What makes a boy a boy or a girl a girl? At birth we look at the genitalia. As the child grows we expect certain behaviors (whatever our societal expectations might be) related to sex. Intersex is a term referring to people whose genitals have both male and female traits. I had never heard the word before this morning. It is one of the taboo subjects of the medical world and society at large. For such people the abiding wounds of shame and secrecy accompany them throughout their lives.
There was an interview on The Current (on CBC radio) this morning of Curtis Hinkle, a fifty-two-year-old living in South Carolina (who was in Montreal on a speaking tour). He is an activist lobbying to allow intersexed people to decide for themselves what changes are made to their bodies. Usually surgical intervention is performed before a child is old enough to become aware that their genitalia are different from what is considered the norm. In fact, it is a biological reality that 1 in 2,000 children are known to be born with an unusual sexuality, possibly parts of both sexes simultaneously.
This man said that he was surgically defined as female but he never felt that was right and was often reprimanded for obstreperous behavior as a child. (Translated that would mean he had the energy of a traditional boy.) He is now living as a man and comfortable with himself. (I missed the first part of his interview so I cannot fill in too many details but I think I heard that he has been married for twenty-five years.)
The question of gender identity is never black and white. There are many shades of boy and girl. Not all boys act alike; not all girls act alike. And that’s what makes horse racing, as my mother would have said.
When each of my children were about a year old, I gave them the same toy. (I hope you don’t mind my telling this story again, Tamar, even though you have heard it many times!) It was a platform on wheels with pegs and balls that could be stacked on top of each other on the platform. Tamar would sit there for an hour at a time stacking and restacking, fascinated by the different configurations she could make. When I gave the same toy to Aaron, at the same age, he immediately took his hand and pushed the toy as hard as he could to make it move. So he is a boy and she is a girl and they had standard boy and girl responses at that age. But that is not all there is to it, the boy and the girl. I’ve seen both of them show aggression, assertiveness, competitiveness, vulnerability, sensitivity, compassion, irregardless of being boy or girl. People are very complex creatures, that’s for certain.
Posted by leya at July 28, 2004 05:09 PM