Intersexuals Fight Back

Carl* looks like a man. He's compact and strong, with unshaven stubble on his cheeks and construction boots on his feet. His West Haven home is filled with man stuff: military paraphernalia, sporting equipment, hardwood furniture that could take a pummeling. He works with his hands for a living, has a steady girlfriend and lifts weights. To all appearances, he is 100 percent red-blooded Man.

Appearances are deceiving.

"Don't be fooled by all of this," Carl says, giggling like a nervous schoolgirl, a shrill, uneasy giggle that repeats itself every time he reveals something new about his past. "I'm overcompensating. This isn't me. But this is what I have to do." Carl behaves like a stereotypical man, he says, because that's what society expects of him. But he's pretty sure that man is not what nature intended for him. From an early age, he felt more like a girl than a boy. He preferred the company of girls, their games, hairstyles and clothing. He began cross-dressing as a child, and continued through high school, later risking discharge from the military for the sake of women's underwear.

Unlike with most transgendered individuals, Carl's psychological gender ambiguity is matched by a physical ambiguity. Carl is intersexed.

Like many thousands of other people across the country, he was born neither clearly male nor clearly female. In the words of Greek mythology, he was a hermaphrodite. (Because of the monsterlike mythical creature this term refers to, the intersexed movement has rejected it.) Although he now functions as a male, his external genitalia were ambiguous enough at birth that doctors initially labeled him female.

"'When you were born, the doctor thought you were a girl. It was on the birth certificate and everything,'" Carl recalls his mother telling him when he was a child. But somewhere along the line, Carl became a boy. He doesn't know when or how this happened, and, though Carl is now in his 30s, his parents still won't discuss it with him. "My mother said, 'Everything was done to make sure that you were a boy.' What she meant by this, I didn't really understand. But I believe that things were done to me," he says.

Despite his anger, Carl is too burdened by the shame and deception surrounding his birth to seek out medical records on his own. He knows that something terrible was done to his body that determined that he would be male-a decision made without his consent and, he believes, without his own best interests in mind. He knows that later, at puberty, he was subjected to countless hospital visits in New Haven, where he was given pills and injections that he believes contained testosterone. He also knows that he is infertile. But his knowledge stops there. Carl's mother has taken care to hide any evidence of his life as a girl. After he caught sight (as an adult) of his birth announcement in a family photo album-and saw that it was an announcement for the birth of a daughter, not of a son-Carl's mother hid the announcement and later denied that it was ever there.

"My parents have their own brand of ethics," he says. "Families first, individuals second."

Carl's story is repeated hundreds of times each year with babies born everywhere in the United States and in most European countries. Doctors regularly use surgery and hormones to make a child look male or female when nature will not make up its mind-which happens in an estimated 1 of every 2,000 births. Like Carl, many become angry as teenagers and adults when they learn what their doctors and parents did. Now the intersexed are fighting back. They have enlisted the help of doctors who have had second thoughts about the practice they took for granted and of intellectuals who believe the system should be changed. In the process, they are challenging all of society to rethink the strict notions of what makes us male or female. Standard medical practice dictates that intersex births like Carl's are emergencies that must be "assigned" male or female and "corrected" immediately to spare the parents the anguish of uncertainty, with no thought as to what the children would want. The primary obligation, as in Carl's case, is to the family.