Good day. I posted a thread hoping that other open-minded people can gain a understanding that not all intersexed people look at being raised the opposite sex as such a bad thing. I see myself as a person who has both masculine and feminine traits. The masculine side of myself is how I was born, genetically male. the fem' I learned from classical conditioning, being raised a girl, and possably the effects of female hormones. The life of the entersexed is a tough road, many parents will have gender issues with their intersexed children regardless of surgery. It can be just as tough on the parents of intersexed children as it is on the child itself.
I can understand why a lot of intersexed people don't like the idea of altering the babys. The tramma from surgrey can have a long lasting effect into adulthood, but so can the effects of the culture of today when genitla is way to far from the normal looking male and female parts. It is also true that if the choice to resign isn't done quickly, the feminine looking process that happens when you remove the testes doesn't always look right. Some surgerys done by doctors that are untrained, leave people's part looking butchered. Here is where the voices of the angry inersexed come out, and I understand them. Any penus of any size should be left untouched, the same for clitorises, doctors well trained with the intersexed know this.
M. G . H. hosptail in MASS has a great intersexed program that had helped so many intersexed people go about happy normal lives. Some with surgery, some without.
I was looking at my records and discovered by accident that I was a boy at birth, and I was shocked to see a picture of me at with two testes hanging between my legs. I sat there and read my records with tears going down my eyes. Yes, I felt a loss because the right to have children was taken away. A loss to decide myself what I what to be. And for my parents, who had know idea what to do. But I do agree, as a boy with no penus, something had to be done.
Many of the genitic anomalies found in the intersexed have been greatly researched in Mass Genral hosptail and they do follow up the progress of the intersexed. If it is off the sexual scale from boy or girl they do know how to operate, leaving sexual sensitivity intact. Far more intersexed adults have a chance now at fullfiling sex lives then ever have before, because of the care, and love, and understanding given to them by well educated doctors trying to understand something that is very delicate issue. I don't see doctors as people who can't wait to cut up the next inersexed child so they(the intersexed) will be angry and untrusting with the medical world. I see doctors as "human" people, some who are well educated make the right choices, and some who make the wrong choices. "I'm terribly sorry if the wrong choices have been made for you."" My ears, and heart is open to you."
Still, A neo-nate at that stage does not know what gender is, and can't possibly at that age decide what sex it should be. The parents my also be vey bias depending on the sex they want to have for the child. We should praise the doctors that do make the right choices, getting intersexed people into the right therapy, giving them surgery, at the right time if they need it, and helping parents understand that their intersexed children are unique and wonderful human beings who need there love and support; boy or girl, or both!
Myself, I was always a tomboy,who loves and needs the friendship of men but falls in love with woman, and likes have sex with woman. But that doesn't make me any less a person, or the woman that I know I am. The one thing I must add is that sex for me is visual. This is just how I think, but the reason why we are not all race of bisexuals people, boy or girl, able to have sex with gays, streights, and hermhaphdites, is because we all hold unquie what is sexualy attractive to us. What looks good to the eye,and gets us sexualy aroused, or what might look good in the mind, is still a visual process. My eyes had proved it to me without a doubt. People with ambigous gentails are no less whole people, but they may lack the gential visual cues that would allow another person to look and there gentials and get aroused. I say this because I must think( or look at) the flower like shape of a vagina to climax. It is very visual to me.
I passed through A skilled surgan who gave me a clit, without disrupting my sex nerves. At seventeen I had vaginal reconstrutive surgery taking skin off my buddocks. Yes, it was very trammatic, and at the time i had to keep it secret. My intersexualty is somthing I'm proud to have survived, I'm intact and whole as a person. I may need more surgery, and that is the trial of my intersexed condtion. doesn't mean I have to like it, but my body is only a tool of my soul. It houses the mind that I carry. I have learned a lot more about how this tool can be used, because of my inersexed condition, then had I been born one gender and stayed one gender.
In closeing...I can't see how I could have been happy as a feminine man with no penus. I can't see how it would have been better letting me decide my gender as a child. When children, up to the age when it they could decide their sex, might not know the diffrence bweteen fantisy and reality. Or waiting untill adulthood,when by then, I would have been firmly seated in the male role and the idea of being a girl who have been terrible. What is realy the less of all the evils? honestly???
I will stand behind any entersexed person who does not like the choice made for them, But we as intersexuals can overcome this. I am as woman, as any woman born XX. Although i fit into more normal visual limits now, My gentials are still somewhat diffrent then anybody's eles. I climax fine and I'm proud of that.
Please tell me other intersexuals can understand it is not hopeless.
We can choose life. We are all unque, and while bad surgins may make wrong choice for intersexed people who deserve much better, some inersexed people are helped by it, when they run into doctors who care and understand, and life can as wonderfull as a journey tht God had indended it to be.......................:)

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You really have to love yourself, to get anything done in this world!

Julanne

Hi Jules,

Welcome btw...

I am curious about something you wrote.

Do you think it is our genitals that define our gender? Or are they separate issues?

Could it be just our genes that define our gender?

Or is it our brains?

By no means are the choices above inclusive of everything that make us whole as people. I am just curious as to what makes us gendered, or even intergendered people?

Betsy

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Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. --Margaret Mitchell

It is of my opoion that trangendering has to do with something that is behind why femine and masuline "people" are attracted each other. What if we all went blind. No more sexual visualtion!!! Now lets take away the hands> Now you can't feel your lovers touch or be touched. Yet we still had to find someway to continue to propgate and get togeather. The Male mind would still seek the female mind, and vise-vera. why..;) because the male (streight male) needs to bond so to speak with the female traits that he lacks in his maculaine mind. you tend to find that the most balanced people are those you pick partners oposite to their gender behavour. The human brain. needs this balance (guy with girl, butch with fem', so on and so forth) It seeks it out! When we are in the womb, before we are even given our sex organs, the gentics ((DNA)) of humans know's this. and split the brain so to speek. One half half fem' one half masuline. in theory only one half of that side will grow neuorns to insure that we will seek out what we don't have(Dave Webber)(the Princable of Neoron Science p 367) but in trangendered people they have the neuron reseptors swiched or double wired in their brain so not only do they feel that they are the wrong sex they "Think IT!!" This is diffrnent then cross dressing, transexualls or intersexed people. it almost like having the wrong brain in the right body. Some cases surgry and resighnment helps. Others(sadly) swich back again after the sex change. It is much more complex then just hormones which seem to govern your sexual orentaion.
Is your gender you gentials GOD No! What about me! I almost had no gentials! featureless.I like sex with both girls and boys. I spent 11 years with a man, I want to be with a girl because that is what "I choose" not because I had testes Although they have found a link between gay girls, tomboy behavour, and high levels to testortsone in mothers womb (Parenting magizine, September)

__________________
You really have to love yourself, to get anything done in this world!

Julanne

Jules,

I don't really see my questions as transgender ones. I was thinking more along the lines of society not willing to accept us in the bodies we were born in. For example...can a girl really be a girl if she has a big clit? Can a boy really be a boy if he has a micropenis?

The way I see it is that society and medicine spends an awful lot of time trying to make our genitals fit our gender, whether real, perceived, expressed.

The lines between TG and IS can and do get blurred, and I agree that they are separate. Yet, they are very small/opaque also. The difference as I see it is we see many problems arise from surgery, and some TG people often see surgery as their salvation.

Betsy

__________________
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. --Margaret Mitchell

Hi Jules and Happy Holidays,
Yes I at times I haved looked beyond the what ifs.
I am IS .
I have at times thought about getting my gender fixed but why.
I had gender augmentation at birth. LOL looky where that got me .
Raised male and then turned out to the world at 18 years old.
What a ride this has been .
you had spoke of Native Americans being of female gender.
reminds me of a story .
Native American IS were nicknamed Berdaches a term given to Native Americans IS individuals by the French.
These Individauls were given very high status in these tribes.
Medicine , Religion and Heads of these tribes, ie Chiefs. Az1

Have a nice day

Muhoe

always looking outside of the box.

I don’t know who brought this thread back to the top but I am

appalled at my bad spelling! How could anybody take my writing

seriously with spelling errors in every sentence? Interesting

enough while my writing style has changed some, my ideas

behind intersex are almost the same then as they are now. I had

very liberal views about surgery then, now, I am more aware of

the damage early surgery does, I still feel that the best choice

for me was early surgery because I would not want to have gone

through another genital operation that I would have

remembered. The surgeries I had where bad enough, without

adding one more to my memory bank.

Betsy said:
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I don't really see my questions as transgender ones. I was thinking more along the lines of society not willing to accept us in the bodies we were born in. For example...can a girl really be a girl if she has a big clit? Can a boy really be a boy if he has a micropenis?
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I think I can answer this.. two years later :p

When is a clitoris not a clitoris?

When is a penis, not a penis? I could answer it like this: When is

your hand not a foot? If you were born with toes an ankle and a

heel at the end of your arm, would you still call it your hand? Or,

would you say that you were born with a foot-like hand? Or,

would you not put any name to it and just say that your (--?)

came out a little different? Let’s go back to Clitoris. How big does

a clit have to be before it is no longer a clit? How small can a

penis be before we can no longer call it a penis? If a penis is

small enough can IT be called a clitoris? Is it unreasonable to call

a large clit a penis if the clit is the standard size (or larger) then a

regular boy's penis? Could we say that we couldn’t call a large clit

a clit if.. it is a penis, or something else?

Does society have a problem with a girl with a penis? Well, even

if society did not have a problem, I think a girl with a penis, might

have problems finding a partner. Most (straight) men don’t want

a penis on there partner unless they have the penis. Most gay

woman like woman genitalia, if they wanted a penis in their sex

life they would be straight.

Most gay men, although they like as many penises as they can

get, like their penises attached to men or they would not be gay.

So the catch is this, even if we had our unique bodies as nature

made us, finding a sexual match for us could have been just as

frustrating as finding a match with our surgically altered genitals.

Even bisexuals tend to go for standard gentials.

Clit or penis? Who has the correct name for such anomalies

anyway?

__________________
You really have to love yourself, to get anything done in this world!

Julanne

hi jewls, yer speln aint whut madders , yur point was understud. beeech

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mutation is THE key to evolution {{{{xxxy}}}}undefined

Anyways, as long as its a debate over how to treat IS rather than what is... I'll participate

Personally, I think we should be given the choice when we're younger,
Heck, I've been told that I need to make a decision some time (yeah right!)

What makes it any easier learning about it at 18 than learning it b4 you get on the hormones and stuff?
(at least, thats how I wouldve liked it)

It should be our choice, theres too much of a PLAYING GOD factor involved in people making a sex choice FOR us.

Thats just my opinions anyways!:D

Hello Shodan!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Posted by Jules:
I can't see how it would have been better letting me decide my gender as a child. When children, up to the age when it they could decide their sex, might not know the difference between fantasy and reality.

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Children have more distorted view on life then adults do. In

fact 'psychologists ' are trying to prove now that people are not

mature enough untill they are twenty eight to realy reflect back

on if there choice are right or wrong.

A child, given the huge gravity of choosing to be a boy or girl

could make a far worse choice for themselves given their

maturational understanding of their choices. Al least an adult

might understand the pros and cons of choosing to be a male or

female based on what sexual parts you have or don't have. The

issue in having a adult decide on your gender lessens the chance

that a wrong choice will be made vs letting a child decide their

sex when they cannot yet grasp the whole picture due to his or

her age and lack of understanding due to their age.

__________________
You really have to love yourself, to get anything done in this world!

Julanne