Virginia's Story

[Published in ALIAS late 1995]

The following is the major part of a letter by Virginia Slocum, an American children’s social worker (shortly to qualify as a certified Marriage, Family and Child Counsellor) and who herself has the partial form of AIS (PAIS). It appeared in issue No. 3 (Winter 1995) of the UK group's newsletter, ALIAS, under the title 'Slaying the Dragon', having first appeared in the newsletter of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA).

Most of my life (I am 46 at present) I have endeavored to feel female. Most of my childhood my parents, especially my mother, labored to instill in me a female identity. These efforts have had some effect. I present myself as a woman, have many womanly attributes and am treated by and large as a female. Unfortunately, this struggle has almost exhausted me. All this time I have labored to prove something which is in some sense not true and at best a terrible simplification of a rather complex state of body and mind.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this process had for a while almost spent me. For much of my young adult life, for at least the years between the ages of 15 and 35, I remember having the experience almost daily of being in the midst of some positive experience (for example, a compliment being paid me, an exciting encounter, feelings of physical pleasure) when into my mind would intrude the thought that something was not quite right. I remember that almost daily experience as one of a lack of genuineness, an illegitimacy, a fear that I would be found out and ridiculed. From a very early age I felt my personal history was out of the norm, that I looked a bit different, felt a bit different and was treated differently than most females. This was never acknowledged. My doctors said only trivial things to me, my parents avoided any mention (and probably any thought) of my difference. My culture dealt with the only gender ambiguity that seemed speakable – transsexualism – with a snicker. I internalized the apparent taboo and lived with a great fear of myself. Another person I know with AIS has had to live in the same way and describes the anguish as her having, in her own words, “to every day slay the dragon”.

I fear that parents in their [desperately anxious] attempts to give their children normal lives, will rob them of the chance to come to terms with their own difference. I suppose there is a great need to feel that the right thing has been done in choosing early surgical intervention. There might be a need to feel that everything has been fixed, or nearly fixed and that their child’s acceptance of their difference will be as decisive as their surgery. Whether or not this type of surgery can ever be viewed as decisive is another critically serious topic. It would be nice if a young person didn’t have to wrestle with puzzling terms like ‘intersexed’ and did not have to contemplate what existed before surgery. But that is not the fate of those of us born like this [just as it is not the fate of someone rendered paraplegic in an automobile accident to walk away from the scene.^{[Ref 1]}]

Ref 1: The author's words have been paraphrased here.

I don’t wish to appear unkind or unfeeling to parents. I have so much empathy for these families, just as I have loved my family through our experience. What is important to emphasize, I believe, is that healing and a kind of wholeness and equanimity are possible. All children [in this situation] may not grow up to identify as intersexuals but there is a very good chance they will perceive of themselves as different to a greater or lesser degree. To not prepare such children for this self-confrontation is to do them a terrible disservice. These children will run the risk of never being comfortable in their own bodies and never at ease with the world around them.

I realize that the prospect of a lengthy course of [psycho]therapy may seem daunting to parents who have already suffered considerable trauma, but I can’t imagine a substitute process. It would be hoped that these children can benefit from expert, informed counselling and be availed of the opportunity to join a group of others like themselves to facilitate self-exploration and gain support. I imagine the participation of loving, accepting parents in the early stages of this therapeutic process would be integral to success. Their child will become very special, someone who knows themself very well and someone who will very probably be capable of great courage and sensitivity to adversity.