[jon12345]

I thought this might be a good place to tell my story. I am not intersex, but I just discovered that the women I have been with for the past nine months is. Today is early on a Wednesday, I discovered this late in the day on Monday. To jump ahead just slightly since then we have had a long cool conversation were I asked a lot of question. I have been gaining a basic understanding of what intersex is and is not, by surfing the net, and have put the relationship on hold, telling her the reason was that I needed time to absorb this, and digest it, before I decided one way or the other. Writing this story is part of that process. It gives me a chance to get feedback, and it might be a positive thing for some of you to get something out of the story.
Monday I was at work talking with a friend of mine that I had not talked with in awhile, and she told me that a particular person, told her that my girl had told him that she had had a sex change operation. I thought that it was kind of funny, because last summer this guy had been hitting on her and been told “no” more times then could be counted. I figured as my friend did that it was just something she said to him to get him to leave her alone in that respect.
Driving home however, I thought of the possibility of that being the truth, and putting it into some of the other little tings that I had noticed it begin to have a possibility of logic to it. Not that there were outward signs or anything that she may have been of another gender at one time, just that if you put some things together with that it gave them a sort of logic. So I was just going to tell what I had heard this guy had said and figured it would be a good laugh. I called her when I got home and she had a friend over and asked if she could call back. That gave me an hour or so to do a little research on her name on the Internet. What I found is that the women I love, was born a male. The feeling was awful and sinking and completely disorientating I called her immediately and confronted her by asking her simply if the name I had discovered was the name on her birth certificate (She had changed both her first and middle name to the female version of them) and her reply was “oh shit”. She then went on with I knew that I would have to tell you this I just have not known how. That particular comment I understood, I have herpes and know how hard it is to tell someone, and how unpredictable reactions are too the news.
Over the next four hours on the phone (we have a long distance relationship), she told me her story, and answered any questions that I had. I now know the whole story, if not in detail at least in essence.
Let me share with you a bit of the essence of what she told me. She was born with both a malformed vagina and penis. She had no reproductive organs, no ovaries, no testicles, no uterus. She has small breasts that contain mammary glands The penis was very small, not very functional, the vagina was small and shallow but with inner and outer lips, rather complete in the superficial sense. At birth the doctor pronounced her a male, and she was raised as such. Essentially by her early teens she was able to function as either gender in did so. Preferring to be a female in her personal times and preferring to be a man in her professional life. She developed two sets of friends, one set knew her as a female, one as a male. Sexually she tried all the genders and orientations (Quad sexual?). I am a few years older then her, she is in her mid forties, I am in my late forties. Two years ago she had an operation to adjust her functional gender to female. She has lived as a heterosexual female for the last 5-6 years. She had one serious loving long term relationship with a male when she was in her early twenties.
I believe the most profound fact personally to me that I was told during our conversation Monday was that she was a virgin the first time we made love.
I do not really know how to describe my feelings. I am not hurt, I am not offended, I am not mad, I don’t feel tricked. When we talked we did a lot of laughing, it was loving and caring, but it was also serious, scary, dismaying, plain weird to me at times. I was talking to Christen, the women I love, but I was also now aware, and talking to Christopher the man who was not quite as dead as she had hoped. Over the months we have been together we have told each other stories of our past experiences in life, jobs family that sort of thing, and I now became aware that the life she was talking about was the life of a male. A lot of things made a lot more sense, such as when she worked as a mechanic, and rowdy things. And the things that did not quite jive with the gentle women I knew. Seemed she was an awful rowdy girl at times when she was younger, the stories now make sense when you place a guy in them. I went to see her once on her home ground where a lot of the people around, like at stores and restaurants had seen her as both a male and a female, the funny smiles people gave now made sense. She seem to have a lot of male friends, that made me a bit uneasy in the heterosexual sense, these guys were his buddies, and remain her friends. They probably don’t know Christen that well, they knew and liked their buddy Christopher a lot and still like doing a lot of the things they did with Christopher with Chris now.
These are not intuitive things to me, and would imagine not intuitive to other people that meet up and become acquainted with intersex people. The discovery blew apart the status quo of our being a normal heterosexual relationship. My relationships with men have sometimes been deep, personal, loving, caring but never sexual. As she succulently put it, she was like a spy, a double agent in a sense. She has an understanding, of a man, that a typical women does not have, it is the kind of perspective that only a man can have because they got it from being men. It is a different perspective for better or worse.
I am unclear as to rather or not I will continue the relationship with this women. I have put her on hold, and she does understand that, and I am sure does not really know if she will be hearing from me again or not, and I am also sure she is very much hoping that she does. I am asking everybody here to help me to gain knowledge that I can use to make the wise decision when I decide that the time is right to become clear on telling her that I am moving on, or I am moving in. I believe I have a good grasp of the basics of intersex, I feel that things that would help me most would be links to good threads here and in other places on the net about peoples stories and thoughts who have been in relationships, successful and not, with an intersex partner similar to the one I described. I will be spending all the time that I can on this until I come to a decision, and make this request for links and stories so that I can make the most out of the time I do have, and more importantly I want to be able to minimize the time I leave this up in the air. I am inclined to stay with her, and if I do, it will be for life, what I am not at all inclined to do is to make a rash decision.
Thank you.