Perpetuating the silence?
1st June, 1998
Last week, we circulated an article from The Observer newspaper on intersex woman Linda Roberts. Cheryl Chase of The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) contacted us to point out the article’s many flaws. Cheryl says:
Although the author seems to be sympathetic to the person whose story is told, "terribly rare" and "surgery almost certain to kill" make the story very freakish, distancing and "othering".
The truth is, intersexuality — of the sort described in the article — is so common that most readers will actually have such a person in their own circle of acquaintances. They don’t realize it because no one speaks about it. And the Observer article serves to perpetuate that silence.
Cheryl’s comments underline the point which we should have spotted in advance: that by circulating without annotation an article perpetuating the myths about another type of intersexed person, we inadvertently served to do for another group exactly what myth and ignorance have done for transsexual people.
We hope in future to feature on this web site more information about the different types of intersex condition, and where transsexualism fits in that spectrum. But in the meantime, the ISNA site carries a lot of valuable material — and here are Cheryl’s notes on the Observer article, which she has kindly allowed us to publish.
Claire McNab
1st June, 1998
Notes by Cheryl Chase of the ISNA on the Observer article of 24th May, 1998Quotes from the article are in a monospaced font Comments are indented in red Linda Roberts was born with a penis and a vagina. No one is born with two sets of genitals. In all likelihood, Linda Roberts was born with ambiguous genitalia. The distinction is important, because the standard treatment today is clitorectomy. The notion that children are born with two sets of genitals hides the fact that clitorectomy is sexually mutilating. Half a century later a doctor told her she was a hermaphrodite. She looked it up in the encyclopaedia: ’An organism combining qualities of both sexes: producing both eggs and sperm and possessing both sex organs.’ Human hermaphrodites cannot produce both eggs and sperm. That definition refers to certain plants and lower animals. Human hermaphrodites have mixed sexual anatomy, but not two sets of genitals. In 1942 little was known about the phenomenon and, not surprisingly, nothing has changed. Actually, the biology is quite well understood. See bibliography at http://www.isna.org/ The odds against being born with dual genitalia are six million to one. Linda is believed to be one of, at most, 12 hermaphrodites in the UK. At least one in two thousand births is ambiguous enough so that professionals cannot easily determine what sex to label the baby. No one is born with two sets of genitals, but there are many orders of magnitude more than 12 hermaphrodites in the UK. Two years ago the surgeon who was to save her life tried to explain what a hermaphrodite was. ’You were a siamese twin joined not externally but internally. Your brother was on the outside, you were on the inside.’ There are at least three dozen etiologies (medical causes) for intersexuality; the above explanation is not one of them. In 1996 she was close to death. Over the years clots had been forming in her legs and lungs. The surgeon explained she was 80 percent female although she looked masculine. She had no need to shave and, although she had a penis, she also had a womb, vagina and clitoris. She had been menstruating since her mid-teens but had no obvious periods because she lacked a cervix. The discharged blood was causing the clots.
By the time she was 50 the medical problems were multiplying and the blood-clotting had become life-threatening. By chance she was admitted to London’s Middlesex hospital and found doctors who understood her condition. Medical knowledge of intersexuality is possessed by pediatric urologists, pediatric endocrinologists, and pediatric gynecologists, including large numbers of these specialists in the UK. She chose the third option, but three surgeons refused to perform the operation because they thought it would kill her. At the end of her tether she consulted a specialist in Brighton. He would do it, but advised against. He thought death on the operating table a near certainty. The surgery described is performed many times each year on infants and toddlers in the UK. It is not more life-threatening than many other major surgeries. And the medical profession has suddenly discovered an interest in her. She is 56 and still menstruating. There are no case-studies of hermaphrodites to predict what is ’normal’. Medical researchers would love to study her. It is typical for intersexed people with ovarian tissue to menstruate. Medical researchers are not particularly puzzled by the phenomenon, nor interested in studying it, because ovarian tissue in intersex people is not dysgenetic. |
