Weird - I got distracted from watching election results last night by a Nova program on the Winnipeg twins case. Bruce Reimer, botched circumcision (using heat to burn off the foreskin), surgically "fixed" and raised as a girl. Money used this case for PR because Bruce had a twin brother. Unfortunately, he didn't share any of the results after the twins' sixth birthday... about the time "Brenda" started feeling... wrong.
Lots of interviews with the tearful mom. And it was very dramatic when they finally interviewed "Brenda" - who is now living as "David," and has a wife and (I'm presuming step-)kids.
The show has a very good website here.
It includes the first person story of an intersexual not included on the broadcast.
Max Beck:
After five weeks of study and surgery, they weren't any closer to the truth; mine was a fuzzy picture. Not even the almighty gene provided any clear answers, since it was discovered that I was a mosaic, with some cells in my body having the XY genotype and others having XO. The decision was made to raise me female.
Could my parents do that? Could they ever hope, after all they had been through, to "raise me female?" What sort of instruction is that anyway?
"Feed the baby every two hours, burp well after feeding, and raise it female."
I also liked this passage:
Tomboy, unfinished girl, walking head, Frankenstein, butch -- these were all just so many wonderful/terrible, sharp/ill-fitting suits; the body wearing them was and is transgendered, hermaphroditic, queer. And an important, even essential element of that queerness was the trauma that accompanied it, the medicalization, the scars, the secrecy, the shame. I was born a tiny, helpless almost-boy, but the way my world responded to me is what made and makes me intersexed.
In March of 1998, after over a decade of therapy, I decided to switch to testosterone and transition to male. Since 1996, I had been an active part of the intersex community, and by deciding to transition, I thought I was copping out. I felt like a deserter, a coward, fleeing the frontlines of the gender war. As a politically aware intersexual, I felt it was my duty to be as brazenly androgynous, as visibly hermaphroditic as possible. But to return to the body/suit metaphor, I was starting to feel very naked and very cold. My "naked" body was scaring little old ladies out of public restrooms, making seemingly simple tasks, such as shopping, surprisingly difficult.
More pertinent to this thread, however, would be this page on fetal gender development. |
