When Mary was born she was a caesarean and she was brought from the delivery room in a blue blanket and I said ‘oh, it’s a boy’ and the nurse said ‘well…’
When my parents were expecting me, they used to refer to ‘Christopher’. Christopher never materialised, it was Barbara who came along. I was a lively, cheerful child, loved playing with my Barbie doll, dolls house, teddy bear, but I knew every car on the road when I was five and had a large collection of toy cars.
My parents put me in dresses and girls clothes, blouses and skirts. I preferred trousers and jeans, more so as I got older. They did try to reinforce my gender as female, although I didn’t need it reinforcing, I’ve always felt female, I am female.
Though when I was growing up I knew that I was a girl, I wasn’t a very feminine one. I wasn’t too interested in playing with Barbie dolls, or in wearing high heels or using make up. And once my diagnosis came out I was a bit concerned with this, that it might have to do with my condition.
Title up - Gender Trouble
I actually find hermaphrodite to be a rather poetic word and I prefer it to some of the more clinical things. I would like it to be reclaimed though because it does have a hint of freakishness to it, and I don’t think we need to think about these conditions as being freakish. Some other words like intersex seem to point too much to the fact that there are two sexes and something inbetween. It would be nice if we could have terms which show that there is a continuum and that there isn't this need to divide into two sexes or being between those two.
Looking at people like me can open up society to a more flexible view of gender. Just like we don’t think of blue as being a male colour and pink as being a female colour anymore, maybe we can stop looking at XY as being a male chromosome and XX as being female chromosomes.
In my first year at girls’ grammar school, we studied chromosomes in Biology. A smear was taken from a girl’s mouth and we all gawped down a microscope to have a look. I distinctly remember sitting there thinking the thought ‘if they do mine it will show male chromosomes’. I sometimes wonder whether deep down we know more about ourselves than we are aware of. A year later I started Latin. In the Latin language nouns are divided into masculine, female and neuter. One weekend we visited friends in another town, and their son had just started Latin too. When he introduced me to his friends they wanted to know whether I was a girl or a boy and he quite spontaneously replied ‘oh, she’s neuter’. I was quite intrigued and amused by the aptness of his comment.
I grew up as a normal, healthy girl and nobody knew anything about my intersex condition until I was about thirteen. At that point my clitoris started to grow. When I was aroused it was about two centimetres long. I was terribly embarrassed about it and thought it was because I had been masturbating too much so I didn’t tell anybody. As time went on I got a bit worried so I approached the district nurse who sent me to my GP who packed me straight off to hospital.
When I was born I looked like a girl and therefore I grew up just like all my cousins, like a normal Indian girl, and until the age of 16 I thought there was nothing different with me. By the time I was sixteen I hadn’t started menstruating yet so my parents took me to see the doctor. It took about six months of tests for the doctor to find out that I did not have the uterus and ovaries that he was expecting to find and that I had XY chromosomes and possibly testes inside of me.
When they had finished their tests, they told me they were going to have to do a bikini cut from hip to hip to do an internal examination. They didn’t tell me what they were looking for and I didn’t dare ask.
My doctor suggested that I have a gonadectomy, that is that I have my testes removed. He said that the main reason to do this was to avoid the testes becoming cancerous because they were internal and therefore the raised temperature could make them cancerous. I was quite happy to go with this because frankly I didn’t want to have testes inside of me because I felt I was a woman and it was quite hard to put together my image of myself and my gender and have testes inside of me. So we had that done when I was 17 years old, a few months after the diagnosis.
When I came round after the operation they told me they had had to remove my ovaries because they hadn’t been properly developed and might have caused cancer if they hadn’t been taken out. This meant I would never be able to have children. That was a terrible shock. As soon as everybody had left the room I tried out to see if my clitoris still worked – I think I was pretty worried they were going to be cutting around at my bits. But luckily everything was OK. At least something to be thankful for. After they regulated the hormones and I grew a bit more, I either grew into my clitoris or it shrank. And today I cant express how grateful I am that I was not subjected to clitoral reduction and all the loss of sensation that might have involved.
At four I was taken into hospital. I was, for all intents and purposes, perfectly healthy, didn’t feel ill. So I was quite worried and terrified of why am I going into hospital. The next minute I am going into surgery and I was absolutely terrified, I woke up in a lot of pain, didn’t know what was happening, nobody would tell me. They said “its for your own good when you get older” and that was it. It was excruciatingly painful. I went from being a happy, general, normal child to being quite shy and worried after that, of what was going to happen to me because nobody would talk to me. At around 13, 14 I asked the surgeon again what he had done to me. I actually said, “what the hell have you done to me?” I was so angry and upset that I had been kept in the dark, but all he would still say was “you don’t need to know, its not important, you’ll find out when you are old enough to get married”
She had surgery at the age of 18 months, something like that. And talking to the consultant about it, this was either at the time or later on, his view always was that Mary should be told everything about herself.
They obviously gave me the initial talks when I was 11 and 13. And then they really left it up to me, which was fantastic, so I could ask questions as I wanted and they also didn’t pressure me into finding out everything possible about it which was really unthreatening and it was very good. There were just no secrets between us, so they told me everything.
I got in touch with the support group when I was 18, they agreed to send me some information and this fateful day I suppose a big brown envelope arrived and I took it up to my bedroom and opened it in private and read through it. And I was partly shocked and partly relieved. Partly relieved in that I now knew what my condition was exactly and why I had had the surgery and that it was an intersex condition. Also very shocked and horrified that nobody had had the decency to tell me about it as I was growing up. I challenged my mother about it and she was very upset and basically it was at this time she said “well, for three weeks we didn’t know whether you were a boy or a girl and they thought you were a boy and while they were doing the tests you were called Nicholas. But then all the tests came back with XX chromosome, so I am female, but with the ambiguity of enlarged clitoris looking slightly penile. The doctors decided not to tell me or my parents that it was an intersex condition because they think that you will grow up psychologically unbalanced and unable to cope with the condition. So they think you don’t need to know about it, you have the surgery and you are fixed. That’s it, it’s not important.
Over the years at each new medical check up there was a new bit of bad news. The first time they said, “By the way, we had to take your womb out as well, that wasn’t properly developed.” The next time I came along they said “Well your vagina is short, we don’t know if you will ever be able to have sex, but we can do something for you, you can either have a bit of your bum taken off and inserted inside, or we can cut your labia, sew them together and extend your vagina externally.” Thank goodness I didn’t take them up on any
of these kind offers. The last thing they told me, which really freaked me out was that promiscuous men would find me really attractive. That’s just the sort of thing a 16 year old girl wants to hear. The thought of these dirty old men wanting to have a grope. When I was 18 and left home the consultant gave me a letter. In it she said that I had had my ovaries and womb taken out because they were underdeveloped at the age of 14 and hormone replacement therapy had been started. I took this letter with me on my year off between school and university, and when I met my new boyfriend I told him what I knew. This was 26 years ago and today he is my husband. After about 8 weeks we slept together for the first time and it was quite difficult because the hymen was so scarred, presumably after these tests, that he couldn’t penetrate to begin with. This took about 3 months. He was very gentle and understanding, very patient and I felt totally loved and accepted. I really blossomed, I couldn’t believe my luck.
I think my doctor’s attitude towards my treatment also reflected the morality of their time and place. My first doctor said that I might need a vaginoplasty, but to wait until I was ready to get married before we could talk about it. 10 years later I was in California where the attitude towards sexuality is quite different and the doctor said I might need, or I might not need a vaginoplasty, but I should find out on my own by using a dilator and even trying to have intercourse. I did both things and there was no problem what so ever. So I was quite glad that neither of my doctors pressured me into having the surgery and I was able to find that I didn’t need one after all.
At the age of 14 I went to see the surgeon for a check up. It was about 6 to 8 weeks after the final surgery, I was only just about 14. The surgeon did a vaginal examination which was extremely uncomfortable and the next thing he turns round, rummages in a cupboard and comes up with this, what they call a dilator and literally rams it into me an I nearly shot on the ceiling, the pain was excruciating because I had still not healed up from the surgery. And he said “do this 10 minutes, 3 times a day for the rest of your life or until you get a partner, get married basically.” No explanation, that was it, just “it’s for your own good.” And each time I went to see him he would give me further sizes of them, they graduated up. It was extremely embarrassing at 14 not knowing what was being done to you. The pain of doing the treatment. My parents thought it was some kind of abuse, basically masturbation, but its not, its to stop the tissues closing up, stretching them, and hopefully to get a more adult size as you are growing up, to be able to use tampons and to allow sexual intercourse.
3 or 4 years ago I was given vaginal dilators to make me bigger inside and I used them for a little bit but then stopped because they were very painful and made me think about things I didn’t like to think about. And I don’t know whether that was a mistake, to stop using them, but I suppose I’ll find out, I don’t know.
When I went to the Middlesex Hospital in my early 30s for a second opinion on the surgery and to find out exactly what was done to me, they reintroduced me to dilation treatment with modern dilators. Supposedly to help me in the future to have a less painful intimate sex life. These were the kit that they give you nowadays. It basically comes with gel and a cleaning brush and then you get a handle to put them on. They are plastic rather than glass, so they are safer and you’ve not got the worry of breaking them. They are basically made of acrylic plastic, in graduated sizes up to so called average male anatomy, being the larger one.
When I was 35 I decided it was time to face the facts. It wasn’t because I was particularly brave, but because things were not going well in my marriage. I tried to contact the medics who had been involved with me in childhood, but most of them had died. One was still alive and he put me in touch with an endocrinologist. He explained to me that because my cells could not react to male hormones, the Y chromosome could not take effect and I had been born a girl. He also told me that the so called ovaries that were removed at 14 were not ovaries at all, but were underdeveloped testes, which they had had to look for in the abdomen which is why they had made such a big cut. I was tremendously relieved after he had told me everything because the truth was manageable. This was my diagnosis, my body, my life, and I had been told nothing but a pack of lies. I was furious with my parents.
When I was diagnosed there were the two aspects; the infertility and the fact that I had an intersex condition. At that age being infertile did not really strike me, it was mostly dealing with the other issue of body image and being comfortable with what I was. For my parents, infertility was the main thing because they knew that it would affect me later in life. They still had hopes that somehow some medical treatment would be available, and I had to convince them that there wasn’t anything about this. It’s only been much later that I have been able to cope with infertility.
As an adult when I eventually got to see these new clinicians, I found out that I had basically had 3 or 4 vaginoplasties and a total clitorectomy. It was like the final piece of the jigsaw slotting into place. The surgery for the clitorectomy actually cut the nerve endings, the glands out of the clitoris, some of the erectile tissue, but most of it was left tied back under the skin to the pubic bone, and when or if I get aroused it tightens up and pulls away from that bone and causes extreme excruciating pain. That is something I am left with for the rest of my life, there is nothing that can be done about that. The surgery has had a devastating effect on my sex life. The vaginoplasty has left deep scarring and visible scarring on the outside, lack of sensation and pain because of the narrowing of the tissues. Clitorectomy causes a great deal of pain and very little pleasurable sensation is left. Probably about 5% pleasurable sensation to 95% pain. Because the surgery that was supposed to fix me and make everything rosy and great has actually had the opposite effect and made it very difficult. Penetrative sex is just a nightmare.
With the help of good old classical Freudian psychoanalysis I’ve been able to face the possibility that there might be something male in me, whatever that might mean. I think I’ve done quite a good job of integrating male and female attributes, and have since discovered that so many people who don’t have intersex conditions do just the same after a mid life crisis.
I’ve always felt female but I do accept that the condition is intersex in that you look when you are born neither male nor female and a bit ambiguous. But I don’t see myself as neither one thing nor the other. I’ve always felt female all be it failed female in that society and the medical profession have failed me in what they have done to me, and that is the only aspect I see it as intersex. I feel female and always have.
After I was diagnosed I was a bit worried that my lack of ultra femininity meant that I wasn’t a girl anymore, but after I went to college, I found a lot of other women without any intersex condition who shared my ideas and who shared my groove in this femininity range, and it became much easier to understand that the notions of femininity don’t have necessarily to do with one’s gender identity.
Having AIS doesn’t really make me feel a part of the intersex community. Even when I’m with people who have intersex conditions it doesn’t make me think “thank God I’m home”. But I do think about the gender issues that it raises quite often. You know I have short hair and wear boyish clothes, and I’ve lots of male friends and I do kind of boyish activities. Then other times I wear a dress and love it and feel really girlie and its great, but then other times I’ll wear a dress just to conform to expectations, so it’s a bit of a mix. When I look back on being assigned as a girl when I was very young. I think for practical purposes that was certainly the best thing to do because I’m much, much closer physically to a girl than a boy, but emotionally it might not be so accurate, I’m not sure, but in the end I think it was a good idea.
What I don’t understand is why people who are normally so willing to accept that each human being is unique are suddenly so afraid of variation when faced with the fact that between the conventional extremes of what we understand as being male and female, there are endless shades of variety.
It’s ironic that the title of this programme is “Gender Trouble” because there isn’t any gender trouble for me or for many of my friends who have intersex conditions. It might be trouble for other people to accept our genders or how we see ourselves, but not for us.
[Title card] - One in every 2000 people are born with some sort of intersex condition.
When my parents were expecting me, they used to refer to ‘Christopher’. Christopher never materialised, it was Barbara who came along. I was a lively, cheerful child, loved playing with my Barbie doll, dolls house, teddy bear, but I knew every car on the road when I was five and had a large collection of toy cars.
My parents put me in dresses and girls clothes, blouses and skirts. I preferred trousers and jeans, more so as I got older. They did try to reinforce my gender as female, although I didn’t need it reinforcing, I’ve always felt female, I am female.
Though when I was growing up I knew that I was a girl, I wasn’t a very feminine one. I wasn’t too interested in playing with Barbie dolls, or in wearing high heels or using make up. And once my diagnosis came out I was a bit concerned with this, that it might have to do with my condition.
Title up - Gender Trouble
I actually find hermaphrodite to be a rather poetic word and I prefer it to some of the more clinical things. I would like it to be reclaimed though because it does have a hint of freakishness to it, and I don’t think we need to think about these conditions as being freakish. Some other words like intersex seem to point too much to the fact that there are two sexes and something inbetween. It would be nice if we could have terms which show that there is a continuum and that there isn't this need to divide into two sexes or being between those two.
Looking at people like me can open up society to a more flexible view of gender. Just like we don’t think of blue as being a male colour and pink as being a female colour anymore, maybe we can stop looking at XY as being a male chromosome and XX as being female chromosomes.
In my first year at girls’ grammar school, we studied chromosomes in Biology. A smear was taken from a girl’s mouth and we all gawped down a microscope to have a look. I distinctly remember sitting there thinking the thought ‘if they do mine it will show male chromosomes’. I sometimes wonder whether deep down we know more about ourselves than we are aware of. A year later I started Latin. In the Latin language nouns are divided into masculine, female and neuter. One weekend we visited friends in another town, and their son had just started Latin too. When he introduced me to his friends they wanted to know whether I was a girl or a boy and he quite spontaneously replied ‘oh, she’s neuter’. I was quite intrigued and amused by the aptness of his comment.
I grew up as a normal, healthy girl and nobody knew anything about my intersex condition until I was about thirteen. At that point my clitoris started to grow. When I was aroused it was about two centimetres long. I was terribly embarrassed about it and thought it was because I had been masturbating too much so I didn’t tell anybody. As time went on I got a bit worried so I approached the district nurse who sent me to my GP who packed me straight off to hospital.
When I was born I looked like a girl and therefore I grew up just like all my cousins, like a normal Indian girl, and until the age of 16 I thought there was nothing different with me. By the time I was sixteen I hadn’t started menstruating yet so my parents took me to see the doctor. It took about six months of tests for the doctor to find out that I did not have the uterus and ovaries that he was expecting to find and that I had XY chromosomes and possibly testes inside of me.
When they had finished their tests, they told me they were going to have to do a bikini cut from hip to hip to do an internal examination. They didn’t tell me what they were looking for and I didn’t dare ask.
My doctor suggested that I have a gonadectomy, that is that I have my testes removed. He said that the main reason to do this was to avoid the testes becoming cancerous because they were internal and therefore the raised temperature could make them cancerous. I was quite happy to go with this because frankly I didn’t want to have testes inside of me because I felt I was a woman and it was quite hard to put together my image of myself and my gender and have testes inside of me. So we had that done when I was 17 years old, a few months after the diagnosis.
When I came round after the operation they told me they had had to remove my ovaries because they hadn’t been properly developed and might have caused cancer if they hadn’t been taken out. This meant I would never be able to have children. That was a terrible shock. As soon as everybody had left the room I tried out to see if my clitoris still worked – I think I was pretty worried they were going to be cutting around at my bits. But luckily everything was OK. At least something to be thankful for. After they regulated the hormones and I grew a bit more, I either grew into my clitoris or it shrank. And today I cant express how grateful I am that I was not subjected to clitoral reduction and all the loss of sensation that might have involved.
At four I was taken into hospital. I was, for all intents and purposes, perfectly healthy, didn’t feel ill. So I was quite worried and terrified of why am I going into hospital. The next minute I am going into surgery and I was absolutely terrified, I woke up in a lot of pain, didn’t know what was happening, nobody would tell me. They said “its for your own good when you get older” and that was it. It was excruciatingly painful. I went from being a happy, general, normal child to being quite shy and worried after that, of what was going to happen to me because nobody would talk to me. At around 13, 14 I asked the surgeon again what he had done to me. I actually said, “what the hell have you done to me?” I was so angry and upset that I had been kept in the dark, but all he would still say was “you don’t need to know, its not important, you’ll find out when you are old enough to get married”
She had surgery at the age of 18 months, something like that. And talking to the consultant about it, this was either at the time or later on, his view always was that Mary should be told everything about herself.
They obviously gave me the initial talks when I was 11 and 13. And then they really left it up to me, which was fantastic, so I could ask questions as I wanted and they also didn’t pressure me into finding out everything possible about it which was really unthreatening and it was very good. There were just no secrets between us, so they told me everything.
I got in touch with the support group when I was 18, they agreed to send me some information and this fateful day I suppose a big brown envelope arrived and I took it up to my bedroom and opened it in private and read through it. And I was partly shocked and partly relieved. Partly relieved in that I now knew what my condition was exactly and why I had had the surgery and that it was an intersex condition. Also very shocked and horrified that nobody had had the decency to tell me about it as I was growing up. I challenged my mother about it and she was very upset and basically it was at this time she said “well, for three weeks we didn’t know whether you were a boy or a girl and they thought you were a boy and while they were doing the tests you were called Nicholas. But then all the tests came back with XX chromosome, so I am female, but with the ambiguity of enlarged clitoris looking slightly penile. The doctors decided not to tell me or my parents that it was an intersex condition because they think that you will grow up psychologically unbalanced and unable to cope with the condition. So they think you don’t need to know about it, you have the surgery and you are fixed. That’s it, it’s not important.
Over the years at each new medical check up there was a new bit of bad news. The first time they said, “By the way, we had to take your womb out as well, that wasn’t properly developed.” The next time I came along they said “Well your vagina is short, we don’t know if you will ever be able to have sex, but we can do something for you, you can either have a bit of your bum taken off and inserted inside, or we can cut your labia, sew them together and extend your vagina externally.” Thank goodness I didn’t take them up on any
of these kind offers. The last thing they told me, which really freaked me out was that promiscuous men would find me really attractive. That’s just the sort of thing a 16 year old girl wants to hear. The thought of these dirty old men wanting to have a grope. When I was 18 and left home the consultant gave me a letter. In it she said that I had had my ovaries and womb taken out because they were underdeveloped at the age of 14 and hormone replacement therapy had been started. I took this letter with me on my year off between school and university, and when I met my new boyfriend I told him what I knew. This was 26 years ago and today he is my husband. After about 8 weeks we slept together for the first time and it was quite difficult because the hymen was so scarred, presumably after these tests, that he couldn’t penetrate to begin with. This took about 3 months. He was very gentle and understanding, very patient and I felt totally loved and accepted. I really blossomed, I couldn’t believe my luck.
I think my doctor’s attitude towards my treatment also reflected the morality of their time and place. My first doctor said that I might need a vaginoplasty, but to wait until I was ready to get married before we could talk about it. 10 years later I was in California where the attitude towards sexuality is quite different and the doctor said I might need, or I might not need a vaginoplasty, but I should find out on my own by using a dilator and even trying to have intercourse. I did both things and there was no problem what so ever. So I was quite glad that neither of my doctors pressured me into having the surgery and I was able to find that I didn’t need one after all.
At the age of 14 I went to see the surgeon for a check up. It was about 6 to 8 weeks after the final surgery, I was only just about 14. The surgeon did a vaginal examination which was extremely uncomfortable and the next thing he turns round, rummages in a cupboard and comes up with this, what they call a dilator and literally rams it into me an I nearly shot on the ceiling, the pain was excruciating because I had still not healed up from the surgery. And he said “do this 10 minutes, 3 times a day for the rest of your life or until you get a partner, get married basically.” No explanation, that was it, just “it’s for your own good.” And each time I went to see him he would give me further sizes of them, they graduated up. It was extremely embarrassing at 14 not knowing what was being done to you. The pain of doing the treatment. My parents thought it was some kind of abuse, basically masturbation, but its not, its to stop the tissues closing up, stretching them, and hopefully to get a more adult size as you are growing up, to be able to use tampons and to allow sexual intercourse.
3 or 4 years ago I was given vaginal dilators to make me bigger inside and I used them for a little bit but then stopped because they were very painful and made me think about things I didn’t like to think about. And I don’t know whether that was a mistake, to stop using them, but I suppose I’ll find out, I don’t know.
When I went to the Middlesex Hospital in my early 30s for a second opinion on the surgery and to find out exactly what was done to me, they reintroduced me to dilation treatment with modern dilators. Supposedly to help me in the future to have a less painful intimate sex life. These were the kit that they give you nowadays. It basically comes with gel and a cleaning brush and then you get a handle to put them on. They are plastic rather than glass, so they are safer and you’ve not got the worry of breaking them. They are basically made of acrylic plastic, in graduated sizes up to so called average male anatomy, being the larger one.
When I was 35 I decided it was time to face the facts. It wasn’t because I was particularly brave, but because things were not going well in my marriage. I tried to contact the medics who had been involved with me in childhood, but most of them had died. One was still alive and he put me in touch with an endocrinologist. He explained to me that because my cells could not react to male hormones, the Y chromosome could not take effect and I had been born a girl. He also told me that the so called ovaries that were removed at 14 were not ovaries at all, but were underdeveloped testes, which they had had to look for in the abdomen which is why they had made such a big cut. I was tremendously relieved after he had told me everything because the truth was manageable. This was my diagnosis, my body, my life, and I had been told nothing but a pack of lies. I was furious with my parents.
When I was diagnosed there were the two aspects; the infertility and the fact that I had an intersex condition. At that age being infertile did not really strike me, it was mostly dealing with the other issue of body image and being comfortable with what I was. For my parents, infertility was the main thing because they knew that it would affect me later in life. They still had hopes that somehow some medical treatment would be available, and I had to convince them that there wasn’t anything about this. It’s only been much later that I have been able to cope with infertility.
As an adult when I eventually got to see these new clinicians, I found out that I had basically had 3 or 4 vaginoplasties and a total clitorectomy. It was like the final piece of the jigsaw slotting into place. The surgery for the clitorectomy actually cut the nerve endings, the glands out of the clitoris, some of the erectile tissue, but most of it was left tied back under the skin to the pubic bone, and when or if I get aroused it tightens up and pulls away from that bone and causes extreme excruciating pain. That is something I am left with for the rest of my life, there is nothing that can be done about that. The surgery has had a devastating effect on my sex life. The vaginoplasty has left deep scarring and visible scarring on the outside, lack of sensation and pain because of the narrowing of the tissues. Clitorectomy causes a great deal of pain and very little pleasurable sensation is left. Probably about 5% pleasurable sensation to 95% pain. Because the surgery that was supposed to fix me and make everything rosy and great has actually had the opposite effect and made it very difficult. Penetrative sex is just a nightmare.
With the help of good old classical Freudian psychoanalysis I’ve been able to face the possibility that there might be something male in me, whatever that might mean. I think I’ve done quite a good job of integrating male and female attributes, and have since discovered that so many people who don’t have intersex conditions do just the same after a mid life crisis.
I’ve always felt female but I do accept that the condition is intersex in that you look when you are born neither male nor female and a bit ambiguous. But I don’t see myself as neither one thing nor the other. I’ve always felt female all be it failed female in that society and the medical profession have failed me in what they have done to me, and that is the only aspect I see it as intersex. I feel female and always have.
After I was diagnosed I was a bit worried that my lack of ultra femininity meant that I wasn’t a girl anymore, but after I went to college, I found a lot of other women without any intersex condition who shared my ideas and who shared my groove in this femininity range, and it became much easier to understand that the notions of femininity don’t have necessarily to do with one’s gender identity.
Having AIS doesn’t really make me feel a part of the intersex community. Even when I’m with people who have intersex conditions it doesn’t make me think “thank God I’m home”. But I do think about the gender issues that it raises quite often. You know I have short hair and wear boyish clothes, and I’ve lots of male friends and I do kind of boyish activities. Then other times I wear a dress and love it and feel really girlie and its great, but then other times I’ll wear a dress just to conform to expectations, so it’s a bit of a mix. When I look back on being assigned as a girl when I was very young. I think for practical purposes that was certainly the best thing to do because I’m much, much closer physically to a girl than a boy, but emotionally it might not be so accurate, I’m not sure, but in the end I think it was a good idea.
What I don’t understand is why people who are normally so willing to accept that each human being is unique are suddenly so afraid of variation when faced with the fact that between the conventional extremes of what we understand as being male and female, there are endless shades of variety.
It’s ironic that the title of this programme is “Gender Trouble” because there isn’t any gender trouble for me or for many of my friends who have intersex conditions. It might be trouble for other people to accept our genders or how we see ourselves, but not for us.
[Title card] - One in every 2000 people are born with some sort of intersex condition.