Bodies Like Ours Girlfriends Article Page 4

FROM ISOLATION TO IDENTITY

" It's important to see a person who doesn't have shame," says Thea Hillman, a queer San Francisco performance artist with CAH. For her, "performance is the opposite of shame and secrecy." An acclaimed artist and author of Depending on the Light, Hillman certainly has had her share of being open. In part, she says, it's due to her progressive upbringing. "My parents were very supportive and always wanted me to embrace the way I was different." Hillman became chair of ISNA's board of directors in January of this year. Hillman, like her fellow activists at ISNA and Bodies Like Ours, stresses the need for parents of intersex children to have support groups.

At present, many of the parents' groups are organized around the individual conditions of their children. There's a group for parents of kids with androgen insensitivity syndrome, a group for parents of CAH girls. "It's very informal right now," says Alice Dreger, who serves on ISNA's board. "A lot of them exist only by word of mouth." Some of the groups, like Klinefelter Syndrome and Associates, are run by homophobic parents who are, in Dreger's words, "still buying into the belief that medical treatment will make things go away." Since the advent of ISNA and the Internet, progressive resources for intersex adults and parents of intersexuals are much easier to find than they were. Doctors "kept us purposely isolated from each other," says Green. But now anyone with a modem can Google intersex and research it on their own.

The gay community has also been seen as a source of emotional support. Many Pride festivals have already added an I to the current LGBT, and many others are on their way to doing the same. Though intersexuality is quite different from homosexuality--"when LGBT babies are born they're not at risk of medical intervention," Hillman reminds us--they both suffer from the medical establishment's homophobia. There's still a medical view, says Dreger, "that a boy with a small penis will end up gay, and that's clearly a failure in their eyes." The same fear holds true, she says, for girls born with large clitorises--that is, that they'll grow up lesbian. (next page>>)

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