When author Jeffrey Eugenides appeared on the Oprah show to promote his then-new book "Middlesex", I was shocked by the medical stats explained by a doctor also on the show; that 1 in 20 people are born with either ambiguous genitalia, or internal sex organs related to both sexes. A young woman in the next segment had Androgen Insensitive Disorder, meaning that she was diagnosed in puberty with a set of undescended gonads that had secreted enough testosterone during puberty to stop her female maturation process. After having the tissue removed, she easily decided to proceed with hormone injections that would give her female breasts, since she had always identified as a woman, but for other Intersex patients, it's not so easy.
Her adolescence had given her the height of a man and slenderness of a boy that made her a natural fit for working as a runway model, as she readily admitted on the show that most of the models she worked with were also Intersex. Her reasoning was excellent, too. Think about it: a 6-foot tall girl with a square jaw and no hips?! Gives "Victoria's Secret" a whole new connotation, doesn't it? But for all the intersex people who have clearer choices between genders, many do not. The young model went on to explain that her male hormones had destroyed her ovarian tissue, and she was born without a uterus, so she can never have children. And that's the less complicated version.
For intersex people from older generations, babies born with ambiguous genitalia were often assigned a gender at birth while still in the delivery room, based on the leanings of the attending physician, without consulting the parents or allowing the child to develop into puberty, armed with information that would assist them in making a choice later in life. One man didn't learn that he had a complete set of fully functioning ovaries and a uterus until an MRI technician told him while he was an enlistee in the army who'd just broken his back, because he also had fully functioning male genitalia and the total outward appearance of a man.
He isn't alone in his gender assumptions, either. Several years ago, a very well-known Olympic runner was newly diagnosed as intersex after her first full medical exam during the Olympic trials was performed on her, because she came from a poor, remote African village that was far from the readily available medical communities of a big city. Her grandmother explained that she'd raised her as a girl, because she looked like one (!), even though she'd never had her menses, which is often common for extreme athletes. The runner was embarrassed beyond belief to have her unusual condition plastered across the evening news, especially since it also cast a shadow over her athletic performance. She'd originally tested positive for the elevated testosterone levels that are typically linked to the usage of performance-enhancing drugs (like steroids) that are banned from legitimate competition.
I'm happy to report that she was finally accepted into Olympic competition for the women's team years ago, and again more recently as a competitor in the summer Olympic Games, proud to represent her African country unblemished with questions about her performance and her gender. For her, the story ends with a successful entry into womanhood, though for many intersex individuals, such is not the case. New York finally granted its first documented designation of intersex gender status THIS YEAR to a driver's license applicant, which tells you about the lack of acceptance and recognition within a LGBTQI community that places a "Q" for "questioning" before the biological reality that is Intersex. Even further progress has been made medically-speaking, with the standard of allowing intersex children to self-identify later in life without surgical intervention. For them, there are no questions about being intersex, because they already are.
How's that for an "I"?
