Editor’s note: The “Let’s Talk about Sexuality” series, which is intended to create a new, feminist sexual discourse, is funded by the Korea Foundation for Women’s Gender Equal Social Development Project.
I can’t see myself
When I was asked to write this article, I hesitated for some time. I had a big suspicion that I had nothing to say. You could say that talking about the identity that I am currently putting down roots in seemed like blaspheming against myself. Or that I’m not sure there is anything I can do with the other branches who share these roots with me – those imperiled beings who might break at any time – except exercise endless caution towards them.
A year has passed since I began identifying as intersex (a person whose genitals, chromosomes, or hormones do not clearly identify them as either male or female). I joined the Korean Intersex Rights Organization Na-sun, and hesitantly carried the intersex flag in this year’s Pride parade. Still, I couldn’t do anything more than that. I haven’t wanted to.
Even among queer groups, intersex people have a very close yet very uncomfortable relationship with the medical field. Before we have even the slightest awareness of our identity, almost as soon as we are born, most intersex people receive plastic surgery that makes our genitals look male or female. (“Suffer” would be a more accurate term than “receive”. The surgeries are a form of violence that deprive us of our right to make decisions about our bodies.) We are thrown into the world with scars left by cold surgical knives. So, in order to find out the source of the violence and discrimination that intersex people face, you have to learn something about the medical field, too.
For me, that process was very difficult. I couldn’t look back “objectively” at the medical processes that had been applied to my body, at how my flesh had been torn. The memories of the hospital that had swallowed my early childhood whole were only too easy to call up. They were like indelible brands burned somewhere deep in my consciousness. Inlaid in the ruts made by these brands, different impressions of pain mingle together. The sour smell of the medicine, the loose feel of the hospital gown, the blinding white of the curtains and the bed, the blankets, the nurses, the doctors... I think the fact that I would need to cross the painful desert of my early years to gather information about intersex made me scared to begin.
Intersex: an invisible identity
So then, do I really have nothing to say? They say that in this article, all I have to do is calmly share my experiences and thoughts. But what have I experienced while living as an intersex person?
I think that there are two types of life as a minority: you’re either an obvious outsider who stands out in your group, or you’re an invisible person, one who certainly exists but cannot be seen anywhere. Intersex people are very much invisible in that way. Among people who don’t even know what intersex is, we cannot experience anything as intersex people. Wherever we go, our nonexistence follows us like a tag. Let’s say we end up, one way or another, coming out as intersex to a trustworthy person. Their response? “Ah... then... are you like a hermaphrodite?”
We have even been erased from the voices who spew hate at queer people. Or not erased—they don’t even know we exist. Of course, it is sad to go through life as an invisible being. But because even this sadness is not visible, we often feel awkward speaking out about our anger. We first have to prove who we are—but that doesn’t work most of the time, so we go back to being unseen. How terribly exhausting that is. In such a world, I spent much of my life not being able to see myself. Or even wanting to, really. When I would look into a mirror, I’d see not myself but a wax figure that was made to look like me.
So because I have nothing to say, I want to talk about this nothingness. I don’t know much about this “intersex”, my own identity. But it is clear that even though my identity and the weight of my existence don’t seem to belong anywhere, I feel them. I don’t think there’s any reason to deny this. Not just the people around me but I myself can’t see me, and being unseen seems to prove one’s nonexistence. But people who are minorities and who understand life as a minority know this: that just because you are invisible, it does not mean you do not exist.
“Remodeling” to insert us into society as men or women
As I alluded to above, as soon as I was born, I was diagnosed with hypospadias and subjected to surgery to make my genitals look like male genitals. Of course, there are cases of hypospadias in which surgical intervention is necessary because of concerns about future problems with functions such as urination. But in most cases, the reasons for surgery are “so a boy won’t have to sit down to pee,” “to give the child normal-looking genitals,” “to make the child into a human”, etc. Which means that I, originally, was “not a human”.
Intersex people are treated as hermaphrodites, or considered either men or women who have serious grounds for disqualification from the group we should be in. Or at least that’s how we’re seen in the medical community these days. Without the slightest regard to our opinions as the people who should have the right to make decisions about our own bodies, doctors “make us into humans” on the basis of their own or our parents’ judgment.
To be honest, it isn’t easy for me to call this action “surgery”. The procedures that most intersex people are subjected to as soon as they are born, and thus before they even know they are intersex, are more like “remodeling”. The shape of an intersex person’s body before this remodeling is one that society is unable to tolerate. Each of us is born as our own particular lump of original sin. By suffering through remodeling, we are exonerated and then allowed into society.
Anyway, my remodeling didn’t stop at a single surgery. I was in and out of hospitals for the first six years of my life, until just before starting elementary school. When I was in the hospital, unidentifiable contraptions were attached all over my genital area. Needles were inserted, and I think something was injected through them. I was too young to remember it clearly now. I couldn’t make it to preschool regularly, so of course I didn’t have any friends, either. The only people in my hospital room were adults like my mom, her brother, and the doctors and nurses.
I vividly remember going into the surgery room for the last operation. I didn’t usually cry much, but that day I wailed. All of the horror that I hadn’t felt before suddenly overwhelmed me. And then I think I got tired, or maybe I was given anesthesia, so I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes again, the surgery was over and my body was once again lying in the white-ceilinged hospital room. I was a little over six years old.
I was there
It had taken years, but my string of surgeries finally ended “without problems”. My mom bowed her head and thanked the doctor who had “made her son into a human”, and told me to always feel thankful to him too. After we left the hospital that day, and all through elementary, middle, and high school and college, there was something my mom said to me habitually:
“Since your pepper[A term often used to refer to a child’s penis] is like that, you need to be manly in other ways.”
Since it was a “pepper” that had been made through remodeling, it was necessarily smaller than those of other children my age. My mother’s obsession with manliness was the reason I developed a complex about showing other people my genitals. I was reluctant to go to public baths, and when I did go, I tried not to let other people see my genitals. And I didn’t go on trips with my friends. Field trips and school retreats were really stressful. It seemed like other boys built friendships by showering together naked. I would use this or that excuse and shower alone later.
My mom might have known about my complex. But she never once told me not to be ashamed of my genitals. Instead, she taught me to be ashamed. She’d say that if I wanted to offset that shame, I had to study hard. That I had to succeed financially in order to no longer be ashamed.
At worst, she would attach this condition to whatever she wanted me to do: “You were born handicapped, and if you don’t want people to call you that...” I thought that I had received absolution through my surgery – no, my remodeling – but it seemed that my mom still saw me as an embodiment of original sin. At that time, I agreed with her. I considered the fact of my birth a curse. So I spent my youth studying hard and doing whatever my mom told me to without protest.
It was only a while after graduating from university that I learned that many people who are diagnosed with hypospadias and subjected to “remodeling” are often intersex. I then felt angry and wronged by the way my life had been to that point. I hated my past self for feeling guilty for a crime that I hadn’t committed and struggling to fit my body into the category of normality as my mother had taught me. I wanted to find the doctor who had so freely performed surgery on me and smash his face in.
The next feeling that washed over me was desolation, like that a raft on a boundless sea. I knew there wouldn’t be many people who could understand my sense of existence and how I couldn’t get a firm hold of it no matter how hard I tried. But at the same time that I was pessimistically thinking I had long been misplacing myself, there was also a small ray of light rising inside my chest. It was the fact that even though no one could see me or had ever seen me, I was very clearly there—I existed.
Now I’m okay even if I can’t see myself
To be honest, my situation still isn’t great. Many people still know nothing about intersex or misunderstand it. This year, in an article about the Pride parade, a reporter described intersex as “female and male in the same body”. This is, of course, incorrect, as well as a description little different from “hermaphrodite”. Pediatric urologists who perform surgery on hypospadias patients when they are too young to consent are still hailed as saviors who “make boys into real men”. (Public opinion is still more focused on the problem of how to make boys into “men”. It’s seen as more important than making girls into women. This society still has an obsession with the phallus.)
Just because we are at odds with the custom by which people must be classified as one thing or another, intersex people are invisible. This is quite sad, but from some point, I decided to accept myself as invisible. I don’t think it’s a problem that only we have. Everyone who lives with some form of minority-hood, who is constantly banished and excluded from society, is always experiencing the phenomenon of dissonance between their existence and others’ perception of it.
But the fact that society has erased me does not mean that I have to erase myself. In the end, I’m the only person who can see the roots that this being called “I” is putting down into the ground, even if I can’t see them well. We’re not used to enduring situations in which nothing is regulated. Even in this suffocating situation, though, I believe in my existence.
I’m just me.
[Translated by Marilyn Hook] Published Aug. 30, 2018 *Original article: http://ildaro.com/8296
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