowel obstruction [1].
A possible cause of this bowel obstruction, the still present ascites and the other assortments of abdominal and perineal pains would be a combination of endometriosis and the still closed-off vagina which keeps menstrual fluids trapped inside the abdomen.
At this point I have to get the MRI scans and reports that are in my possession to the GP's office, after which the GP will contact me about the next steps, with ideally the fixing of these abdominal troubles and the reconstructive surgery for the vagina, all of which should help with ending the medical issues which have troubled me since I was eleven years old.
Thanks to this new knowledge I now know to drink a lot of peppermint tea and apply heat to the abdomen to control the worst of the abdominal issues. This should help me with waiting for these next steps and hopefully whatever comes next. Feeling optimistic about my chances here seems still very early day, but who knows, maybe things could work out after all?
Maya
[1] https://www.everydayhealth.com/digestive-health/diagnosing-and-treating-bowel-obstruction.aspx
Thursday, 12 December 2019
Confronting severe ascites
I have written a few times before about my suspicion of having ascites [1]. As the symptoms have progressed from a grade 2 (bulging flanks) to the most severe grade 3 (>2L of fluids in abdomen), I have finally convinced myself to go to a doctor with it. With a bit of help from a friend who made the appointment for me, I'll hopefully find out a bit more during tomorrow's appointment.
It's disturbing enough by itself to look at oneself in the mirror and see an abdomen that would befit a 9-month old pregnant woman, while tapping one side of the abdomen causes ripples to travel across the skin to the other side of the abdomen. My best guess is that around five liters of fluid has collected in the abdomen at this point, with it clearly causing intense discomfort inside my abdomen, along with symptoms such as shortness of breath.
Looking up information on ascites, it's not a cheerful picture that one gets, as most cases of ascites are due to a small number of causes: one's liver is dying, one's kidneys are failing or one has some type of cancer. Though I'm fairly certain that it's neither of these three options, it's nevertheless a sobering realisation of the potential severity one might be dealing with.
Depending on how quickly the underlying cause will be found, I could be looking at severe dietary restrictions (low-sodium), regular draining of the fluid from the abdomen and other assorted fun. Considering that the Holidays are right around the corner, getting quick help seems unlikely. All one can do is hope for the best.
Merry X-Mas, I guess.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascites
It's disturbing enough by itself to look at oneself in the mirror and see an abdomen that would befit a 9-month old pregnant woman, while tapping one side of the abdomen causes ripples to travel across the skin to the other side of the abdomen. My best guess is that around five liters of fluid has collected in the abdomen at this point, with it clearly causing intense discomfort inside my abdomen, along with symptoms such as shortness of breath.
Looking up information on ascites, it's not a cheerful picture that one gets, as most cases of ascites are due to a small number of causes: one's liver is dying, one's kidneys are failing or one has some type of cancer. Though I'm fairly certain that it's neither of these three options, it's nevertheless a sobering realisation of the potential severity one might be dealing with.
Depending on how quickly the underlying cause will be found, I could be looking at severe dietary restrictions (low-sodium), regular draining of the fluid from the abdomen and other assorted fun. Considering that the Holidays are right around the corner, getting quick help seems unlikely. All one can do is hope for the best.
Merry X-Mas, I guess.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascites
Tuesday, 19 November 2019
Analysing my body's decades-long stumbling through puberty
In previous writings I have mentioned this 'second puberty' that I felt that I was experiencing, but after looking it more closely, it's more of an excessively drawn out puberty. When using the commonly used Tanner scale [1][2] and putting it alongside the symptoms which I have noticed since the age of 11, I can now clearly see the struggle my body went through over the decades.
Age 11 was when I noticed early breast development, along with my hips beginning to widen. Over time both this female and male secondary development slowed to where I was left in essentially in a Tanner III stage, with neither full breast development nor any of the typical male characteristics, aside from the development of penis. As the biopsy of the removed testicles in 2011 showed, they had never entered the spermagenesis stage of development.
At this point in time, the female side of my body appeared to be stuck in a Tanner II or III stage when it came to the breasts, but with no clear development of the vagina into the multi-layer structure yet [3], as judged by the near-dozen MRI scans that were made of that region between 2007 and 2014. These showed the vaginal structure in the lateral views, running from the perineum to the top of the bladder, but without the characteristic 'H'-shaped structure when looked at it in the top-down views.
The clear presence of a vagina indicates that the testicles while present did not produce sufficient Anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) to have terminated development of the müllerian (paramesonephric) ducts that would go on to develop the upper part of the the vagina, the uterus and surrounding structures. Though the top one-third of the vagina appears to be present in those MRI scans, a uterus cannot be distinguished on them, nor ovaries.
Clearly, the interesting thing is that after puberty ground to a halt in my early teenage years, it seems to have resumed again in 2015, 3-4 years after the late 2011 orchiectomy that saw those undeveloped testicles removed. This may hold clues as to why the hormone replacement therapy (HRT) (with estradiol) seemed to have very little effect on my body, despite being on it from 2007 to 2014. Some triggers appear to have been missing.
This led to the sudden estradiol overdose effect when the estradiol sensitivity of my body apparently became significant, with female development akin to Tanner IV and V taking place over the course of the past four years. Most noticeable being the significant growth of the breasts, going from a small A cup to a regular B (so far), in the complete absence of HRT, with seemingly my body winding its way through the Tanner V stage towards full maturation as an adult female. It's also noticeable in my hips and overall body and skin tone.
The abdominal swelling and suspected ascites that started around 2015 appears to be linked with this as well. As part of female puberty involves the enlarging and development of the vagina, uterus and ovaries, this could provide hints as to why I am having these pains and sensations of discomfort in my abdomen and perineum. Considering my unusual physiology, any such changes to organs and randomly distributed tissues in my abdomen could easily lead to ascites as abdominal tissues respond to these changes in a negative way.
What would be interesting at this point is to have a new abdominal MRI scan made, as the first scan since before the resumption of puberty. Could one now see an adult vaginal structure, including the multi-layer mucosa, surrounded by a bright, white line? Is the uterus truly missing, or did some vestigial tissues there respond and grow? What would have happened to the ovarian tissue that's likely also present in my abdomen, as evidenced by my natural estradiol cycle (recorded in early 2018 by a gynaecologist)?
At this point I'm on a low-sodium diet in an attempt to keep the ascites-like symptoms under control, which seems to have a positive effect. Heading back into the fray of the medical system is not something which I am looking forward to, however. Though my body is very clear at this point about finishing up the development of these secondary female characteristics, the medical system and the people in it doesn't appear to have evolved to the point where a hermaphroditic intersex person doesn't simply get laughed away as 'yet another transsexual'.
That's a trauma which I'm absolutely not looking forward to facing again, and is essentially the reason why despite me feeling practically pregnant with these ascites symptoms I haven't bothered to see a doctor about it again this year.
As for my body, I do hope that it will follow a natural course here. Simply finish up this whole puberty thing after what feels like a lifetime and leave me with nothing more serious than the issue of the still closed-off vagina and the monthly discomfort and agony. Though I am on a contraception pill now to suppress most of those symptoms, I'm well aware of this not being a fix but instead merely treating the symptoms.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanner_scale
[2] https://www.healthline.com/health/parenting/stages-of-puberty
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty#Vagina,_uterus,_ovaries
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-M%C3%BCllerian_hormone
Age 11 was when I noticed early breast development, along with my hips beginning to widen. Over time both this female and male secondary development slowed to where I was left in essentially in a Tanner III stage, with neither full breast development nor any of the typical male characteristics, aside from the development of penis. As the biopsy of the removed testicles in 2011 showed, they had never entered the spermagenesis stage of development.
At this point in time, the female side of my body appeared to be stuck in a Tanner II or III stage when it came to the breasts, but with no clear development of the vagina into the multi-layer structure yet [3], as judged by the near-dozen MRI scans that were made of that region between 2007 and 2014. These showed the vaginal structure in the lateral views, running from the perineum to the top of the bladder, but without the characteristic 'H'-shaped structure when looked at it in the top-down views.
The clear presence of a vagina indicates that the testicles while present did not produce sufficient Anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) to have terminated development of the müllerian (paramesonephric) ducts that would go on to develop the upper part of the the vagina, the uterus and surrounding structures. Though the top one-third of the vagina appears to be present in those MRI scans, a uterus cannot be distinguished on them, nor ovaries.
Clearly, the interesting thing is that after puberty ground to a halt in my early teenage years, it seems to have resumed again in 2015, 3-4 years after the late 2011 orchiectomy that saw those undeveloped testicles removed. This may hold clues as to why the hormone replacement therapy (HRT) (with estradiol) seemed to have very little effect on my body, despite being on it from 2007 to 2014. Some triggers appear to have been missing.
This led to the sudden estradiol overdose effect when the estradiol sensitivity of my body apparently became significant, with female development akin to Tanner IV and V taking place over the course of the past four years. Most noticeable being the significant growth of the breasts, going from a small A cup to a regular B (so far), in the complete absence of HRT, with seemingly my body winding its way through the Tanner V stage towards full maturation as an adult female. It's also noticeable in my hips and overall body and skin tone.
The abdominal swelling and suspected ascites that started around 2015 appears to be linked with this as well. As part of female puberty involves the enlarging and development of the vagina, uterus and ovaries, this could provide hints as to why I am having these pains and sensations of discomfort in my abdomen and perineum. Considering my unusual physiology, any such changes to organs and randomly distributed tissues in my abdomen could easily lead to ascites as abdominal tissues respond to these changes in a negative way.
What would be interesting at this point is to have a new abdominal MRI scan made, as the first scan since before the resumption of puberty. Could one now see an adult vaginal structure, including the multi-layer mucosa, surrounded by a bright, white line? Is the uterus truly missing, or did some vestigial tissues there respond and grow? What would have happened to the ovarian tissue that's likely also present in my abdomen, as evidenced by my natural estradiol cycle (recorded in early 2018 by a gynaecologist)?
At this point I'm on a low-sodium diet in an attempt to keep the ascites-like symptoms under control, which seems to have a positive effect. Heading back into the fray of the medical system is not something which I am looking forward to, however. Though my body is very clear at this point about finishing up the development of these secondary female characteristics, the medical system and the people in it doesn't appear to have evolved to the point where a hermaphroditic intersex person doesn't simply get laughed away as 'yet another transsexual'.
That's a trauma which I'm absolutely not looking forward to facing again, and is essentially the reason why despite me feeling practically pregnant with these ascites symptoms I haven't bothered to see a doctor about it again this year.
As for my body, I do hope that it will follow a natural course here. Simply finish up this whole puberty thing after what feels like a lifetime and leave me with nothing more serious than the issue of the still closed-off vagina and the monthly discomfort and agony. Though I am on a contraception pill now to suppress most of those symptoms, I'm well aware of this not being a fix but instead merely treating the symptoms.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanner_scale
[2] https://www.healthline.com/health/parenting/stages-of-puberty
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty#Vagina,_uterus,_ovaries
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-M%C3%BCllerian_hormone
Friday, 9 August 2019
The brain of a childhood abuse victim
The realisation that we are our brain rarely feels more relevant than when considering the impact of childhood on an individual's development and the adult which they'll ultimately become. With half of the neuronal connections within the brain getting pruned between the age of 3 and adulthood, massive structural changes occurs occur within the brain during this period.
Little wonder, then, that essentially anything that a child experiences will impact which connections will get pruned or rewired and what the child's adult brain will end up look like. This is most apparent when it comes to victims of childhood abuse and neglect [1]. By exposing the young brain to a high-threat environment, it has been observed that this makes the amygdala (part of the emotional regulatory system and fight or flight mechanism) less responsive.
Along with the hippocampus (responsible for short-term memory handling), both regions thus become optimised for a high-threat, high-stress environment. While great for surviving such an environment, this adaptation makes it hard to impossible for those such affected to thrive in an environment where no such threats exist. Especially dealing with diverse, non-threatening emotions becomes exceedingly hard, with in the most extreme cases children being unable to distinguish between emotions such as sadness and anger.
Along with the hyper-vigilence and inability to regulate their emotional state, this can pose severe difficulties in the interaction with others. Since the child's brain is tuned for a high-threat environment, warnings by adults or certain actions by peers can be interpreted as a prelude to imminent danger, causing the child to display overly aggressive or aversive behaviour. In turn, this leads the former to issue sterner warnings and proceed with more aggressive forms of punishment and the like, continuing the cycle.
This combines with symptoms from Box 2 in the previous link, which includes an aversion to physical contact, even with caretakers and close family, as well as low self-esteem and the feeling that one deserves anything bad that happens and any form of punishment, since obviously one is a bad person.
Other common issues include homelessness, substance abuse including alcohol and drugs, criminal and violent behaviour, as well as mental health issues. The latter includes depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and a range of related disorders. Finally, another major impact of childhood abuse appears to be medical, in that the affected individual will suffer more medical issues over time, likely caused both by the effects of the initial high-stress environment on the child's development immune system and the results of the later high-risk behaviour and unhealthy life style choices.
A few years ago this led to the resurfacing of a recollection of being physically or sexually abused. Likely the latter as I remember lying on this surface, with two or more adults present, touching my undressed child's body. I think I must have hurt one of them as I struggled to get away. Next I remember is me running and ending up in this dark room with no way out. Then this adult male standing in the doorway and yelling at me that it's 'all my fault' before slamming the door close. Leaving the child alone in that dark room.
If it was just that apparent recollection I might have dismissed it as just a dream or fantasy, but long before this my mother would tell me that around the age of 5 I suddenly went from this open, energetic and super-friendly child to a withdrawn child, who didn't even allow their own mother to touch them, instead flinching away from any form of physical contact. Over the following years one can then track a pattern of similar symptoms that are typical of abuse as discussed earlier.
I still do not know who might have abused me, how many times or for how long it happened. I do know that a cousin of mine committed suicide after growing into a young adult because she could not live with the memories and lack of support in the family where an uncle and grandfather sexually abused her along with a number of other young girls. Especially after a legal error set the two criminals free again. Things like that are too close for comfort, and it makes one wonder about other dark secrets. Maybe even ones involving one's 5-year old self.
I'm beginning to realise that what I'm struggling with for years now are essentially the results of childhood abuse, combined with years of social rejection and bullying at school, followed by years of rejection and ridicule by doctors and psychologists regarding my intersex condition. Oh, and getting raped, sexually and psychologically abused on multiple occasions because I too fell for the lure of high-risk, abusive environments like so many of child abuse victims.
In a sense it's comforting, I guess, that I appear to be such a textbook-style case of child abuse. By realising that what's 'wrong' with me is that my brain is simply tuned for an environment which hasn't really existed since I was a child. That the way to hopefully fix this is to correct for this behaviour by being more aware of it, hopefully forcing my brain to stop living life as though there's a child rapist and murderer behind every corner. In the midst of a war zone and zombie apocalypse.
The many years of doctors and kin mistreating me the way they did has done me no service, and they will likely never relent, but there are things which I can control and fix. Together with my therapist I can dive back into what really happened, finally release that child from the dark room and show it that there can be a life after such an event. To evaluate life and other people not as a potential source of threats, but as a potential source of interesting and fun interactions and experiences.
It sounds terribly easy when I write it like that. And that's sadly the thing with cases like mine. One can cover up the literal emotional damage to one's brain with intelligence and reasoning, but in the end one is still one's brain, and just like a broken leg one cannot just wish the physical damage away. It will take time and good care to make things heal and go back to the way things were. Just like a broken leg it will however never be quite the same again.
Here's to the long road to recovery.
Maya
[1] https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/122/3/667
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3743691/
[3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/somatic-psychology/201104/the-lingering-trauma-child-abuse
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4117717/
[5] https://www.nap.edu/read/2117/chapter/8
[6] https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/effects-child-abuse-and-neglect-adult-survivors
Little wonder, then, that essentially anything that a child experiences will impact which connections will get pruned or rewired and what the child's adult brain will end up look like. This is most apparent when it comes to victims of childhood abuse and neglect [1]. By exposing the young brain to a high-threat environment, it has been observed that this makes the amygdala (part of the emotional regulatory system and fight or flight mechanism) less responsive.
Along with the hippocampus (responsible for short-term memory handling), both regions thus become optimised for a high-threat, high-stress environment. While great for surviving such an environment, this adaptation makes it hard to impossible for those such affected to thrive in an environment where no such threats exist. Especially dealing with diverse, non-threatening emotions becomes exceedingly hard, with in the most extreme cases children being unable to distinguish between emotions such as sadness and anger.
Along with the hyper-vigilence and inability to regulate their emotional state, this can pose severe difficulties in the interaction with others. Since the child's brain is tuned for a high-threat environment, warnings by adults or certain actions by peers can be interpreted as a prelude to imminent danger, causing the child to display overly aggressive or aversive behaviour. In turn, this leads the former to issue sterner warnings and proceed with more aggressive forms of punishment and the like, continuing the cycle.
Abuse and symptoms
Not all types of childhood abuse are the same, obviously, and each will have a different set of common symptoms in the affected children [2]. In the case of sexual abuse victims: "Disclosure is the most obvious indication of sexual abuse. Age-inappropriate sexual behaviour or excessively sexualized behaviour might be an indicator of abuse. Indirect signs can include any of the following:"- acting out (with aggression or anger);
- withdrawal;
- regression;
- fears, phobias, and anxiety;
- sleep disturbance or nightmares;
- changes in eating habits;
- altered school performance;
- mood disturbances;
- enuresis or encopresis;
- running away;
- self-destructive behaviour; or
- antisocial behaviour (eg, lying, stealing, cruelty to animals, fire-setting)
This combines with symptoms from Box 2 in the previous link, which includes an aversion to physical contact, even with caretakers and close family, as well as low self-esteem and the feeling that one deserves anything bad that happens and any form of punishment, since obviously one is a bad person.
Adulthood
For most victims of childhood abuse and neglect the consequences persist into adulthood, where their struggle with emotions and stress responses causes many issues [3][4][5][6]. Their views of the world and other people will be more negative than average, and the difficulty in recognising positive emotions causes significant friction in the interaction with others. Many will end up in abusive relationships that imitate the original environment in which they grew up, others will exhibit risky and/or extreme sexual or otherwise self-destructive behaviour as they find themselves struggling with a low-threat environment. A number will attempt suicide.Other common issues include homelessness, substance abuse including alcohol and drugs, criminal and violent behaviour, as well as mental health issues. The latter includes depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and a range of related disorders. Finally, another major impact of childhood abuse appears to be medical, in that the affected individual will suffer more medical issues over time, likely caused both by the effects of the initial high-stress environment on the child's development immune system and the results of the later high-risk behaviour and unhealthy life style choices.
A personal note
Repressing memories of the traumatic events is apparently also quite common, even as the neurological effects do not change. This is how I was able to believe for many years that I had had a normal childhood and youth, with a caring family and a safe environment. Even as I was exhibiting many of the symptoms of child abuse during this time and well into adulthood. By being ever more confronted with my own behaviour and the reasoning behind it, it has forced me to quite literally dig into my oldest memories to put things together.A few years ago this led to the resurfacing of a recollection of being physically or sexually abused. Likely the latter as I remember lying on this surface, with two or more adults present, touching my undressed child's body. I think I must have hurt one of them as I struggled to get away. Next I remember is me running and ending up in this dark room with no way out. Then this adult male standing in the doorway and yelling at me that it's 'all my fault' before slamming the door close. Leaving the child alone in that dark room.
If it was just that apparent recollection I might have dismissed it as just a dream or fantasy, but long before this my mother would tell me that around the age of 5 I suddenly went from this open, energetic and super-friendly child to a withdrawn child, who didn't even allow their own mother to touch them, instead flinching away from any form of physical contact. Over the following years one can then track a pattern of similar symptoms that are typical of abuse as discussed earlier.
I still do not know who might have abused me, how many times or for how long it happened. I do know that a cousin of mine committed suicide after growing into a young adult because she could not live with the memories and lack of support in the family where an uncle and grandfather sexually abused her along with a number of other young girls. Especially after a legal error set the two criminals free again. Things like that are too close for comfort, and it makes one wonder about other dark secrets. Maybe even ones involving one's 5-year old self.
I'm beginning to realise that what I'm struggling with for years now are essentially the results of childhood abuse, combined with years of social rejection and bullying at school, followed by years of rejection and ridicule by doctors and psychologists regarding my intersex condition. Oh, and getting raped, sexually and psychologically abused on multiple occasions because I too fell for the lure of high-risk, abusive environments like so many of child abuse victims.
In a sense it's comforting, I guess, that I appear to be such a textbook-style case of child abuse. By realising that what's 'wrong' with me is that my brain is simply tuned for an environment which hasn't really existed since I was a child. That the way to hopefully fix this is to correct for this behaviour by being more aware of it, hopefully forcing my brain to stop living life as though there's a child rapist and murderer behind every corner. In the midst of a war zone and zombie apocalypse.
The many years of doctors and kin mistreating me the way they did has done me no service, and they will likely never relent, but there are things which I can control and fix. Together with my therapist I can dive back into what really happened, finally release that child from the dark room and show it that there can be a life after such an event. To evaluate life and other people not as a potential source of threats, but as a potential source of interesting and fun interactions and experiences.
It sounds terribly easy when I write it like that. And that's sadly the thing with cases like mine. One can cover up the literal emotional damage to one's brain with intelligence and reasoning, but in the end one is still one's brain, and just like a broken leg one cannot just wish the physical damage away. It will take time and good care to make things heal and go back to the way things were. Just like a broken leg it will however never be quite the same again.
Here's to the long road to recovery.
Maya
[1] https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/122/3/667
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3743691/
[3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/somatic-psychology/201104/the-lingering-trauma-child-abuse
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4117717/
[5] https://www.nap.edu/read/2117/chapter/8
[6] https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/effects-child-abuse-and-neglect-adult-survivors
Sunday, 14 July 2019
Why transsexuality hurts intersex people
It's been nearly fifteen years now since I first visited a gender team. This was in early 2005, when after an extremely confusing puberty I deduced from online references that I was most likely intersex. Part of the evidence involved my skeletal features and my general physique. I figured that I would get medical help with this matter soon. Yet as it turned out, I'd be forced to be my own physician for a lot longer than I had imagined.
My skeleton is absolutely that of a female human, with its wide, tilted pelvis, that causes the thigh bones to rotate inwards to effect the female way of walking. It also causes the inwards curve on the lower part of the 'S' that forms the spinal column. I also have the outwardly set lower arms, which presumably evolution engineered so as to allow lower arms to not hit the sides of the wider hips.
Add to this the lack of any masculine features in the skull, such as an eyebrow ridge, and it's obvious that my skeleton is devoid of any features that are masculine. The other features, however, are all secondary female characteristics that would have developed during puberty. This all seemed to point strongly towards the conclusion that despite the outwards appearance of my genitals, I was in fact not male, but had to be intersex.
At the gender team, however, my opinion wasn't shared. Though first seemingly accommodating, a blood test for testosterone levels and a urologist appointment were scheduled. The first would supposedly show that I had regular male hormone levels, and the second ended with me being told by this urologist after some unenthusiastic external prodding that no sign of me being intersex had been found by him.
Quickly this situation devolved into me being pushed into the transsexuality protocol, with numerous discussions with psychologists and kin revolving around why I'd not just simply accept that I was not intersex, but transsexual. After two years of this, the final drop was a fake-out where a previously extended offer - to start on hormone therapy towards a female hormone balance and skip the transsexual protocol - was brutally retracted and with me subjected to a ten-minute monologue of how I'd have to stop being so difficult and that following the transsexual protocol towards gender-reassignment surgery was the only option for me to get what I want.
Suffice it to say, that was the day when I decided to become my own doctor again. Getting hormone level tests via my GP was easy. Obtaining the hormones via the internet was too easy and even affordable. Calculating the right doses took a bit of effort, but was doable. That was the moment when I figured out that I had neither typical male, nor typical female hormone levels.
Testosterone was being produced at elevated levels for a female body, but not significantly so, while estradiol would be high for a male body, but on the low end for a female body. I also paid out of pocket for an MRI scan of my abdomen. That scan showed me to be a hermaphrodite, with both male and female genitals present, though with a closed-off vagina.
While initially thinking that this MRI scan in 2007 might change things, this quickly resulted again in my getting stonewalled in the Dutch medical system, with doctors there insisting that nothing could be seen on the scans, and that I was just male, and transsexual. After shifting gears in 2011, I would focus on getting my official gender changed from male to female using a Dutch law aimed at intersex people, to finally put an end to the mass-confusion in waiting rooms due to this official gender not matching my phenotype.
I managed to get the required orchiectomy ('castration') that the Dutch law required to prove that I could no longer be fertile as the old gender. The resulting biopsy of the removed testicles showed that they were underdeveloped, explaining why they had never produced significant amounts of testosterone. This just added to the body of evidence about me being intersex, along with the exploratory part of that orchiectomy surgery, where the surgeon opened the perineum and found the entrance of the vagina.
Fast-forward another eight years, and the same pattern repeats over and over. I can try my utmost to find solid evidence about me being intersex, but it will be denied and I will be pushed back into just giving up, admitting to being transsexual and playing that game. Giving up, getting my body cut up and my spirit broken. Never being allowed to just be myself.
When I say that I hate transsexuality [1], it is from the above described perspective. If transsexuality didn't exist, would I have had to spend fifteen years (and counting) suffering through this non-existence with a condition that is more than real to me? Will there ever be an end to this? Is giving into what feels like the tyranny of transsexuality the only option that's being provided other than to simply end one's life? I question this.
And I'm not the only intersex person to feel this way. A good (trans) friend of mine mentioned recently on Twitter how she had been told the same thing by other intersex people she knows: how the insistence of the medical system and society to force intersex people to be like transsexuals is harming them. It feels both positive (confirmation) to hear this from others, though it also makes me feel terribly sad that so many of us intersex people are affected by this.
I will never judge a person for something what they are. I will however judge anyone based on their actions and deeds. I will judge those medical professionals and kin who caused me and so many others like me such untold suffering and trauma. They made us feel disgusted and have our traumas triggered at the mere mentioning of 'transsexuality', and who made being confronted with transsexual people such an awkward and at times traumatic experience.
As mentioned in the linked post as well, I would love to be able to find a place for this trauma, but I cannot do so while the cause behind it hasn't ended. Transsexuality is still hurting us intersex people, and those hateful, ignorant doctors will keep inflicting that same blunt instrument of transsexuality on us intersex people until we finally all submit to it, giving up our own identity.
I cannot find medical help for my intersex condition, even as it changes, causes discomfort and pain, with possible harmful long-term implications from the closed-off vagina. All I can be to the medical world is either a regular woman/man or transsexual. As I'm neither, I do not exist.
Here's to being invisible and hurting in so many ways.
Maya
[1] http://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/06/torn-between-hate-love-and-hope.html
My skeleton is absolutely that of a female human, with its wide, tilted pelvis, that causes the thigh bones to rotate inwards to effect the female way of walking. It also causes the inwards curve on the lower part of the 'S' that forms the spinal column. I also have the outwardly set lower arms, which presumably evolution engineered so as to allow lower arms to not hit the sides of the wider hips.
Add to this the lack of any masculine features in the skull, such as an eyebrow ridge, and it's obvious that my skeleton is devoid of any features that are masculine. The other features, however, are all secondary female characteristics that would have developed during puberty. This all seemed to point strongly towards the conclusion that despite the outwards appearance of my genitals, I was in fact not male, but had to be intersex.
At the gender team, however, my opinion wasn't shared. Though first seemingly accommodating, a blood test for testosterone levels and a urologist appointment were scheduled. The first would supposedly show that I had regular male hormone levels, and the second ended with me being told by this urologist after some unenthusiastic external prodding that no sign of me being intersex had been found by him.
Quickly this situation devolved into me being pushed into the transsexuality protocol, with numerous discussions with psychologists and kin revolving around why I'd not just simply accept that I was not intersex, but transsexual. After two years of this, the final drop was a fake-out where a previously extended offer - to start on hormone therapy towards a female hormone balance and skip the transsexual protocol - was brutally retracted and with me subjected to a ten-minute monologue of how I'd have to stop being so difficult and that following the transsexual protocol towards gender-reassignment surgery was the only option for me to get what I want.
Suffice it to say, that was the day when I decided to become my own doctor again. Getting hormone level tests via my GP was easy. Obtaining the hormones via the internet was too easy and even affordable. Calculating the right doses took a bit of effort, but was doable. That was the moment when I figured out that I had neither typical male, nor typical female hormone levels.
Testosterone was being produced at elevated levels for a female body, but not significantly so, while estradiol would be high for a male body, but on the low end for a female body. I also paid out of pocket for an MRI scan of my abdomen. That scan showed me to be a hermaphrodite, with both male and female genitals present, though with a closed-off vagina.
While initially thinking that this MRI scan in 2007 might change things, this quickly resulted again in my getting stonewalled in the Dutch medical system, with doctors there insisting that nothing could be seen on the scans, and that I was just male, and transsexual. After shifting gears in 2011, I would focus on getting my official gender changed from male to female using a Dutch law aimed at intersex people, to finally put an end to the mass-confusion in waiting rooms due to this official gender not matching my phenotype.
I managed to get the required orchiectomy ('castration') that the Dutch law required to prove that I could no longer be fertile as the old gender. The resulting biopsy of the removed testicles showed that they were underdeveloped, explaining why they had never produced significant amounts of testosterone. This just added to the body of evidence about me being intersex, along with the exploratory part of that orchiectomy surgery, where the surgeon opened the perineum and found the entrance of the vagina.
Fast-forward another eight years, and the same pattern repeats over and over. I can try my utmost to find solid evidence about me being intersex, but it will be denied and I will be pushed back into just giving up, admitting to being transsexual and playing that game. Giving up, getting my body cut up and my spirit broken. Never being allowed to just be myself.
When I say that I hate transsexuality [1], it is from the above described perspective. If transsexuality didn't exist, would I have had to spend fifteen years (and counting) suffering through this non-existence with a condition that is more than real to me? Will there ever be an end to this? Is giving into what feels like the tyranny of transsexuality the only option that's being provided other than to simply end one's life? I question this.
And I'm not the only intersex person to feel this way. A good (trans) friend of mine mentioned recently on Twitter how she had been told the same thing by other intersex people she knows: how the insistence of the medical system and society to force intersex people to be like transsexuals is harming them. It feels both positive (confirmation) to hear this from others, though it also makes me feel terribly sad that so many of us intersex people are affected by this.
I will never judge a person for something what they are. I will however judge anyone based on their actions and deeds. I will judge those medical professionals and kin who caused me and so many others like me such untold suffering and trauma. They made us feel disgusted and have our traumas triggered at the mere mentioning of 'transsexuality', and who made being confronted with transsexual people such an awkward and at times traumatic experience.
As mentioned in the linked post as well, I would love to be able to find a place for this trauma, but I cannot do so while the cause behind it hasn't ended. Transsexuality is still hurting us intersex people, and those hateful, ignorant doctors will keep inflicting that same blunt instrument of transsexuality on us intersex people until we finally all submit to it, giving up our own identity.
I cannot find medical help for my intersex condition, even as it changes, causes discomfort and pain, with possible harmful long-term implications from the closed-off vagina. All I can be to the medical world is either a regular woman/man or transsexual. As I'm neither, I do not exist.
Here's to being invisible and hurting in so many ways.
Maya
[1] http://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2019/06/torn-between-hate-love-and-hope.html
Sunday, 9 June 2019
Torn between hate, love and hope
It's been a while now since the apartment eviction thing came to a crescendo and I found myself moving into a temporary apartment. Not finding a new home during those two months at this apartment, I then had to move my belongings into storage while becoming homeless myself.
I was fortunate enough to have friends help me out during these moves, and for a perfectly nice stranger to offer me a couch to sleep on in a comfortable room. Though the house/apartment search continues week after week with little result, at least I have a bit of respite in the sense of no set deadline when I have to leave an apartment, no legal troubles, and above all no worries about my belongings, even though they're essentially inaccessible.
The freelancer thing seems to be picking up now as well, with one active contract and a few upcoming ones that should secure me financially this year. This would be a very welcome improvement over being jobless and searching for a job as I did last year, as much fun as it was to travel around the world for free.
To have people help me out to ensure that I will not end up sleeping on the street, to help me out with moving multiple times and to assist me with the new home search. Those are things for which I am super-grateful and which makes me feel this weird sense that I can relax at least a little bit.
Slowing down and feeling stress levels reduce is a weird sensation after so many years of stress apparently only increasing. I'm sleeping better, and have recently begun to have processing dreams, as my mind tries to make sense of all that has happened to me over the past decades. It's a lot to dig through, that's for sure.
One big and unexpected mistake I made recently was to accept an invitation to talk at a local pride parade event. Supposedly I'd get to talk about intersex and related. I was however unprepared for what I encountered. First of all the people in this parade themselves. Such an obsession with sexuality that it pretty much blew out my PTSD and I found myself practically incapable of doing the speech.
Then as I stood on the podium I found myself facing a rowdy crowd, with seemingly little interest in listening. Struggling with a poorly configured sound setup, I did an abbreviated version of the speech and left as soon as I reasonably could. To say that I felt uncomfortable was an understatement.
As I was standing in the backstage area, I could hear the people who came after me make various statements about what we intersex people are, want and such. Like us wanting to become part of this 'third sex' thing. Hearing transsexual and such folk make such statements about us intersex people with whom they do not even bother talking, but only using us to further their own agenda and desires was pretty much the final drop.
For days after this event I found myself struggling to make sense of this experience. One thing which it definitely changed was that my discomfort and PTSD triggers related to transsexuality got blown up into full-blown hatred against and disgust with anything LGBT. I found myself forced to admit that LGBT folk truly live in a world divorced from the world intersex people find themselves in.
It's not that one wants to hate, as it's such an unpleasant feeling to experience. Yet it ignited the trauma and struggle to come to terms with me having been forced into this transsexuality thing on many occasions over the past years, as I have written about previously. To be confronted with transsexuality in any shape is so incredibly painful and agonising now as the pain of all those years now lies bare and exposed.
I hate transsexuality. I wish nothing more than for it and all transsexuals to vanish right now. Just so that I can stop feeling this pain. This trauma that those doctors and psychologists caused by lying to me and deceiving me. By stripping away my humanity and reducing me to this shell, without any ability to control my future or decide about my body. Just a nothing, with doctors and psychologists patiently waiting for me to crack, admit to being transsexual and suffer normalisation surgery.
I know the trauma will not go away that easily. I am not sure that I will ever be able to understand why those so-called professionals saw fit to do something so inhumane and cruel to me. Anyone could have seen that I'm intersex, if they had paid any attention.
Part of coming to terms with what has happened to me is by learning to understand the nature of transsexuality. To eliminate this lingering fear that I was wrong after all and they were right about me. Here the medical literature makes it obvious that transsexuality is the most common form of Body Identity Disorder (also known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder), whereby people seek to have healthy parts of their body (surgically) removed, to cope with psychological issues.
This is an important difference from intersex, as with the latter there is no such identity disorder present. Though doctors and psychologists tried their best to cause such feelings and make me want to hate the male genitals or such, I would still never voluntarily want to part with any bit of my body. Thus I have no body identity disorder, and thus I cannot be transsexual.
Yet it still hurts to deal with the topic. Though I know that those doctors and psychologists were completely wrong about my body, I very much doubt that I'll ever learn why they felt this need to torture me and cause such horrific traumas. Is it because the only appropriate way they know to deal with intersex people is to coax them into accepting normalisation surgery? I mean, who could be happy as a physically non-binary person?
It's against this background that I now try to rebuild my life. Even though I am now relearning that there's also a gentler, kinder side to life and people, giving both that knowledge and my past experiences a place inside of me is not going to be easy.
Despite things being easier now than they used to be, it's still going to take a lot more love and kindness to get me fully out of the woods, allowing me to finally put behind the endless nightmare that has been my life for far too long now.
Here's to that kindness and love.
Maya
I was fortunate enough to have friends help me out during these moves, and for a perfectly nice stranger to offer me a couch to sleep on in a comfortable room. Though the house/apartment search continues week after week with little result, at least I have a bit of respite in the sense of no set deadline when I have to leave an apartment, no legal troubles, and above all no worries about my belongings, even though they're essentially inaccessible.
The freelancer thing seems to be picking up now as well, with one active contract and a few upcoming ones that should secure me financially this year. This would be a very welcome improvement over being jobless and searching for a job as I did last year, as much fun as it was to travel around the world for free.
To have people help me out to ensure that I will not end up sleeping on the street, to help me out with moving multiple times and to assist me with the new home search. Those are things for which I am super-grateful and which makes me feel this weird sense that I can relax at least a little bit.
Slowing down and feeling stress levels reduce is a weird sensation after so many years of stress apparently only increasing. I'm sleeping better, and have recently begun to have processing dreams, as my mind tries to make sense of all that has happened to me over the past decades. It's a lot to dig through, that's for sure.
One big and unexpected mistake I made recently was to accept an invitation to talk at a local pride parade event. Supposedly I'd get to talk about intersex and related. I was however unprepared for what I encountered. First of all the people in this parade themselves. Such an obsession with sexuality that it pretty much blew out my PTSD and I found myself practically incapable of doing the speech.
Then as I stood on the podium I found myself facing a rowdy crowd, with seemingly little interest in listening. Struggling with a poorly configured sound setup, I did an abbreviated version of the speech and left as soon as I reasonably could. To say that I felt uncomfortable was an understatement.
As I was standing in the backstage area, I could hear the people who came after me make various statements about what we intersex people are, want and such. Like us wanting to become part of this 'third sex' thing. Hearing transsexual and such folk make such statements about us intersex people with whom they do not even bother talking, but only using us to further their own agenda and desires was pretty much the final drop.
For days after this event I found myself struggling to make sense of this experience. One thing which it definitely changed was that my discomfort and PTSD triggers related to transsexuality got blown up into full-blown hatred against and disgust with anything LGBT. I found myself forced to admit that LGBT folk truly live in a world divorced from the world intersex people find themselves in.
It's not that one wants to hate, as it's such an unpleasant feeling to experience. Yet it ignited the trauma and struggle to come to terms with me having been forced into this transsexuality thing on many occasions over the past years, as I have written about previously. To be confronted with transsexuality in any shape is so incredibly painful and agonising now as the pain of all those years now lies bare and exposed.
I hate transsexuality. I wish nothing more than for it and all transsexuals to vanish right now. Just so that I can stop feeling this pain. This trauma that those doctors and psychologists caused by lying to me and deceiving me. By stripping away my humanity and reducing me to this shell, without any ability to control my future or decide about my body. Just a nothing, with doctors and psychologists patiently waiting for me to crack, admit to being transsexual and suffer normalisation surgery.
I know the trauma will not go away that easily. I am not sure that I will ever be able to understand why those so-called professionals saw fit to do something so inhumane and cruel to me. Anyone could have seen that I'm intersex, if they had paid any attention.
Part of coming to terms with what has happened to me is by learning to understand the nature of transsexuality. To eliminate this lingering fear that I was wrong after all and they were right about me. Here the medical literature makes it obvious that transsexuality is the most common form of Body Identity Disorder (also known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder), whereby people seek to have healthy parts of their body (surgically) removed, to cope with psychological issues.
This is an important difference from intersex, as with the latter there is no such identity disorder present. Though doctors and psychologists tried their best to cause such feelings and make me want to hate the male genitals or such, I would still never voluntarily want to part with any bit of my body. Thus I have no body identity disorder, and thus I cannot be transsexual.
Yet it still hurts to deal with the topic. Though I know that those doctors and psychologists were completely wrong about my body, I very much doubt that I'll ever learn why they felt this need to torture me and cause such horrific traumas. Is it because the only appropriate way they know to deal with intersex people is to coax them into accepting normalisation surgery? I mean, who could be happy as a physically non-binary person?
It's against this background that I now try to rebuild my life. Even though I am now relearning that there's also a gentler, kinder side to life and people, giving both that knowledge and my past experiences a place inside of me is not going to be easy.
Despite things being easier now than they used to be, it's still going to take a lot more love and kindness to get me fully out of the woods, allowing me to finally put behind the endless nightmare that has been my life for far too long now.
Here's to that kindness and love.
Maya
Friday, 3 May 2019
Coming to terms with being forced into transsexuality
The most ironic thing about my intersex condition will probably always remain that I could not have known about it sooner because I simply did not know that it existed until I practically tripped over the term and read up on it at Wikipedia. For about a week during early 2005 I figured that I had to be transsexual because I had just realised that I really felt more comfortable in a female role, rather than the assigned male role.
After that revelation and subsequent roller coaster of events, it culminated in an MRI scan on the 21st of December 2007 which showed that I have both male and female genitals in addition to a feminine skeleton. During the following twelve years my body would gradually change, with the sudden arrival of a second puberty at the end of 2014 kick-starting changes that would see me not only drop hormone therapy fully, but find myself grasping at physical changes that simply could not be happening. Changes that essentially transform my body from that of an adolescent female into that of an adult woman.
Winding the clock back more than a decade, the struggle that I had to deal with was that the doctors at the VUmc gender team as well as those elsewhere in the Netherlands, the UK, US and so on, had virtually no clue about 'intersex'. I got told that it was not possible that I could be intersex. That they had found no sign of intersex on my body. That I likely was suffering some kind of psychological delusion that made me perceive my body improperly.
Imagine defending your views against doctors and psychologists for more than a decade, as first one group tells you that you are obviously a true hermaphrodite based on the MRI scans, ultrasound and ultimately an exploratory surgery and biopsy of undeveloped testicles. Then the next group will happily tell you that your body is totally that of a male, but that they'll gladly help you transform into a 'beautiful woman' if I only just would accept that I am not intersex, but just a transsexual male with a desire to become a woman.
A big part of my post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) comes from those experiences. Where people in positions of absolute authority would consistently repeat those statements, which had been contradicted by their colleagues months or even days before. It forced me to really think about myself, about this thing called 'gender' and what it meant to be a 'woman' or a 'man'.
Looking back, I can see that the role which I was forced into was essentially that of a female-to-male transsexual, made possible by my outwards appearance as a child being that of a male child since none of the primary female characteristics were visible from the outside. As puberty approached, however, this became problematic.
The development of secondary male characteristics on my side were rather spotty and ultimately highly ineffective, with no real change in my voice or facial hair growth noticeable, even as I got feminine hips and a slim waist. Later it would be found that my testicles had essentially not developed to the point where they would have produced more than minimal levels of testosterone. The natural production of estradiol by ovarian tissue on the other hand was apparently strong enough to start some breast development and kick-start a monthly cycle that started off with a super-painful first menstruation event when I was eleven.
Not knowing what was going on with my body, I was forced to suffer in silence as I believed that my body was that of a regular male, even as the secondary female characteristics were becoming ever stronger, with this sudden second puberty seemingly finishing what got started back then.
Doctors ever really helped me with this. Aside from this one Dutch urologist and the one German surgeon, it's been mostly me against the world, trying to understand what it was that made people want to make me believe that I had to be transsexual, and just what in blazen's name my real identity and body are.
With nearly fifteen years of intense experience and plenty of time to think about it all, I think that I have reached a point where a lot of it is beginning to make sense. The concept of 'male' or 'female' has only meaning in so far as they apply to the biological, sexual elements. There's no such thing as 'gender', just one's personality. There's no way to define a 'man' or a 'woman' outside of those crude biological terms.
As for transsexuality, it's always irked me that it was so hard to pin down, and to understand how such a term could conceivably apply to me. Quite recently I wrote a bit on the topic of Body Identity Disorder (BID, also called Body Integrity Dysphoria) [1]. This disorder/dysphoria seems to provide a lot of insight in the topic. The main characteristic is a person with BID feeling like they are 'born in the wrong body', with one or more parts of their body not being part of it, and extreme measures such as amputation being the only reasonable course of action.
As noted by R. Bou Khalil and S. Richa in their December 2012 published article "Apotemnophilia or body integrity identity disorder: a case report review" (doi: 10.1177/1534734612464714), a literature study shows a strong correlation between BID and transsexuality. While detailed research is still spotty, one could state that for a person to be transsexual they need to have BID, with a strong desire to get rid of those elements (genitals and/or secondary characteristics) that feel 'wrong' to them.
Generally people with BID have these fantasies of themselves in their 'new' body, living this different life in which they are happy, unlike in their current existence. This fantasy and the differences between themselves in it and their current reality is what causes their psychological suffering. So far only amputation (i.e. giving into their desires) has shown any reasonable success in resolving their BID.
Why then the insistence on 'transitioning' if a simple amputation of the offending body parts could suffice, skipping the hormone replacement therapy and big risks of sex reassignment surgery? One could postulate here that the concept of 'transitioning' gives those who suffer from genitals-related BID an acceptable way to deal with their problem. Acceptable in the sense that moving between the two binary states that are ingrained into society can be presented as an extreme but acceptable solution to this form of BID.
The misfortune then is for other types of BID patients that there is unlikely to ever be a socially acceptable way to present the amputation of a body part that doesn't have such a counterpart, or another state that they could transition to. To lose a limb or two, lose a hand or even become paralysed from the neck down are things that usually result in the affected person being met with pity at best and them getting shunned at worst. Not by celebrities championing their 'right' to undergo limp amputations. Here one would truly wish for a less tragic solution.
For me then, as someone whose body has so made it so clear that a binary sex is a nice theory but in reality unworkable, to me I find peace in such knowledge. That there's nothing wrong with my body. That there's no sex binary, and that there are no 'male' or 'female' roles, just societal roles which differ per culture. That we're all just individuals with our own personality, and that 'gender' is an obsolete, archaic term without relevance on a modern way of thinking.
Yes, there is still a lot of suffering out there, but most of it seems to be inflicted through society's strict and old-fashioned roles, as well as our ignorance on how the brain works when it comes to understanding things like the mapping between the body and mind. Those are things which still need a lot of research. With our current knowledge we can already clearly see just why performing non-medical genital surgery on intersex infants is so incredibly harmful, as it ignores this mapping between mind and body.
Yet above all, working through all of those different aspects of a topic that so consumes humans has allowed me to take my distance from it. Through a better understanding it has lessened my agony about how I got treated by doctors and psychologists. By gaining an appreciation for how things fit together and my own place as a decidedly non-binary person in this whole, it has given me a much deeper understanding of what it means to be simply human.
Because in the end, the thing to strive for is to simply be a human being.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria
After that revelation and subsequent roller coaster of events, it culminated in an MRI scan on the 21st of December 2007 which showed that I have both male and female genitals in addition to a feminine skeleton. During the following twelve years my body would gradually change, with the sudden arrival of a second puberty at the end of 2014 kick-starting changes that would see me not only drop hormone therapy fully, but find myself grasping at physical changes that simply could not be happening. Changes that essentially transform my body from that of an adolescent female into that of an adult woman.
Winding the clock back more than a decade, the struggle that I had to deal with was that the doctors at the VUmc gender team as well as those elsewhere in the Netherlands, the UK, US and so on, had virtually no clue about 'intersex'. I got told that it was not possible that I could be intersex. That they had found no sign of intersex on my body. That I likely was suffering some kind of psychological delusion that made me perceive my body improperly.
Imagine defending your views against doctors and psychologists for more than a decade, as first one group tells you that you are obviously a true hermaphrodite based on the MRI scans, ultrasound and ultimately an exploratory surgery and biopsy of undeveloped testicles. Then the next group will happily tell you that your body is totally that of a male, but that they'll gladly help you transform into a 'beautiful woman' if I only just would accept that I am not intersex, but just a transsexual male with a desire to become a woman.
A big part of my post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) comes from those experiences. Where people in positions of absolute authority would consistently repeat those statements, which had been contradicted by their colleagues months or even days before. It forced me to really think about myself, about this thing called 'gender' and what it meant to be a 'woman' or a 'man'.
Looking back, I can see that the role which I was forced into was essentially that of a female-to-male transsexual, made possible by my outwards appearance as a child being that of a male child since none of the primary female characteristics were visible from the outside. As puberty approached, however, this became problematic.
The development of secondary male characteristics on my side were rather spotty and ultimately highly ineffective, with no real change in my voice or facial hair growth noticeable, even as I got feminine hips and a slim waist. Later it would be found that my testicles had essentially not developed to the point where they would have produced more than minimal levels of testosterone. The natural production of estradiol by ovarian tissue on the other hand was apparently strong enough to start some breast development and kick-start a monthly cycle that started off with a super-painful first menstruation event when I was eleven.
Not knowing what was going on with my body, I was forced to suffer in silence as I believed that my body was that of a regular male, even as the secondary female characteristics were becoming ever stronger, with this sudden second puberty seemingly finishing what got started back then.
Doctors ever really helped me with this. Aside from this one Dutch urologist and the one German surgeon, it's been mostly me against the world, trying to understand what it was that made people want to make me believe that I had to be transsexual, and just what in blazen's name my real identity and body are.
With nearly fifteen years of intense experience and plenty of time to think about it all, I think that I have reached a point where a lot of it is beginning to make sense. The concept of 'male' or 'female' has only meaning in so far as they apply to the biological, sexual elements. There's no such thing as 'gender', just one's personality. There's no way to define a 'man' or a 'woman' outside of those crude biological terms.
As for transsexuality, it's always irked me that it was so hard to pin down, and to understand how such a term could conceivably apply to me. Quite recently I wrote a bit on the topic of Body Identity Disorder (BID, also called Body Integrity Dysphoria) [1]. This disorder/dysphoria seems to provide a lot of insight in the topic. The main characteristic is a person with BID feeling like they are 'born in the wrong body', with one or more parts of their body not being part of it, and extreme measures such as amputation being the only reasonable course of action.
As noted by R. Bou Khalil and S. Richa in their December 2012 published article "Apotemnophilia or body integrity identity disorder: a case report review" (doi: 10.1177/1534734612464714), a literature study shows a strong correlation between BID and transsexuality. While detailed research is still spotty, one could state that for a person to be transsexual they need to have BID, with a strong desire to get rid of those elements (genitals and/or secondary characteristics) that feel 'wrong' to them.
Generally people with BID have these fantasies of themselves in their 'new' body, living this different life in which they are happy, unlike in their current existence. This fantasy and the differences between themselves in it and their current reality is what causes their psychological suffering. So far only amputation (i.e. giving into their desires) has shown any reasonable success in resolving their BID.
Why then the insistence on 'transitioning' if a simple amputation of the offending body parts could suffice, skipping the hormone replacement therapy and big risks of sex reassignment surgery? One could postulate here that the concept of 'transitioning' gives those who suffer from genitals-related BID an acceptable way to deal with their problem. Acceptable in the sense that moving between the two binary states that are ingrained into society can be presented as an extreme but acceptable solution to this form of BID.
The misfortune then is for other types of BID patients that there is unlikely to ever be a socially acceptable way to present the amputation of a body part that doesn't have such a counterpart, or another state that they could transition to. To lose a limb or two, lose a hand or even become paralysed from the neck down are things that usually result in the affected person being met with pity at best and them getting shunned at worst. Not by celebrities championing their 'right' to undergo limp amputations. Here one would truly wish for a less tragic solution.
For me then, as someone whose body has so made it so clear that a binary sex is a nice theory but in reality unworkable, to me I find peace in such knowledge. That there's nothing wrong with my body. That there's no sex binary, and that there are no 'male' or 'female' roles, just societal roles which differ per culture. That we're all just individuals with our own personality, and that 'gender' is an obsolete, archaic term without relevance on a modern way of thinking.
Yes, there is still a lot of suffering out there, but most of it seems to be inflicted through society's strict and old-fashioned roles, as well as our ignorance on how the brain works when it comes to understanding things like the mapping between the body and mind. Those are things which still need a lot of research. With our current knowledge we can already clearly see just why performing non-medical genital surgery on intersex infants is so incredibly harmful, as it ignores this mapping between mind and body.
Yet above all, working through all of those different aspects of a topic that so consumes humans has allowed me to take my distance from it. Through a better understanding it has lessened my agony about how I got treated by doctors and psychologists. By gaining an appreciation for how things fit together and my own place as a decidedly non-binary person in this whole, it has given me a much deeper understanding of what it means to be simply human.
Because in the end, the thing to strive for is to simply be a human being.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria
Wednesday, 5 December 2018
Gender dysphoria and body identity dysphoria
Back in early 2005 I found myself watching a documentary on Discovery Channel on the topic of body identity dysphoria (BID) [1]. It followed this young woman who spent much of her time looking for a surgeon who would amputate her legs. Not because she had any medical problems, but simply because it felt 'right' to her to not having legs. She could recall seeing this person in a wheelchair as a child, with that person having the same kind of amputation as she ended up seeking for herself years later.
Not long after watching that documentary I found myself dealing with first the suspicion of me being transgender, quickly followed by the growing realisation that I had to be intersex. The memories of watching those BID sufferers faded to the background, until recently, when I found myself considering BID again, this time in the context of gender dysphoria and similar disorders.
Briefly put, BID is the desire to have invasive surgery performed on one's body in order to amputate healthy body parts, or to lose parts of one's body's functionality. The source of this desire appears to be in the brain's view of the body, with the functionality or parts that are deemed undesirable falling outside of this mapping.
For BID sufferers amputation or induced paralysis appears to be the only real solution, as ethically convoluted this solution may be. This is similar to with gender dysphoria (GD), where those affected will describe a strong desire to have their genitals removed, along with many other characteristics of their body. So-called sex-reassignment surgery involves the removal of one's existing genitals, and the surgical creation of a facsimile approximation of the opposite sex's genitals.
In both cases the hope is that by giving in to the desire for surgical interference, the psychological suffering will cease, and the person can live a normal life again. In the case of BID, the suffering can increase to the point where the person will self-amputate. Both BID and GD are very real forms of suffering, without a clear solution, or cause.
Looking back on the past fourteen years that I spent dealing with my intersex condition, I can see the many choices that I had to make in order to find myself. Most strongly of all, I can see the weird medical attitude towards BID, GD and intersex cases.
With the first, there's little inclination by doctors to assist surgically. With the second it's becoming easier and easier to the point where even children can apply, and with the third 'normalisation' surgery is forced on unwilling intersex individuals - including infants - but actual medical help is not available.
I consider myself fortunate to not have any kind of dysphoria or medical disorder. Yet I'm not blind to the horrific irony that while BID and GD require intense psychological and medical attention and are met with guarded caution, the medical approach towards intersex is one of overly enthusiastic surgical intervention.
With intersex there's no protocol, real-life test, psychological evolution or the like. Nobody will weigh the ethics of chopping up the genitals of an intersex infant, or ask whether it's proper to subject an adult intersex person like myself to psychological pressure to undergo 'normalisation' surgery and to be repeatedly told that I am not capable of making decisions myself, that I should rely on the doctors.
With BID and GD individuals are born with a problem. With intersex individuals are born without a problem, but have problems created for them.
I wish all three groups could get the help that they need.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria
Not long after watching that documentary I found myself dealing with first the suspicion of me being transgender, quickly followed by the growing realisation that I had to be intersex. The memories of watching those BID sufferers faded to the background, until recently, when I found myself considering BID again, this time in the context of gender dysphoria and similar disorders.
Briefly put, BID is the desire to have invasive surgery performed on one's body in order to amputate healthy body parts, or to lose parts of one's body's functionality. The source of this desire appears to be in the brain's view of the body, with the functionality or parts that are deemed undesirable falling outside of this mapping.
For BID sufferers amputation or induced paralysis appears to be the only real solution, as ethically convoluted this solution may be. This is similar to with gender dysphoria (GD), where those affected will describe a strong desire to have their genitals removed, along with many other characteristics of their body. So-called sex-reassignment surgery involves the removal of one's existing genitals, and the surgical creation of a facsimile approximation of the opposite sex's genitals.
In both cases the hope is that by giving in to the desire for surgical interference, the psychological suffering will cease, and the person can live a normal life again. In the case of BID, the suffering can increase to the point where the person will self-amputate. Both BID and GD are very real forms of suffering, without a clear solution, or cause.
Looking back on the past fourteen years that I spent dealing with my intersex condition, I can see the many choices that I had to make in order to find myself. Most strongly of all, I can see the weird medical attitude towards BID, GD and intersex cases.
With the first, there's little inclination by doctors to assist surgically. With the second it's becoming easier and easier to the point where even children can apply, and with the third 'normalisation' surgery is forced on unwilling intersex individuals - including infants - but actual medical help is not available.
I consider myself fortunate to not have any kind of dysphoria or medical disorder. Yet I'm not blind to the horrific irony that while BID and GD require intense psychological and medical attention and are met with guarded caution, the medical approach towards intersex is one of overly enthusiastic surgical intervention.
With intersex there's no protocol, real-life test, psychological evolution or the like. Nobody will weigh the ethics of chopping up the genitals of an intersex infant, or ask whether it's proper to subject an adult intersex person like myself to psychological pressure to undergo 'normalisation' surgery and to be repeatedly told that I am not capable of making decisions myself, that I should rely on the doctors.
With BID and GD individuals are born with a problem. With intersex individuals are born without a problem, but have problems created for them.
I wish all three groups could get the help that they need.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria
Saturday, 14 April 2018
Glimpses of a normal life
This whole intersex/medical thing is something which is like an annoying mosquito: even if you want it to just go away, it keeps coming back. Ignoring it will just let it get you in a different, nastier way. Me trying to ignore the chronic pain for a bit didn't work out so well. Since a few days it's back to the burning right side, numb and painful right leg and arm, along with the terrible abdominal pains, distended abdomen and lack of appetite.
Current suspicion is something like imperforate hymen [1] resulting in something like peritonitis [2], which would explain the distension of the abdomen and pains, along with the rest of the symptoms.
Even though I have been experiencing such pains for many years now, there has been very little interest from doctors. After the laparoscopy, two months ago, and the prompt dismissal by the gynaecologist of my problems being gynaecological in nature, there only really seems one plausible option for me to proceed, namely undergoing an examination by a proctologist.
To this end I have made an appointment for such an examination, scheduled for the end of next month. This will mostly focus on examining where the occasional bright red blood comes from, and whether signs of an anal fissure can be seen. If issues are found, then some kind of treatment will follow. It's unlikely that this will in any way detect the reasons for the abdominal bloating and pain, let alone fix it.
Despite the chronic pain and the way it drains me off the will to continue living, I have to keep believing that there is a way out of this situation.
Medically I can basically just wait for something to go wrong. If it is in fact peritonitis, then sepsis is a possible complication. Until then I am forced to continue with things as if nothing is wrong.
Currently this entails waiting for the results in the eviction case, which will likely see me being forced to find a new place to live along with a draining of my financial resources, seeking a new job and doing job interviews, writing a new reference book for Packt on embedded C++ development, along with stumbling ahead with my autobiography.
I so desperately want to believe that things can and will get better. That I will find a place to live where I am actually happy to be, that I'll find a job or occupation that will make me feel useful and appreciated.
That there'll be an end to this endless, merciless pain in my abdomen that makes my life into a literal living hell.
Along the way I keep meeting others who think that I will make it, who support me and want the best for me. It's tough for me to think about how I feel about life and existence in general. After more than thirteen years of doctors and psychologists treating me like trash, of suffering all types of physical, psychological and sexual abuses, along with incarnation and attempting suicide, I feel that I have tried just about anything that I can think of to make my life better, yet with me only getting punished for my efforts.
I also hate feeling like a victim.
I'm a victim of many uncaring, vile people. True. Yet there are other people out there. People who are so incredibly positive and supportive. People whose optimism I fear that I cannot live up to. Like this one person whom I met on Quora a while ago, and who has been doing his utmost to cheer me up, even going to the trouble of getting me better Japanese dictionaries than the ones I had, so that I have more fun doing translation work and generally using Japanese. To make my life that little bit brighter and more joyful.
There's also my best friend, who has been there for me during almost the entirety of those thirteen years. Despite his own problems, he always tries to be there for me, to cheer me up and make me see the brighter side of life. I'm not sure I could have made it this far without him and other essential people in my life, such as my mother.
I feel that I have to get out of this dark shadow of my medical issues and the horrors of living in German run-down apartments owned by vile landlords. That's all that is keeping me down and so unhappy. There is a way out of this. I just don't know how to reach it yet.
Just need to survive a little bit longer, I hope.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperforate_hymen
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peritonitis
Current suspicion is something like imperforate hymen [1] resulting in something like peritonitis [2], which would explain the distension of the abdomen and pains, along with the rest of the symptoms.
Even though I have been experiencing such pains for many years now, there has been very little interest from doctors. After the laparoscopy, two months ago, and the prompt dismissal by the gynaecologist of my problems being gynaecological in nature, there only really seems one plausible option for me to proceed, namely undergoing an examination by a proctologist.
To this end I have made an appointment for such an examination, scheduled for the end of next month. This will mostly focus on examining where the occasional bright red blood comes from, and whether signs of an anal fissure can be seen. If issues are found, then some kind of treatment will follow. It's unlikely that this will in any way detect the reasons for the abdominal bloating and pain, let alone fix it.
Despite the chronic pain and the way it drains me off the will to continue living, I have to keep believing that there is a way out of this situation.
Medically I can basically just wait for something to go wrong. If it is in fact peritonitis, then sepsis is a possible complication. Until then I am forced to continue with things as if nothing is wrong.
Currently this entails waiting for the results in the eviction case, which will likely see me being forced to find a new place to live along with a draining of my financial resources, seeking a new job and doing job interviews, writing a new reference book for Packt on embedded C++ development, along with stumbling ahead with my autobiography.
I so desperately want to believe that things can and will get better. That I will find a place to live where I am actually happy to be, that I'll find a job or occupation that will make me feel useful and appreciated.
That there'll be an end to this endless, merciless pain in my abdomen that makes my life into a literal living hell.
Along the way I keep meeting others who think that I will make it, who support me and want the best for me. It's tough for me to think about how I feel about life and existence in general. After more than thirteen years of doctors and psychologists treating me like trash, of suffering all types of physical, psychological and sexual abuses, along with incarnation and attempting suicide, I feel that I have tried just about anything that I can think of to make my life better, yet with me only getting punished for my efforts.
I also hate feeling like a victim.
I'm a victim of many uncaring, vile people. True. Yet there are other people out there. People who are so incredibly positive and supportive. People whose optimism I fear that I cannot live up to. Like this one person whom I met on Quora a while ago, and who has been doing his utmost to cheer me up, even going to the trouble of getting me better Japanese dictionaries than the ones I had, so that I have more fun doing translation work and generally using Japanese. To make my life that little bit brighter and more joyful.
There's also my best friend, who has been there for me during almost the entirety of those thirteen years. Despite his own problems, he always tries to be there for me, to cheer me up and make me see the brighter side of life. I'm not sure I could have made it this far without him and other essential people in my life, such as my mother.
I feel that I have to get out of this dark shadow of my medical issues and the horrors of living in German run-down apartments owned by vile landlords. That's all that is keeping me down and so unhappy. There is a way out of this. I just don't know how to reach it yet.
Just need to survive a little bit longer, I hope.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperforate_hymen
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peritonitis
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