Author: Karin

Photo by Karin

Karin: “Church brutality”

What can be said in the face of this? I heard many rumours about this kind of thing going on in Western Australia for years, where many Irish Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy, and nuns from other orders, run boarding schools. My own mother was in the care of nuns, in another state. She…
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Max Beck in Middle Sexes

Karin: “Middle Sexes”, not all the same

Intersex people are often represented as being all the same, or as slight variations on a uniform theme. So, too, are trans men and women. Likewise, the Hijras of India and Pakistan, or the Kathoey of Thailand, are depicted as being near-identical clones of each other. It’s a new form of an old trope –…
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detail of cover image

Karin: Lili Elbe’s autobiography, Man into Woman

Download a copy of this book review as a PDF Published autobiographies written by intersex people are rare. Socially-imposed guilt and shame at being born intersex have led to fewer such books being published than one might wish for – we can learn so much from how others like us have lived. I’d always known…
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detail from the book cover

First Hollywood bio about an intersex person, Lili Elbe

Late last year it was widely reported that Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron are to star in a fictionalised though somewhat biographical feature film, about Lili Elbe née Einar Wegener. She was the first publicly known intersex person. The film is The Danish Girl, based on the novel of the same name by US author…
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