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Conflict of Interest. The author reports no conflicts of interest.
Abstract. The voices of 13 people with intersex traits are shared in this symposium to shape dominant medical discourse about intersex bodies and experiences. Four commentaries on these narratives by experts from various disciplines are included in this issue, with each raising questions that hopefully enhance rather than regulate the voices of people with intersex traits.
Key Words. Disorders of Sex Development, Intersex, Medical Apology, Normalization and Normalizing Interventions, Shame
Background
I'm intersex. I was diagnosed with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) when I was a young teenager in the early 1990s, although I didn't learn the truth about my body until I obtained my own medical records years later as an adult. A surgeon removed my internal testes in 1997, when I was 17 years old. The surgery was an attempt to normalize my "abnormal" body because testes don't belong in a female body. I thought the doctor was removing premalignant underdeveloped ovaries, but as I later learned that was a lie he told me allegedly to ensure that I would see myself as the girl I had been raised to be. Although I no longer hold any animosity for how I was treated by a medical provider I admired and respected as a teenager, I wish he knew that the surgery he performed created a new set of abnormalities in my life. Having my body surgically modified for a medically unnecessary reason, I came to feel that my core was, from the beginning of my life, damaged. I felt like I was a freak of nature. For years I wondered how different my life would be had my body been leftintact, and rather than lied to about my diagnosis, I had been told I was a unique, and, most importantly, natural variation, even if most of us have been taught that sex is simply binary.
I'm intersex, but for years I never shared it. It wasn't until 2007, when I was a 27-year-old doctoral student studying sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, that I reached a place where I felt comfortable sharing my medical history with supportive faculty and close graduate school friends, and then, eventually, anyone who cared...