(53) The Woman Inside, Lauren’s Journey

It’s time to write again, and I have a lot on my mind. So many things in fact, that I will try to stay on track, although the way my mind operates, there could be multiple tracks. So where to start? My mind has been occupied by the research I have been doing to try to fully understand just who I really am. How’s that for a heavy beginning?

As I have written previously, all my life, from the age of three, I knew I was different, that I supposed to be a girl, and those thoughts, awareness and feelings never left me. As a result, I’ve always carried around with me, a big question mark. And that question mark has featured visibly in much of my art work and many of the poems I’ve written. I love presenting something a bit obscure or abstract, that makes the viewer or reader ask, “What is it,” or “what does this say to me?” So I was always dealing with a question.

Almost exactly a year ago, I found out I was an intersex person. There are almost 40 major variations of being intersex, with over 100 different ways that our bodies respond, so just what was I? All intersex people are a mix of male and female, and we all have a keen sense of our own unique gender, but many of us were simply categorized when infants based upon cursory looks at our reproductive anatomy. My birth certificate says “male child”, but I have always known that was not correct. I recently found out my actual diagnosis. I am PAIS intersex, which means Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. There are quite a few rather lengthy articles describing PAIS, using equally lengthy words, so I will do my best to provide you with my own, hopefully easier, description. When I was still in my mother’s womb, due to my genetics, my body developed an insensitivity to androgen, which is the predominate male hormone. Consequently, I was born as a mix of male and female, kind of 60% female 40% male. I was born with very tiny male reproductive anatomy, referred to as a micro penis. I was small as a child and always feminine. At puberty my male parts did not develop any further, my voice remained higher with no Adam’s apple, I remained small, always “the short kid”, very little body hair, and I developed breasts, hips, thighs and nice round bum, which made life hell dealing with PE classes. Through my years as an adolescent I was poked and prodded as there was much interest in my private parts. I often had lingual hernias and a lot of pain in my lower groin. To this day I can still have discomfort there. I was also told by several doctors that I might be unable to father children. It did take almost ten years of trying before my kids were born.

Now I know why, now I know who I am. A year ago I had a lady doctor say to me, “Lauren, you actually are a woman.” I am an intersex female. That was the answer to the question I always lived with, the answer that validated what I always knew about myself from the start.

In doing the research on being intersex, I have been in contact with other intersex people, and there is a common concern I hear from many of them that I have already experienced myself.

Ignorance.

Even though we are born this way, we are often not considered acceptable. Most people have very little knowledge about being intersex, and when confronted with the subject, many would rather remain ignorant because it is too hard for them to wrap their heads around. We get lumped in with the LGBTQIAS+ “rainbow”. Because we are definitely different, we are seen by many as weird, deviant, immoral, obscene, even evil and demonic. We are just, wrong!!

The harsh reality is that, as I write this, there are politicians, on both sides of our borders, who want to strip us of our rights, to eradicate us, because we are visibly different we have become a handy target for them. They can say all sorts of horrible, but false, things about us, to instill fear amongst their followers, when all we want to do is live our lives. I ask you, what is wrong with that?

At this point in time, in history, with all the horrible things taking place to people all around our world, who just want to live their lives, I ask the same very big question. What is wrong with that?

And so, I reach this part of my journey on a relatively somber note. I now have answers to a question that has dwelt within me for almost my whole life, and that is a very welcome ending to that quest. I feel that my energies, along with my intersex brothers and sisters, will now be focused on educating all those we encounter, by sharing our lives with them so they can see that we are just ordinary people who were born a bit different.

Until next time,

Lauren