*audio from phone* (On next week's episode, you're gonna get to learn about my vaginoplasty when I was 11)
On the last episode, part three, I talked about the clitorectomy I had which I
was four when that happened, and the clitorectomy was completely medically
unnecessary. It's something that still happens today to children, and it was an
assault of my human rights and my bodily integrity. And that was when I was four,
but another surgery happened to me and that's what this video is about. It's
about a vaginoplasty that happened to me when I was 11, about 11 years old, so stay
tuned and we're gonna talk about that surgery coming up next.
*soft melodic music*
As an intersex person my body is non-binary, and binary just
simply means two opposite/opposing categories that are supposedly
completely different. In terms of this conversation, I'm talking about sex so my
body did not fall into either one of these opposing categories of male or
female. It had some male characteristics and it had some female characteristics
and then it had its own intersex characteristics. So when doctors found
that out, they decided that it would be best to intervene and make my body fit
into one of these boxes, and they chose the female box, and they decided to do
surgeries and forced me to go on feminizing hormones that would make my
body more "normal". Doctors unfortunately get taught
medicine in this way that says if something is abnormal, it's your job to
make it normal. Unfortunately, intersex people who are generally healthy get
casted into this completely subjective definition of abnormal and so thus for
almost 100 years... [TV Interviewer] "Doctor Money it's still a pretty drastic procedure isn't it?"
[Dr. Money] Well it's a drastic procedure by your standards and mine..."
[Pidgeon] Clinicians have been taking it upon themselves to
quote-unquote "fix" us and make us normal, and they've been successful in getting
parents to go along with their plans because in most parents hearts, they want
what's best for their children. They want their children to be happy. And
in order for parents to believe that their children can be happy, they often
think that their children have to be normal, and again, normal is completely
subjective, but with that aside they want us to be normal and doctors are over
here being like "We can make your child normal, we can make them norma,l thus we
can make them be happy". And that is what happened to me. So my parents were told
that I was abnormal and that these doctors had the "fix" for
me and the third fix they had for me: a vaginoplasty. So they decided my vagina
wasn't long or wide enough to accept a male's penis, and they talked about it a lot
saying, like, it wouldn't be able to have "normal sex" with my husband in the
future, and so they decided to go in and do a surgery. Now did they tell me the
truth? No, they didn't tell me the truth. What they told me was is that I had a
bladder issue, and that they were gonna go in and fix my bladder & my urethra
and right before the surgery they said "We noticed your vagina is a little bit
smaller than other girls and we can go in and make your vagina bigger so that
when you have sex with your husband, when you're older, it'll be all good." And they
said, "Does that good?" and I was like, "Sure, okay, um sounds good." I was literally in
my gown, had been prepped for anesthesia, & thought I was just going in for a
bladder surgery. When I woke up from that surgery
I had tubes coming out of me, which was a catheter, and I had tons of stitches and
I was groggy from the anesthesia and threw up-it was disgusting. And then I
thought I'd go home pretty soon, and days and days and days go by and I'm still in
the hospital, and I still have my catheter in me, and I would have teams of
medical attending physicians, and also their resident physicians, and they would
come into my room and they would say, "Hey, I have some medical students here, is it
okay if we allow them to come in with us?" And I would say, because I waned to be
nice, I would say "Okay". And then, what they did next, I was not prepared for, they
would spread open my legs, and I was just wearing a hospital gown, and they would
look at the surgery site which was between my legs and they would show the
residents in the room, these students, their handiwork, what they had done to me, and
it was a vaginoplasty essentially. And that was horrible, that moment coupled
with other moments, like in follow-ups, taught me something that has stuck with
me, and it is that my body is not my own that everyone else has access to my body
I don't have any say in that, my body is an object to be looked at, to be
scrutinized and to be surgically manipulated. And that is a horrible thing
to learn as a young person, I was only 11, and in those moments, in order to cope,
what I did was I would go someplace in my head *Disney music* I would freeze up,
I would not breathe, uh, I would hold my breath actually and I
would go somewhere else, I would try not to be present in that
moment. I didn't want to be physically or emotionally there because to be there in
that moment, while people were looking at my most private parts, was too much to
deal with as an eleven-year-old and I didn't feel strong enough, or like I had
enough power or autonomy or authority, to say no, don't do this,
leave me alone. And that had some lasting effects that were horrible, eventually I
was able to leave the hospital, and I was able to go home and I remember they
taught me how to take a warm bath. I remember I attempted to do that and when
I was finally in the bathtub I wanted to touch myself, and feel the surgery site, I
wanted to feel what it felt like after after their surgery, and I remember
slowly putting my hands down in between my legs, and it felt very foreign, felt
very different, I felt very sharp and crispy cuz there was stitches and
scarring--fresh wounds! And that made me feel sick, it put that sick feeling in my
stomach where I immediately snatched my hand like out, and I was like I don't
want to touch myself ever again down there. Which is another lesson I was
learning at that tim,e that my body was something to be ashamed of, that I
didn't, I didn't have a sense of respect for my body because I felt like the
people around me who were adults felt that there was something wrong with my
body, something so wrong that they did these surgeries that left me feeling so
icky, and they would come in and look at me,
and I felt that because of all of that, that there was something to be ashamed
about. I internalized it and I became ashamed, and touching myself kind of
confirmed that shame, that I was I was really different, I was cut up, I was
raw, I felt like a monster, and it really messed me up. I went through the
time when everybody else goes through...
Wow, I thought I just saw a levitating beast, okay, whew...no demons. After that
experience, I went through a time when others are going through puberty, umm and
went through my teenage years with this intense shame that came because of the
stigma, the stigma that is associated with intersex people, or people who are
just non-binary and "aren't normal", even though they had not told me I was
intersex at this point, they were still covering it up by saying I was born with
"cancer in my ovaries", I still felt the effects of that stigma, and that
kind of translated into intense feelings of shame. That's how I went
through my teenage years, it was just feeling that horrible sense of shame and
having nobody to talk about it with. And that led me college, I got to college and
it wasn't until my first year of college sitting in a psychology of women class
and looking at a slide where the professor was talking actually about the
intersex variation that I have, that I found out I was intersex. Stay tuned for
part 5, where I'm gonna talk about what my journey after finding out I was
intersex, to today: being an intersex educator, college-speaker, filmmaker, and
activist. And remember: intersex stories, not surgeries! * mouth click*