Growing up in Silence

By: Bre-Ann Werner

          In today’s society, growing up ‘different’ is like being a prisoner in your own body. Our current generation is so mesmerized by what society has provoked to be ‘normal,’ that anyone who appears to be slightly off from the cookie cutter image is not accepted. In our society, the media has not only created an unrealistic image of what ‘normal’ should appear to be on the outside, but on the inside as well. Meaning, girls can only like boys, and boys can only like girls. Children grow up learning about two distinct genders/ sexes, and what their role is. They never grow up learning about gays, or even intersexed people. What about the people who grew up in silence their entire life because they were ‘different?’ No one ever thinks or talks about the people who were raised and identified as one gender and later on found out that they were something completely different. The lack of education on such an important topic creates a domino effect on people’s understanding to accept these individuals for who they are.

            The word “Intersex” is used to describe children that are born with very unusual sex characteristics. [1] For example, it ranges from girls that are be born with an enlarged clitoris, or boys born with very small genitals and no testes. These birth defects make their characteristics unapparent and difficult to define at first. [2] There are many different sex conditions within the word “Intersex.” A women can be born with AIS; Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which states that they are born with and x and a y chromosome instead of the normal xx chromosome.[3] As a result of this defect most women do not properly develop the parts they need to do normal womanly functions, like reproduce. AIS specifically is not as common as other general “Intersex” conditions are. About 1 in 20,000 babies are born with the AIS condition, while 1 in every 2,000 babies are born with other disorders of their sex development.[4]

            There is an extreme lack of education about disorders like this. When we learned about it in class I was absolutely blown away. I was astonished at how these babies can be born with these defects. More importantly, I was truly caught off guard with how hard their lives are as young children growing into adulthood. The stories of these children’s lives can be just like any of us or can be extremely devastating. When children with these sex defects are born, the doctor announces their sex as a newborn; they feel it is too risky to wait until they develop their personality and go through puberty. In that case, the doctor goes by what seems most accurate in their eyes. The parent of these children raise their children according to doctors’ orders. Unfortunately, in a lot of these cases the doctors are not always correct, and the children grow up raised as a boy or girl, and later on in life they discover that their body does not equal up to their sex identification. [i]

            Imagine that, growing up knowing yourself as a boy or a girl, and in your blooming years you soon figure out that you were not “normal” like you thought you were. I cannot even stand to think about growing up as a girl and then finding out that I have male parts growing on my body, as well as experiencing a male’s stages of puberty. Children that are currently experiencing this problem feel as if they have no part or place in this world; like as if they didn’t belong. Our society is so judgmental, but yet so uneducated. If people only knew that individuals are experiencing this on a daily basis, then maybe there wouldn’t be so many deaths and suicides over it.

 

 

 

---

[1] Katie Baratz to Harvard College News online forum, September 24, 2007, Growing up 'Intersex,' Going on Oprah, http://www.haverford.edu/news/stories/411/51.

[2] Katie Baratz to Harvard College News online forum, September 24, 2007, Growing up 'Intersex,' Going on Oprah, http://www.haverford.edu/news/stories/411/51.

 

[3] Katie Baratz to Harvard College News online forum, September 24, 2007, Growing up 'Intersex,' Going on Oprah, http://www.haverford.edu/news/stories/411/51.

[4] Katie Baratz to Harvard College News online forum, September 24, 2007, Growing up 'Intersex,' Going on Oprah, http://www.haverford.edu/news/stories/411/51.

---

[i] Morgan Holmes to Intersexed Society of North America online forum, , 2008, http://www.isna.org/node/743.