The Serpent's Wisdom

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

I wrote a filtered post in my LJ about it a couple of years ago, but i haven’t really made it public knowledge that i have an intersex condition. This may come as a surprise, but i don’t actually make it a habit to talk publicly about certain parts of my body. It was diagnosed at birth and i remember when i was eight attending a consultation with a surgeon who talked about ‘correcting’ it surgically.

Yes, i am intersex AND transgender. My secondary sex characteristics are pretty unambiguously male yet my identity is female. But the last couple of days i’ve been pondering the link between these two things.

All my life people have acted as though there is something off about me. Even before i began laser hair removal therapy, it was not uncommon for people i encountered on the street to gender me as female, even if i hadn’t shaved in a week. Then they’d look up at me or look again and ‘correct’ themselves or just look very confused. So, something about me sends ambiguous gender signals to people. I’ve long presumed that maybe i was giving off some kind of unconscious behavioral signal of my feminine gender identity. But what if it’s because i’m intersex?

The gestational estrogen exposure which caused my intersex condition was possibly responsible for the overall female shape of my face and body. People who meet me find it difficult to believe i’ve never taken hormone supplements. My height is about average for a woman, though i have a broad masculine upper body. It’s possible i smell female to myself and others, too; in this regard i’ve heard mixed accounts from different people close to me.

My voice, too, is ambiguous. I have been working with a voice training program my therapist gave me, and while i can speak in female registers without my voice straining or cracking, i have the vocal resonance of a man and comfortably sing tenor. Heck, i could write a long autobiographical post about my voice alone - i have never liked the sound of it and have tended to soften it to the point of whispering - but suffice it to say my voice has never helped convince anyone i was male or female.

I’m going to veer into controversial territory because i’ve been skating on the edge of it anyway. It’s one thing to wonder if my physical ambiguity is due to estrogen exposure during gestation, but quite another thing to wonder if that same exposure affects psychological ambiguity too.

There are those who advocate calling transsexualism an intersex condition. I’m iffy on this for two reasons. First, there is a wide variance in what brings people to where they will say they are transsexual; the desire or need to transition stems from many different things inside many different people, and i’m not comfortable supposing there is one single identifiable root cause.

Second, any proposed causality from biology to psychology is problematic. We can examine the brains of male and female cadavers and find statistical differences between them. But what causes those differences is unclear. Genes paint the shape of the brain in broad brushstrokes; beyond that the brain is shaped by experience. Without clear experimentation (which would be, to say the least, unethical) we don’t really know where to draw the line between nature and nurture.

But as my wife is fond of pointing out, when it comes to treating people with respect it shouldn’t matter whether these things are inborn or cultural. So i am not offering the question of, “Was i born this way?” in the spirit of then saying, “Because if i was born this way, then you should treat me fairly.” You should treat me fairly anyway, even if i have chosen something you don’t like. In the end it’s not scientific evidence that will end discrimination (the anti-gay right has been adjusting their religious argument to accommodate bio-psychological arguments) it is our account of what it is like to be us.

No, i’m just trying to understand why i am the way i am. 37 years of this and i don’t really think i’m any closer to understanding.