[RGMCjim]

Dana,
Like so many other intersexed people when I went to the medical profession for help with physical problems, they only cared about my gender. My mother took me to one of those hospitals influenced by John Money (Buffalo Childrens) because I'd stopped growing and hadn't started puberty at the age of 14. I was born with ambiguous genitals and nobody knew what would happen when I was old enough for puberty. Their only concern was that I'd been raised a boy and they were convinced my penis wasn't big enough to succeed as one. Their main objective seemed to be to try to sell my parents on a phalloplasty which I swore I would run away or kill myself to avoid. They were such weirdos with such whacky ideas, and they scared all of us to death. My parents had fought over the gender police vs. an endocrinologist and my father finally exploded and took me to an endocrinologist at home. Finally I to grow up like the other boys. My mother was convinced I was as freak and without my Dad would have thrown me out. But no one pursued the cause of my being intersexed! My mother took progestin for months before and into her pregnancy with me, but no one told us that probably meant I was XX. I've had nasty adrenal problems all my life and so have both of my parents and yet no one suggested they might be carriers and I might have CAH. At 49 I finally ended up in the care of a doctor who put it together. I know so many intersexed people whose physical problems related to the cause of being intersexed have gone untreated, improperly diagnosed, and even denied while far too much concern was given to their gender. In her book, "Intersex and Identity, the Contested Self" Sharon Preeves interviews with the intersexed lead her to the conclusion that the creation of a "social emergancy" about our gender caused most of our problems, rather than preventing them. Our life stories all seem to bear this out. My concern over the new guidelines is that they don't take that into account, and don't insist on enough community and parental education. The shame, secrecy, lies, and mutilation are not eliminated by the new guidelines. If we settle for them, we can not do so without acknowledging that they don't do the job WE, the intersexed wanted.
One of the things I find especially alarming is that depite knowing that intersexed people may vascillate between genders before settling in the one that fits them most closely, and knowing that this is totally unpredictable there seems to be a push on to give the searching intersexed a diagnosis of gender identity disorder and handing them into the treatment protocols for transsexuals. This is happening in the U.K. and I know one such person who was given a hormone cocktail as per the transsexual protocol that made her sick. She's not male transitioning to female, she's intersexed and her natural hormone levels and PAIS counterindicate what you'd give a MtF. Nevertheless, her doctors just don't get it because the labels matter more than the REALITY. Protocols create a "paint by the numbers" approach to medicine that can have dire consequences for people who aren't ordinary. It is just this sort of thing that I am most concerned about for all of us everywhere. We seem to have a whole lot of these kinds of problems because our health are is not job one to our Physicians. Worrying about our gender is. Our gender is something we can and do figure out for ourselves just fine. We don't need someone to force a gender assignment on us and back it up with hormones that don't work, and surgery that mutilates. We're quite capable of figuring out our gender, working with endocrinologists to achieve healthy hormone levels, and chosing or NOT chosing designer genital surgery. We do need our medical issues diagnosed and treated. This just isn't happening like it does with the general population, or with other groups of people with conditions and anamolies that can impact their health.
I know exactly what you mean about past arguments over who is/isn't allowed to call themselves intersexed. I'm dead set against that. Whether we call ourselves intersexed or disordered or blue jello if we act like a bunch of bitchy control freaks declaring who is or isn't one of the chosen ones we're wrong. Right is to embrace each other, welcome one another and work together to make the world a better place for ourselves.
I hope everyone here and at the other intersexed sites I hang out at gets the sense that I'm neither judgemental or exclusionary.

Jim