Another Fathers Day is creeping up on me. It's my 13th one. Long ago and faraway I stood in the doorway of an "Early Intervention" program classroom, staring into the eyes of a crippled toddler who was strapped to frame that stood him up at a table where he was squeezing Play-Doh and beaming. Surely it was some sort of divine directive that brought me to this place, and I demanded God to tell me if this was whom S/He had sent me to adopt.

Later his foster mother told me that on the way home he asked if I had come to be his father. Spooky. No one had even told him he was being adopted. I became, or maybe always had been, his father.

Occasionally, people ask him, or me, if I'm his REAL father. Within months the two of us had decided to answer this question with a snappy, "No, I have such a good imagination that you can see him too," or "Oh, he's real all right, pinch him and see what happens."

No one could invalidate us if we were laughing. Real father, real. Real. That's the question that used to hunt and haunt me. "What are you, REALLY?" If I have no biological connection, am I a REAL father? Is an intersexed man or woman REAL, seeing as they aren't exactly male or female and sort of both? There are women who aren't female and men who aren't male. REALLY.

Like most Intersexed people, I'm sterile. I haven't had to deal with grief over loss of fertility, or grieve that being gay would preclude me from "having my OWN children". Does that mean that if we have a biological connection to them, we OWN our children? It was never an expectation, because I've known all my life that sexual reproduction isn't in my repertoire. I've listened to male and female people question if they were REAL men or women when they discovered they are sterile and medicine can't fix their broken organs. Not knowing what I am, I've had the surreal experience of them asking ME if I think THEY are real. How ironic that they would ask me, the UNREAL male/female, to tell them if they are REAL.

But that is exactly how it goes when you are intersexed. When you talk about it with people, they invariably end up re-evaluating just what makes them male/female, men/women, and ask the intersexed to help them figure it out. Some intersexed educators and authors complain about it. They want people to pay attention to them as intersexed. I welcome it. No, I love it. It's like watching flowers bloom. Real. "What are you REALLY?"

I'm not sure at what age I learned that parenthood could be achieved through adoption. I'm not sure at what age I was told, overheard, deduced that if "They" figured out WHAT I WAS, "They" would never let me be a parent. What I was. An unfinished male. An over-done female? "Pseudo-hermaphrodite," not even a REAL hermaphrodite, a pseudo-hermaphrodite? That was one of the cryptic words I'd heard bandied about in hushed tones under a smothering blanket of shame.

At some point, I accepted that parenthood was never going to be part of my life. Imagine my amazement when I stood in the Judge' s chambers being legally declared a father. It happened again in the first years of our relationship, when my partner's daughter whispered to me that no matter what other people said, in her mind she had two Daddies. But did that mean people would see me as REAL? A REAL father? A REAL man? To her I am real.

Over the years a fascinating pattern has developed with people who have seen me with our kids, (even my kids sometimes honor me on Father's Day. They also honor me on Mother's Day!). It happened again this year, a man walked up to me in church, threw open his arms, hugged me, slapped me on the back and said, "Happy Mother's Day, Jim!" It was clearly spontaneous. Even as he let go his face registered, "Why the hell did I just do that?"

I grinned and said, "Thanks!" He looked relieved that I was happy. Am I happy? Is it a good thing for people to see a Mother AND a Father when they look at a man who can't REALLY be either of those things? REAL? Is that what I am? Yes, I'm real. Just pinch me.

Reprinted with permission of the author. Originally published in The Empty Closet, a publication of the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley, NY

Read more articles by Jim Costich.