Thursday 22 October 2015

Intersex awareness day, or: mocking intersex people

In five days from now there'll be 'Intersex Awareness Day', or so some outlets have proclaimed proudly. In me as an intersex person this proclamation mostly evokes a sense of helpless outrage and frustration. Nothing about it is even remotely fair.

For over ten years I have fought to get acknowledgement of and (medical) help with my intersex condition. All it got me is one side in the medical community agreeing that I am indeed intersex, the other side disagreeing completely and stating that I am just intersex, and none of the medical help I need.

I have contacted specialists across the globe, have tried big medical centers and expensive specialists from anywhere in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. All to no avail. This year my body is increasingly succumbing to the effects of medical negligence as hormonal imbalances wreck my last remnants of sanity through near-constant pain, nerve issues, migraines and so on.

And I know I am not alone. Through my contacts over the years with other intersex individuals as well as so-called 'intersex organisations' (OII, ILGA, and others), I know that there are only intersex victims of brutal medical and psychological abuse. Intersex organisations are just a front for this abuse, offering no help of any type of intersex individuals.

The 'treatment plan' for intersex individuals as created by WPATH is still to treat intersex as a disorder whereby (forced) genital surgery and such to 'fix' the victim into one of the perfect binary genders is the only way this person can be happy. Meanwhile doctors, psychologists and even some brainwashed intersex people are moving towards fully accepting intersex as a physical and psychological disorder, by abandoning the term 'intersex' and calling it 'Disorder of Sex Development' instead.

The physical and psychological abuse and terror I have experienced over the past ten plus years and the resulting post-traumatic stress disorder have reduced my life to a state where I'm not sure where I can, let alone wish to, continue living. Being intersex is clearly a curse, with every intersex individual - whether a newborn, infant, child or adult - being fair game for medical and psychological experiments. It's not like we are really human after all.

But sure, do that awareness day thing and keep pretending that nobody, intersex organisations and physicians most of all, do not care in the slightest about intersex individuals. It's not like we intersex people have feelings or care about being mocked.

Is it really necessary to mock us like this? Why hold such events which make the victims of the Western approach to 'fixing' intersex individuals feel like slitting their own wrists over the induced agony?! What did we do to deserve such abuse? Why not help us instead? Just... go away...


Maya

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