Personal stories and testimony, with a focus on testimony by people with intersex variations.
‘R’ had his hand and forearm swathed in plaster. Two days earlier he’d tried to punch out the reinforced glass window in his front door. That one angry punch had broken most of the bones in his right hand. It was just the last of many angry punches. ‘R’ radiated anger. Aggression was in the…
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Karin at OII Australia has obtained a PDF rendition of the autobiography of British intersex woman Roberta Cowell. It was published in the UK in 1954 and has long been out of print. Roberta aka Betty underwent urogenital surgery in the early 1950s. She lived a long life, as a World War II fighter pilot…
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Woohoo! I’m on a four month posting from Australia to Ireland, courtesy of my employer. I’ve just collected my latest Testogel medication from a local pharmacy and I’m excited! Why the excitement? Well, here’s a little background: like almost all adults with intersex conditions, I’m infertile and I need HRT to help maintain my weight,…
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I can say that I became an adult at seven years old. When I saw that I looked more like my sister who had just been born than my brother who was four years younger than I was! Before the birth of my sister, when I was naked, I had noticed there was a difference…
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In a world as heavily mediated as ours, where the boundary between reality staged for entertainment and reality documented for information is blurred, and sometimes lost altogether, works of fiction often encroach upon the territory of fact – the danger is that we may not be able to tell the difference. That certainly happens when…
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A short documentary film made by London-based Australian director Maxx Ginnane about a woman named Adele and her struggles with the UK medical system.
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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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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Despite a difficult childhood, Tony Briffa is a resilient pragmatist with a wonderful sense of humour, writes Lily Bragge. When Tony Briffa was born at Altona Hospital in 1970, doctors were unable to determine his gender. The younger of a set of twins, Briffa’s sister Catherine was confidently announced to be a girl, but for…
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