My Mother Hid My Intersex Identity from Me, and why I don’t hate her.
Last year, I discovered that I am Intersex. I choose to use the word discovery in place of diagnosis to underline that, for me, this is a profound experience not rooted in medicalization and science. The most impactful part of this discovery has been the shift in how I understand myself as a social being. But before I dive into that, I’ll first share how exactly I came to this self-discovery.
I discovered that I am intersex on International Intersex Awareness Day. I started the day not knowing what Intersex Awareness Day was or even that there was an Intersex Awareness Day. It was a Saturday morning, and I started like most Saturday mornings, which included listening to music and relaxing. I eased into the day after meditation, yoga, mindful eating, and spending too much time on Instagram reels.
At one point during the morning, I just happened to remember some pivotal moments of my life growing up in my childhood. I thought about these experiences in the aggregate, and a little voice in my head just happened to think of the pattern and recognize that these experiences were very different. Then, I came to the theory that I might be Intersex.
This prompted me to do some research, and a few hours later, after researching and cross-referencing, I realized that I am Intersex, and so much of my life made sense at that moment. Funnily enough, later that day, my spouse shared with me that it was Intersex Awareness Day. At first, I didn’t believe him, but when I found out that it was and confirmed it, we had a hearty laugh.
I needed that moment of laughter and lightness because this discovery was identity-shattering. I was assigned male at birth, socialized, and raised as male in Indiana. I am the middle child of five, raised by a single mother. As a black person socialized and treated as male, I navigated hyper-masculine spaces, and my sense of worth and my standing in the community was always held to the standard of hyper-masculinity. I never truly felt that I belonged in masculine spaces or that it was where I could be seen and accepted for who I was.
Looking back, I can see that there were moments and signs of my Intersex identity, but we didn’t talk about such things in my family. Mine was the kind of family where children were expected to be seen and not to be heard. There wasn’t much space for shame or conversation about feeling like I didn’t fit in because we were navigating homelessness and poverty, and my household was one of domestic violence mixed with adults who were experiencing addiction and joblessness.
As a child, I was just trying to survive and get as far away from my home as possible. My mother passed away in 2012, and my father passed away a few years before that. When my mother passed away, my siblings and I spoke less. Today, we are estranged from one another, sadly. After my mother’s death, a lot of my opportunities to discover what made me so different went with her. Through my research, I discovered that she had me at home, with my aunt as her midwife. My aunt was a registered nurse. My mother had me out of wedlock and at home to avoid judgment from her family and neighbors.
Despite my mother’s attempts to keep my Intersex identity hidden, I’m very fortunate that since then, I’ve had the opportunity to release the shame that she instilled in me, and I’ve come to a better relationship with my body. Through this gradual process of trusting my instincts, I also discovered that I am Autistic and that I have a couple of co-occurring neurodivergent characteristics.
I’m still grappling with the full weight of this discovery, and I’m taking things day by day. There are moments when I’ll get a flashback to a memory of my childhood that was a clue or hint that I’m Intersex, and those moments are bittersweet. It almost feels like I am unraveling a Russian doll set and trying to get to the root of the matter, and as I get closer, I learn more and get more of the picture. I think the loss of memory or the minimalization of the memories tied to my body and puberty and the incongruence between what my body was doing during puberty was a survival mechanism.
My mother was obsessed with respectability politics and how she was perceived, and there was no room for difference or divergence without shame. To be different and outside of the norm was to be wrong or broken in her eyes.
Discovering my intersex identity has been healing, and it is also has been wounding, which are not at all opposite experiences. I believe that the closer I get to healing, the more vulnerable I become to potential wounding and that the wounding is an opportunity for healing.
Today, more than anything, I am being gentle with myself and gingerly remembering the things I was forced to forget, the insults I was forced to accept, and the disconnection from my body that kept me alive in that household. As I get older, I know that these adaptations or maladaptions were born out of trauma to keep me alive long enough to get out of that household, and they’ve served their purpose.
Now that I am a small business owner, well-educated, and married, I can return to these emotions in these experiences. I’m strong enough to face, accept, and integrate them into my story. I’m grateful for this experience and for the strength that these experiences have given me.
