Intersex

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"?

Scouts Honor

My dad was the Scoutmaster for my bro's Boy Scout troop growing up, and it was awesome. We did really fun things like canoeing, wilderness hiking, and history tours that became treasure hunts to find the most building markers in Philadelphia at nighttime, which kind of felt like that t.v. show "Sleepy Hollow". I learned about camping (always pack extra white socks for makeshift bandages, and triple-wrap matchbooks in foil and plastic for waterproofing), orienteering (moss almost always grows on the north side of a tree, but always carry a working compass anyway), reading trails and the landscape, but I mostly knew that anyway. I was the best scout my dad ever had, until I joined "The Brownies" and then "The Girl Scouts".

Then, the pace slowed to a crawl, and there were no boys around. At all. There were absolutely no menfolk or boys around anymore; just a really "butch" troop leader who'd adopted two kids with "her" "husband", which was jarring to me outside of a girls-only softball practice that I did not attend outside of school hours. Ya dig? Country queers were deeply closeted back in the day, but we knew who was who anyway because we knew "gay", even as very young children. For instance, at Chestnut Grove elementary school in New City, his name was Patrick, and he was (is) a very nice, quiet, devoutly Catholic Irish-American boy with a blue pen type of birthmark. In junior high, his name was "Bryon", and he did funny things like foil bullies from pulling on his pants for wedgies and compose sonnets on the fly while pursuing an acting career in the city that he continued for years.

In high school, "the gay kid" was Pete and he's an awesome painter, albeit with a lifelong appreciation of goth music and/or the lifestyle, but I digress. We're talking about lesbians. In our school, her name was Gina, and she was famously found in bed with her "best friend"—a petite, highly-freckled Irish-American girl one grade behind her—by her mom the summer before we all left for college. Unlike the average suburban "sports dyke" though, Gina was (and is) the real deal: an all-star athlete who attended college on a basketball scholarship, not that it ended there. She played almost every sport that we had a team for, like volleyball, track and field, baseball, swimming, etc. So, we knew "gay" and we knew the real deal, too, not just the awkward "closet case" lurking around doing vaguely "faggy" stuff. We were "out" with each other about who were were, because we were all we had back then as a generation.

Still, the crazy dykes in my troop surpassed even my sophisticated New York understanding of gay culture. They were fucking horrible. They were cliquish to the extreme and insane, and instead of feeling ashamed about it, they reveled in their loud queerness like the assholes they were. My mom loved it. Unlike, say, dancing or art, she could excel in this. My mom remains one of the bitchiest gossips I have ever met in my life, and she's also kind of an "art fag", too. She loved the little cliques she could giggle with like a kid, over weird shit like different colored strings that were made into bad crafts no one really likes. That's a fucking badge for chicks in this troop?! The good sportsmanship of my father and my brothers had wrecked me on this gay girl experience, and nothing less as a scout would do.

I made it through Brownies easily because I really liked the illustrations that came with the handbook for me to read, plus my friends were part of that troop, but once the local "closet case" took over, she upped up the manic energy a few gay cheerleader notches, and I couldn't take it anymore. My mom immediately bonded and then sided with the gay girls and their dykey troop leader with the crew cut, to laugh about me behind my back and make fun of me, which is what she did at home with her sisters anyway, so why did I need to earn a badge in it? I really didn't. Plus, did I mention there were no boys? Like, no men at all, and that's hell for a straight girl, man-ladies. Turns out that hell for a totally heterosexual woman is a bunch of bitchy, bipolar, deeply closeted queers in a homocentric Girl Scout troop in the 'burbs, with no room for escape. Buckle up, boys. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.