My Intersex Story

It must have been around 1980. I was perhaps 11 years old, and asleep in the small bedroom I shared with my older brother. I was woken by a severe pain in my tummy. I can’t remember the shape of the pain any more, but it was certainly the worst pain I had had in my life. I do remember it was constant, like a lightbulb that had been switched on. I felt the area - on the left side, maybe a bit past halfway down from the belly button to the groin, and was surprised to feel a small hard lump, like a marble had been inserted under my skin.

I had a deep terror of the dark, so I probably lay there for a bit hoping the pain would go away, but soon resigned myself to getting and making my way to my parents’ bedroom. My father had been drinking and my mother had taken her nightly cocktail of crazymeds. They were dismissive. “Growing pains, go back to bed,” mumbled my father. My mother was no help: “Listen to your father”.

I remember being back in bed, curled up painfully and then it was morning. I didn’t go to school, and the pain didn’t go away. To my surprise, my mom eventually took me to the doctor. I think at that point I heard the phrase “undescended testicle” and I was checked into hospital for emergency surgery.

After the operation, I was told the testicle was non-functional. I remember the word “ischemic”. They told me not to worry, they had left it in so I still had two testicles. This was said with great emphasis I did not understand. Did they tell me then that, aside from being the size of a pea and without any function, it was also a significant cancer risk? I don’t know, but I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want the thing out of me.

When I transitioned 13 years later, I looked back on that day as a little miracle. My body had eliminated at least one of the two agents of a male puberty from my body. My puberty was different from my brothers. I wasn’t going bald at eighteen. I didn’t have a hairy chest and back. I didn’t get broad shoulders, I didn’t get any muscle (I was not remotely worried about these things). My voice broke, my legs got hairy, and, worst of all, my face sprouted stubble, but it could have been worse.

At times, I would wonder about intersex. I know most people would not want to be intersex, but I did. Anything that undermined the tyranny of a male body I had been born with was entrancing. I knew I didn’t need a reason to be a transsexual, it was my right as a human being to make decisions about my body, and my (relative) happiness after transitioning was all the reason I needed. But dysphoria casts a long shadow, and I would wonder from time to time if I really was the typical “biological male” I had been told I was.

Such thoughts would shame me. I felt like I was appropriating other peoples’ stories to ease some residual anxiety about transitioning. One undescended testicle was not that uncommon, and intersex conditions are rare. Intersex people have to deal with the trauma of unwanted surgeries and other treatments, while I was just a tourist.

Decades passed. Eventually I lost patience with the intersex thoughts fluttering around me like moths, and decided to dig a little deeper. I got a book about intersex, and reached a section on hypospadias. This is a condition where the urethra does not open at the tip of the penis. I was quite shocked. It was thirty years since a penis was attached to me, but I had no idea that the urethra was meant to open at the tip. Really? Mine had always opened on the underside of the penis, in a deep cleft at the base of the glans.

My earliest memory is me standing in the bathroom with gauze on my penis. My mom says “Be careful of your circumcision”. Now I wondered if the circumcision was really a circumcision, or perhaps a partial “correction” for my hypospadias.

My oldest brother remembered the gauze, and me running around for a while wearing no pants. He thinks I was two or three. But he went on to say, “I was told you were going in for surgery on an undescended testicle”. I may never know about the circumcision, but it seems I had two undescended testicles, not just one. This cleared up a mystery for me–I had always wondered how I got the age of 11 with an uncorrected undescended testicle. But maybe they only operated on the one they could easily access. The other was high, possibly not palpable, and not worth the bother in 1971.

And I wonder too if the testicle was ever normal–that lump I felt as a kid was not exactly testicle sized.

It cleared up another mystery. Normally if one is reduced to one testicle, the remaining one steps up, hypertrophies, and maintains normal testosterone levels. In my case, the remaining testicle did no such thing, and was quite small as far as I can remember. Assuming I was only operated on at age three for that testicle, it could have sustained heat damage from being in my bowel for that time.

My intersex book had not put the intersex thoughts to bed. I seemed to have a cluster of physical and endocrine differences–bilateral cryptorchidism, hypospadias, hypogonadism… What had seemed like a presumptuous appropriation now seemed like the most likely scenario. I was–I am–intersex.

I started rethinking my trans story too. Those “almost physical” feelings of dysphoria I felt? They could have been plain old physical feelings. Maybe it wasn’t “reverse phantom limb” feelings of discomfort about my flat chest, it was gynecomastia from my divergent hormones. And the feeling of physical difference and weariness could all be explained as the logical consequences of reduced testosterone production of hypogonadism. And the parade of deeply resented male role models who tried to correct my male gender performance? Their characteristic reaction to “correct” and compensate for my deviating physiology. I am still a trans woman, and happy to be so. It seems my origin story traces back to intersex physical differences and toxic compensation by the people around me.

It feels very strange recognizing myself as intersex. I feel that as a trans woman, I would have greatly benefitted from a body that told me that binaries are not absolute, that I was not like all the boys I was being grouped with, but that part of my uniqueness was hidden from me. I have mysteries about my past I will probably never resolve. I have spent decades shaming myself for questioning my birth sex assignment.

#intersex #trans

Thanks for the boost, @radiofreefedi – and for the help locking in my setup yesterday!
Hoping nothing's changed with the audio, as I had to dismantle everything for an interview today – but I'll keep an eye on the chat in case things get clippy on the big notes >:D

Ended up pulling together a #RedDwarf medley, thanks to @futzle, so that's definitely on the setlist!

More songs ppl can request (some rusty): spacesongsunday.com musician.social/@radiofreefedi…

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2025-07-15 23:09:48

Coming up next for #RFFF25 16 July 2000 UTC

alex glow @alexglow - #acoustic #singerSongwriter

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Friends, be starstruck as alex ports #SpaceSongSunday to a Wednesday with acoustic and voice covers and originals of all things space themed/adjacent. Good times off the starboard bow captain!

Another chance to #joinIn together at home as this awesome month long artists' streaming series jumps to light speed.

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