from Twitter user #EndIntersexSurgery @Pidgejen:
Anyways, let’s start with what I thought I once knew about about myself. When I was 18, I discovered I wasn’t like other girls. My medical records read “male pseudo-hermaphrodite 46 XY” & other BS terminology that pathologized my healthy/beautiful intersex body.
I discovered then that I had been diagnosed with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS); my XY body couldn’t fully utilize androgens (like T) and so I developed mostly like a typical female person externally.
For me, this meant that I had a somewhat “ambiguous” looking body (aka a non-binary body) and the doctors performed 3 unnecessary cosmetic surgeries to make me look more like a “normal” girl:
Not to mention, they lied to me about ALL OF THIS and then forced me to take Premarin (a low dose of estrogen made from extracting the hormone from pregnant mare’s urine 🐴😢)
Anyways, I got in touch with a new endocrinologist recently thanks to my therapist at @RushMedical who suggested I see him.
He did something no other doctor has ever done. He asked me if he could see my medical records, all of them, and then took time to read of them.
He even reached out to other experts in his field when he was confused by something.
Wow. We love humility in medicine.
Anyways, he ends up suspecting something is up and that perhaps my PAIS diagnosis is wrong.
He then orders me a genetic 🧬 test. Thanks to covid it took almost half a year to get the results, but a month or so ago I got them back.
Turns out, I don’t have PAIS. I actually have something else known as NR-5A1. Now this is big news mostly because 1. It supports my thesis that docs who deal with intersex kids don’t know shit...
And 2. P/AIS intersex folks are believed to not be able to utilize androgens and so we’re often only given estrogen (never T), forcibly “feminized” with fucked up “cosmetic” surgeries, and forcibly assigned female.
Doing what they did to me was fucked up enough, but now realizing that they didn’t even have the diagnosis right—and that I *can* utilize androgens—is fucking infuriating beyond beyond belief.
We need to #EndIntersexSurgery y’all like yesterday.
prguitarman
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
amandla
titsay
