LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a message to Chrislove.
Approximately 40 different types of biological circumstances have been scientifically identified that, in the succinct words of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies."
One term often seen is "intersex," though current language -- as well as much else in public discourse concerning such individuals -- is in flux and can be controversial. Another term is "differences of sexual development."
It has been estimated that the number of such persons worldwide could amount to nearly 1 in 50 individuals.
If anyone was inclined to make more
out of such things than mere coincidence, it might have appeared last year like some kind of synchronicity that...
...in 2023...three people...all in their thirties…
...all raised as girls...but born with XY chromosomes...who'd suffered drastic "normalizing" medical interventions...under the sway of powerful social institutions...
...for the first time shared their varying journeys, in book-length memoirs.
Two born in the United States. One in South Africa.
One Black. One of mixed ethnicity. One white. One identifying today as nonbinary. Two as female. Two resolved activists. One resolved athlete. All three, fixed on the same goal: self-determination.
Their stories:
Pidgeon Pagonis, Nobody Needs to Know: A Memoir, TOPPLE Books/Little A (Amazon), New York, 2023
Caster Semenya, The Race to Be Myself: A Memoir, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2023
Alicia Roth Weigel, Inverse Cowgirl: A Memoir, HarperOne (HarperCollins), New York, 2023
!!! Content alert !!!
The following discussion describes certain specifics about biological differences in sexual development and about medical procedures -- including on children -- that readers may find severely disturbing. As I did. This was pretty hard to write, but I think we--collectively, at least-- need to know.
☀️✳☀️✳☀️
"A year after my third surgery, I began junior high at Elm Middle School."
--Nobody Needs to Know, p. 37.
In young adulthood, Pidgeon Pagonis adopted a new first name after watching a pigeon step casually into a city bus, ride a while, and just as casually hop off. The bird had attitude worth emulating, Pagonis thought. If some people choose to refer to pigeons "flying rats," so what?
Growing up in a blue-collar Chicago neighborhood, surrounded by their extended Greek-Armenian-Mexican family, playing happily with dolls, five-year-old "Jennifer" Pagonis expected a grownup life much like "her" mother's and aunts'.
The child held vague, disturbing memories of a painful surgery. Pagonis, however, had no idea they'd already gone through two operations to "fix" a physical form that at birth, appeared in-between the typical male and typical female anatomy.
No idea that their being called a girl was anything but natural. Nor that within their every cell twined XY chromosomes -- typical of a boy.
.
Pagonis gives a talk, April 24, 2017 (2:42)
.
The child was, however, deemed "old enough" for just one piece of truth: giving birth to babies would never be part of their life. A fragment of truth--which was blamed on a fictional cancer.
Six years later, Pagonis headed for surgery yet again, this time because of a minor problem with their urinary tract. The adult Pagonis, writing, plunges the reader full-on into an 11-year-old's traumatic ordeal.
At the very last moment before the child is wheeled to the operating room, the surgeon appears.
"...I wanted to pop in and let you know that [earlier]...we noticed your vagina was a little bit smaller than that of other girls. We think it would be a good idea to make a small incision while you're on the operating table today to make it a little bit bigger--so you can have normal sex with your future husband. Is that okay with you?"
This statement from the doctor felt confusing and mortifying. But I wanted to be normal. Like the "other girls." I nodded. (p. 30)
Unexpectedly, a whole week in the hospital follows, attached to an uncomfortable, embarrassing urine bag and catheter.
At least once a day--sometimes multiple times a day--a group of medical personnel (mostly men but sometimes women) would walk into the room...."Do you mind if my residents also take a look with me today?"
...The lead lab-coated duckling removed my blanket and hiked up my gown. They could see everything, my most private parts. He then asked me to spread my legs, which I did, staring at the oscillating fluorescent ceiling light, wishing I were somewhere else, anywhere else.…
I kept telling myself it was okay, that by putting myself on display like this--like a science experiment, like a zoo animal--it would help other patients with bladder problems like mine….
Had I known what the surgeon had really done to me...I'm not sure I would have been able to handle it. (pp. 33 f.)
Sent home, still trailing the bag and catheter, young "Jennifer" in tried to discover what had been done.
But all I could feel were ridges of stitches and flesh swollen around the catheter tube.
Whatever was there, wasn't me. Or if it was me, it was a new me.…
The feeling turned my stomach, and I shut my eyes tightly. I didn't want to think about it. (pp. 35 f.)
Later on, Pagonis would learn they'd actually had major surgery, completely different from what was announced: vaginoplasty.
Also, that their very first operation, age less than one year old, removed not cancer but a pair of undescended testicles. And finally, that the vaguely remembered painful procedure, age four, had completely excised their clitoris, which doctors adjudged unsuitably large.
While that discovery lay in the future, Pagonis continued being, or trying to be, "like the other girls." Attending school. Making friends. Enjoying softball. Going to slumber parties. Trying not to fret about delayed puberty. On doctors' orders, starting hormones. Acquiring a boyfriend, short-term. The next one longer-term, more serious. Gaining admission to college, a first in the family.
And keeping quiet about all they'd been through.
Until as a student at DePaul University, age 18, they signed up for a course called "Psychology of Women," and in one of the lectures, first encountered the term "intersex."
The description of one type of intersex--partial androgen insensitivity syndrome--and how it was typically treated--rang all sorts of bells. A quick phone call, and Pagonis's mother read out from hospital paperwork she was keeping: "Andro...gen insensi..."
Pagonis's world fell apart.
...
The professor invited Pagonis to lunch after the next class with her and a guest lecturer from the Intersex Society of North America.
Lynnell Stephani Long had the same type of syndrome, with characteristics in-between typical male and typical female, but had been assigned male gender at birth, but identified as female, and was lesbian.
What happened to Long, as a Black child of a single mother in a poor neighborhood, was a whole other horror. Hospital physicians offered to treat the "baby boy" free of charge.
Later, Lynnell's appearance was deemed not masculine enough, and "For reasons unbeknownst to Lynnell at the time, her mom started dropping her off at [the] hospital for entire summers. There, the doctors experimented on her with novel hormone treatments that made her very sick, and not in the very least more masculine appearing." It was the same hospital where Pagonis had undergone surgery.
Long advised Pagonis how to request their complete medical records, which they did. There were the words, "46 XY male pseudohermaphrodite," and the whole gruesome story of what had been done.
Every single procedure haf been medically unnecessary. Cosmetic.
By the time Pagonis graduated, they'd worked the hurts out with their mother, no longer cared about blending in with "the other girls," and were freely sharing their story. One day a snippet of it somehow found its way from a nonprofit oral history project onto NPR, and Pagonis got a call from Lurie Children's Hospital, where their surgeries had taken place, requesting to meet. Lurie had already turned down a proposal from Pagonis to consult with them.
The meeting, with two officials off-site in an obscure coffee shop, was evidently meant to gain sympathy and/or intimidate. But Pagonis brought her own boss, an attorney who headed a intersex interest group called Advocates for Informed Choice, and confronted them with a direct request to stop performing unconsentrd surgeries on intersex kids.
It was the start of a years-long campaign that united many activists. It began with getting information out to the public via film and media, but when nothing substantive changed, they went to the streets in a series of highly visible demonstrations.
The ACLU got involved, pointing out that Lurie was breaking laws about informed consent and against female genital mutilation. Lurie made good p.r. out of its treatment of trans people; trans activists spoke up against the mis-treatment of intersex kids. Allies came to include a doctor at Lurie itself. Thanks to one state legislator, the Illinois House of Representatives opened an investigation.
Finally, the momentum reached a critical point, and Lurie ended its intersex surgeries--the first U.S. hospital with such a department to do so.
☀️✳☀️✳☀️
"People believed all sorts of insanity about me -- that I was a boy who managed to hide his penis all the way to the world championships, that I was paid to have my penis removed...that I was a hermaphrodite forced to run as a girl for political gain."
--The Race To Be Myself (p. 2)
"Gender" has sometimes, controversially, been described as a "social construct": in other words, an entity that does not exist as such in physical nature, but only as defined by human consensus. (This complex subject deserves more discussion that I won't get into here.)
In contrast "race" has, in our day, been recognized by scientific anthropologists as a social construct, not a biological reality -- a social construct with major practical consequences for people marginalized by that classification.
While "sport" is clearly a social construct, linked with other social constructs, among them rules, fairness, corporations, educational institutions, clubs snd associations, law, prestige, nation-states, celebrity, and money. BIG money. (A mere fraction of it, overall, going directly to athletes.)
Caster Semenya's memoir introduced to this reader (never "into" sports) more than one new universe of human experience.
When any young athlete like Semenya takes aim at the top, their life becomes, almost, a 24-7 business venture.
Not only do these young people live perpetually with relentless rigors of training and competition, their choice can lead to social isolation. They navigate mazes of rules, dodge endless possible mishaps (such as a recurring knee problem that dogged Semenya for her entire career). They need good mentors. Always they must be thinking, studying, strategizing on multiple levels. People and organizations must be courted to invest in the aspirant. Money's a headache and limiting factor. While, to succeed, the athlete must still be able heed their own inner compass.
Born to a traditionally minded, Christian family in rural South Africa, young Mokgadi Caster Semenya looked exactly like any typical female child.
She helped take care of the family's animals, went hunting with the boys, moved in with an aging grandmother--a traditional role for girls--adored soccer, and didn't worry too much when puberty's usual milestones failed to appear. No one at home ever questioned that she was a girl--a girl with her own agenda. Including fame, and money to help her family.
A new home, new school, and a thoughtful teacher zoned in on Semenya's special affinity for running. In a pair of used running spikes that were gifted to her, she trained by running up a steep hill, and grew into a star on the "youth running circuit."
She also ran the bureaucratic gantlet to represent South Africa in international competitions. From a trip to India she returned to her home village with a pocket full of winnings.
A few comments had passed on her physique, but pulling down shorts for routine "pee tests" seemed to settle any question about gender. Until the day Semenya broke a national record at the African Junior Championships in 2009, aged 18.
Afterwards, expecting a routine blood test at a Pretoria hospital, she was shocked at being subjected also to a sonogram and full gynecological examination, something she'd never before experienced.
It changed everything.
...
Not told the results of her exam, Semenya was secretly put through another, even more upsettingly invasive, "gender test" before her next international competition, in Berlin.
She was allowed to compete, but at the same time her test was leaked to the media. And after she won a gold medal, she was not invited to the winners' press conference, where the head of the International Association of Athletics Federations announced--behind her back--that Semenya was "clearly a woman, but maybe not 100 percent."
She was allowed to keep her medal, but it took a long time for the IAAF to release the prize money.
After that, journalists swarmed Semenya's unsuspecting family, village and everyone who knew her, seeking "evidence" in her personal history and every aspect of every minor action.
It was only from these news media that Semenya first learned that she had no uterus, no fallopian tubes, and a pair of undescended testicles that produced an elevated level of testosterone in her blood compared with most women.
Now a student at the University of Pretoria, Semenya was sequestered, forced to live by herself in a university sports facility.
Eventually, the IAAF gave Semenya an ultimatum: to go on competing, she'd have to have her internal testicles surgically removed. She resisted. Since then, she has learned of other women who accepted this option and were broken afterwards.
Annet Negesa, for example, "claims that she was told by an IAAF doctor...that to get back on track was a very easy procedure...[S]he believed she was going infor an injection but woke up with deep cuts in her abdomen having undergone a gonadectomy."
Instead Semenya agreed to take estrogen in an effort to bring down her testosterone levels, despite risks from side effects and a shortened career. She agreed to remain sequestered, be subject to twice-monthly monitoring for testosterone levels as well as at random times.
We started with this medication in the form of a gel. I'd rub this gel on my arms every day....[I]t started to melt the muscles in my arms. I was already a very thin girl, but my arms began to look...like twigs...so my doctor switched me to a pill.
....At first, it felt like I'd esten too much of something, I felt bloated. My muscles felt heavy, and I was always tired. I couldn't recovdr from workouts the way I had before. My head would hurt. My brain felt cloudy. I was nauseous for no reason. The foods I normally enjoyed, I no longer enjoyed in the same way. And I would suddenly get hot and start sweating. Particularly at night....I'd lay on the bed wide awake, staring at the ceiling. The thirst was unbearable....The hunger became its own challenge. (p. 189)
But Semenya carried on training, and her testosterone levels declined. She was allowed to run again internationally and made respectable times. She ended her depressing sequestration. Changed coaches, and adapted her strategy in races. Eventually she qualified for the Olympics and brought home a silver medal.
Meanwhile, Semenya believes, the IAAF basically just wanted to remove her and others like her from the field. She believes that the organization "went out searching for other girls like me," many of whom came from poor communities and had little formal education, "and began experimenting on them."
A female Indian runner subjected to a similar hormone regime, however, sued the IAAF and won. Mandatory hormone treatment was discontinued. Semenya again qualified for the Olympics and won the gold. Two European rivals cried on each other's shoulders and refused to acknowledge Semenya's existence.
Semenya points out:
My [Olympic gold medal] win...seemed "inevitable, not because I'd been training and running well, but because people felt I had something that made winning unfair. Yet they thought nothing of cheering on the seeming inevitability of wins by genetically gifted athletes like Usain Bolt, who boasted millions more fast-twitch muscle fibers and a stride that was inches longer than his peers. No one suggested Michael Phelps's dominance was unfair and he should take medicine so he produces just as much lactic acid as his competitors or have surgery to fix his hypermobile joints. Swimmer Katie Ledecky was never accused of being a man because she smashed multiple world records, and her ever-improving times...would actually qualify her for the men's Olympic team.
She continued to maintain a challenging schedule of national and international competitions until 2018. In that year the IAAF brought back a testosterone limit. It claimed a scientific basis for cutting the threshold to exactly half of what it had been before and requiring that level to be maintained continuously for six months before an international competition. Semenya disputes the alleged science and considered the continuous maintainence requirement inconsistent with physiological reality.
By now 27, however, she was already studying for a degree in sports management and planning to open a club with her long-term best friend and partner, now wife. Semenya decided to retire.
☀️✳☀️✳☀️
"I lived twenty-seven years in the closet and spent a few more working within the structures that ultimately keep voices like mine silenced. I am no longer willing to live by anyone else's rules to get ahead…
---Inverse Cowgirl (p. 181)
Alicia Roth Weigel describes a youth of upper-middle-class privilege, later eye-opening international travel, and dissatisfaction with corporate jobs that led her into the nonprofit sector, advocacy and mainstream political campaigning. The story's studded here and there with well-known figures including Texas firebrand Wendy Davis, Raphael Warnock, Ilhan Omar, Pete Buttigieg and Daniel Radcliffe.
Based on an in utero genetic test, Weigel's parents had prepared for a baby boy. When she arrived looking just like a typical girl, physicians advised that she needed treatment.
Just like Pagonis, Weigel had internal testicles, which were surgically cut out before age one on the excuse that they were or might turn cancerous. Her physicians, however, were more forthcoming than Pagonis's: they shared the condition's technical name and some idea of what to expect. At the age of eleven, after an intimate exam under total anesthesia, Weigel was relieved to hear she wouldn't need further surgery. But she was given a "dilator" with instructions on using it to stretch her vagina to "normal" size. The girl kept it all secret.
(Later, she would also suffer from osteoporosis due to her hormone treatments.)
Growing up on the prestigious Philadelphia Main Line, the early years had not been untroubled, despite economic and racial privilege; one parent was prone to rageful meltdowns, and the other drank. Among Weigel's friends, alcohol entered the picture as early as middle school. The use of and other drugs became a recurring motif. Nevertheless, Weigel excelled: studying, working, running for exercise, forging ahead as if on permanent overdrive, seeking adventures. A summer in Greece gave a first taste of international travel.
At Cornell University she majored in linguistics. A semester in Brazil brought friendships and joy but also drama, including rape, robbery at knifepoint, and dengue fever. After graduation, she moved to New York City with a job "selling sponsorship packages for tech conferences in Latin America." From there to Paris, briefly, to be with a boyfriend, then to an advertising firm in San Francisco. Her networking talents constantly produced more connections.
"Backpacking across the Southern Cone of Africa" she met another man, impulsively moved to Angola to be with him only to find he'd had to leave the country, landed after a while in South Africa, and there got involved in a movement advocating for the rights of sex workers.
In terms of organizing, "I have learned more from Black, brown, trans, and homeless sex workers than any other group," Weigel later wrote.
Back in San Francisco, she joined an advertising agency specializing in social change campaigns. Through involvement with a women's network called Spark, she happened to connect with Wendy Davis, who after defending abortion in a marathon filibuster, had lost her seat in the Texas legislature and was starting a nonprofit to train young women in the political process. Weigel moved to Austin.
In the Davis organization's office one day, Weigel happened to pick up an issue of Vogue magazine that featured intersex model Hanna Gaby Odiele.
It was the first time Weigel had ever seen the word "intersex." The first time Weigel realized she was not some singular aberration but that "there was a whole movement of intersex people looking to fight stigma...and shame in our upbringing."
She was 27. It was an inflection point of her life.
...
Soon afterwards the Texas legislature took up a "bathroom bill" targeting trans people.
Weigel quickly intuited the connection between this attack on trans people and the general, rigid, unscientific concept of gender binary. She chose to "come out" by testifying in a public hearing.
"...I have XY chromosomes....Because of a condition called complete androgen insensitivity, I was born phenotypically female....While I find it absurd that I have to disclose my anatomical history to a room of complete strangers, legislators no less....I can tell you that I am very much a woman....Does that mean that because of my genotypic XY chromosomes, I've been using the wrong bathroom my whole life? If my life experience is equal to that of a female, I should be able to identify as such. And I do....
Suddenly, Weigel found herself a public figure. She received an outpouring of news coverage and support.
Hate came later, when she moved on from Davis's nonprofit to manage aher first political campaign, for Danielle Skidmore, a civil engineer and trans woman running for Austin city council.
During the campaign Weigel naively walked into a "gotcha" setup by an alt-right YouTuber with some six million subscribers.
Her comebacks to his attacks on trans people and on her understanding of intersex conditions were pointed. Eventually he was reduced absurdly to defending "Western Civilization" as "a civilization that brought you the iPhone. A fundqmental role in Western Civilization is that of male and female...." Publicity brought masses of hate messages including graphic threats.
An article in the Daily Mail followed--another mixed blessing--and in response to announced plans by the Trump administration for legislative changes to "define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals a person is born with," Weigel, at white heat, composed an op ed that ran in the New York Times.
With all this happening alongside the ultimately unsuccessful campaign, some burnout was almost inevitable.
After further adventures in campaign politics, Weigel today calls herself a "reformed party girl." She serves on Austin's Human Rights Commission while continuing to advocate and organize for intersex health care.
She notes:
Requiring individual patients to serve as squeaky wheels within the medical institutions they frequent for years on end -- and then to lead large-scale consulting projects...in order to rectify care gaps--is entirely unsustainable.
☀️✳☀️✳☀️
A few closing thoughts:
It's going slowly, but there is motion in some jurisdictions.
April 25, 2024: "UN Makes History With First-Ever Resolution Supporting Intersex Rights" (LGBTQ Nation)
Three people born within a six-year span: one in South Africa, two in the United States. Each labeled with female gender at birth.
Under the orders of -- perhaps not coincidentally, male -- authority figures, each of them subjected to drastic, involuntary medical interventions designed to remodel their bodies, surgically and/or chemically.
In order to conform them more closely to a certain conceptual archetype of female. To render them, in effect, "female enough."
To some -- I don't know -- it might appear superficially that struggles of intersex persons for biological autonomy could be somewhat tangential to the situations of other LGBTQ+ people.
My reading of these memoirs has convinced me that exactly the opposite is the case. All of our issues are intimately interleaved and in the last analysis come down to the tyranny of a stereotype, labeled "normal."
We are raised to believe that you should just be able to glance at someone for a split second and know not only what lies between their legs but between their ears....[T]here is also supposed to be an inherent synchronicity between the two.
-- Pagonis, p. 120
Whether it's our anatomy and physiology, or our subjective sense of our own gender, or who we love, or how we present ourselves in public, or some combination, all under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella are essentially "guilty" of the same thing: outraging this simplistic, unscientific notion.
A notion that also is deployed to butress "traditional" power relations, including racism and the subordination of women. In line with which interest, exceptions must be erased. While "protecting children" is invoked as cover for "protecting the status quo."
So, for example:
The bills that block gender-affirming care for trans kids who want that care allow parents to force [surgeries and hormones] on intersex kids who haven't asked for them." (Weigel pp. 177 f.)
[W]omen like Michelle Obama and Serena Williams...have been called monkeys, accused of being men. Every part of their body, their musculature, their facial features, have been derided and insulted.
(Castor Semenya)
"First they tried to 'cure' gayness; now they're fixed on 'healing' trans people" (LGBTQ Nation)
and
"Gemma Collins says doctors advised her to terminate pregnancy because the baby was intersex" (The Pink News)
.
Against a the rising drumbeat of homophobic and transphobic slander, excludatory legislation targeting trans people, and actual violence, together with coordinated pushes to rip away minority voting rights again and return women to a condition of "barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen."
Truly, I've believe we're all in this together, and I mean ALL.
☀️✳☀️✳☀️
LGBTQ LITERATURE SCHEDULE (2024)
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