Sunday, July 2, 2023

Documentary 'Every Body' centers the lives and activism of intersex people : NPR

"Yeah. So I like to think of intersex as sex characteristics. And, you know, when I say sex characteristics, I mean hormones, like testosterone or estrogen, chromosomes, like XX, XY, X, XXY, internal organs like ovaries, testes, ovotestes and external organs like penis, vagina. So we all have sex characteristics, but people with variations in their sex characteristics are often targeted by the medical establishment and by practitioners for what sometimes are very harmful medical interventions." 

… So although I was, you know, born with a small phallus and undescended testes, I was assigned female at birth. And they were hoping that my mom would do really invasive medical surgery to sort of align my body with sort of social expectations of female, right? And even though they had done the surgery, I still didn't necessarily feel more like a girl. I didn't fit in. So I went to college. And one night, I'm sort of at my student job, and I type in testicular feminization syndrome. And then this updated term, androgen insensitivity syndrome, came up. And I sort of looked at the characteristics of AIS, and I was literally in shock because I was like, that's me. That's my body. And all of the doctors who I had spoken to or interacted with up until that point did not tell me the truth about my body.

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