INTERSEX, CAIS, AND WTF IS WRONG WITH DOCTORS?!

 

Disclaimer: This is a post about intersex and CAIS individuals and our experiences with clueless medical professionals. It pulls no punches, so read at your own discretion.

 

Please watch this before you read what follows it….

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/17KjRBWypA/

 

PSA: If you aren’t already following Jackie Green on Facebook, please do so now. You should be!  She is amazing!

 

The video above reminded me of what happened to me when I went in for a vaginal exam when I was a teenager (the first time I ever had a mandated pap smear done).

 

First of all, just the thought of climbing onto a table, opening my legs and letting someone “in there” was horrifying to me.  As a trans kid (without the terminology or insights, yet, to categorize myself in that way in the early 1970’s), I didn’t even spend any time looking at myself down there with a mirror, since that part of my anatomy didn’t “belong” to me.  That part of me felt freakish enough — wanting something desperately (at times) but knowing that there was no way to achieve it in the way my brain wanted. (The brain determines one’s gender and sexual orientation identity, not the body.)

 

So, going to a doctor for a pap smear was worse than the worst nightmare I had ever experienced.  I wasn’t sexually active with anyone else, so why did I need a pap smear? (Nuns never got cervical cancer, right?! So, only sexual activity with other people caused cancer, I figured!)

 

I went simply because it was required

 

And when I got in there, the clueless woman who attended me took a look, declared me inexcusable tiny inside, and said I should get several different size dildos and “work with them” to stretch myself out sufficiently to make way for my eventual husband or lover.

 

Husband or lover?!!!

 

What husband or lover?  I had zero interest in a husband.  Or in a lover with the appendage that I was rightfully supposed to have, but didn’t.

 

No one talked about any  other options to teenagers or young adults back then

 

Girls/women’s bodies were viewed as receptacles for men’s appendages and hosts for their offspring. Period.

 

This Wasn’t the ONLY Time I Was “Viewed” and Discussed

 

On later occasions, I was brutalized by a woman physician who used a medium size speculum on me even though I told her beforehand that I was super small down there and wanted a small one used. I shrieked when she jammed it in me and hurt for two solid weeks afterward.

 

WTF was she trying to do — make me bigger by force?

 

After that experience whenever I had a pap smear done, I told that story to the doctor and said that if I ever got hurt again in that way, I would never have another one done. (Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, ain’t ever gonna happen again!)

 

And another time, my PCP asked if she could have a trainee in the exam room with her. I said okay, and they spent an inordinate amount of time wordlessly gesticulating at my oddly configured external labial (or whatever!) anatomy!

 

So, all of this led me, later in life, to begin to speculate about where I was, exactly, on the gender spectrum.  Was I intersex at birth and altered to a female binary? Did I retain some vestiges of intersex anatomy externally?  Why was I so tiny internally?

 

Testing for Intersex or CAIS (or other spectrum conditions) is Prohibitively Expensive

 

I was never tested for any of the above conditions, but my experiences have led me to believe that I was either born intersex or transgender.  I have chosen the term transgender, since my brain is male, but it’s entirely possible that I am intersex (unaltered) or that I was AFAB — that is, that I was literally assigned female at birth because I lacked a sizeable, serviceable, fully functioning male organ (which I now suspect).

 

Jackie’s video above gives you an idea of how unbelievably difficult it is to be treated by medical people who are utterly clueless when it comes to intimate issues like these.  It’s easier to just remain silent and figure it out ourselves than it is to try to get help or insights from people who have all the answers for cis normative individuals and none for the rest of us.