I was circumcised at 3 and a half - My parents were assured that I was too young to remember it. Yeah, right! I remember every bit of that day right up to the rubber mask and the ether. And I remember waking up in a vast hall full of steel barred cribs and screaming with the burning between my legs.

I'm 47xxy and I'm the son of a mother who was given Diethylstilbesterol to prevent miscarriages, DES. I'm also a Two Spirit in that I have a very feminine brain and a passable male body. The reflexive therapy for xxy persons is Testosterone shots or patches at doses based on "normal" males. These doses can vary a great deal depending on what "normal" they're going by.
I was lucky. I missed being diagnosed. Yes, I suffered a lot from slow maturation, being more comfortable in the company of women, having soft teeth as a child and teen, and ending up with small testicles. But I was a man, could have good relations with women and good, sometimes great sex.

Today, many xxy children are being given Testosterone "for their own good", "to make men of them" and to "normalize" them and prevent them from becoming gay. Yet we have met many xxy's who wished they'd never seen Testosterone. It's a very strong hormone and in large doses can convert to estrogen either through an enzyme or as a result of belly fat. The problem is that most of this therapy has never included baseline lab work of the entire endocrine and enzyme panel to determine what xxy patients actual hormone interactions are.

This kind of therapy is typical of what happens to all intersex people and persons with disorders of sex development - a term intersex people abhor in that it implies the necessity o f
"re-ordering". A common condition that happens in men is penile hyoerplasia where the urethra does not come out of the end of the penis but instead comes out on the shaft or at it's base. Surgeons routinely "fix" this condition with surgeries that at best scar the shaft. (at worst? Try not to imagine it.) Most of the time these surgeries eventually fail and are often done several times using grafted skin to reform the urethral opening. These grafts are not the same kind of tissue so they too have a high failure rate. It is worth noting that men who escaped such "normalizations" are quite content to sit to pee - have worked out successful ways to have sex and to father children. (Yet doctors will assure parents that without the "fix" the children will be traumatized by other children, in gym class, and will have trouble reproducing. We suspect that all of these worries are based in the Doctor's own unhappy childhood's and gym experiences.)

Whether we view CAH as intersex (and many with CAH refuse the designation) or DSD as DIx Poppas has called them, or simply a female with an enlarged clitoris, these "experiments" are typical of the kinds of operations that have been going on for more than 60 years on any and all infants and children found to have ambiguous genitals. It's time that these adventures in surgery and psychological trauma come out of the privacy of obstetric rooms with their Gender Identity Teams who terrify parents of newborns with the news that their baby may not be normal but that a simple operation will correct them. To date, most of these parents are not made aware of any of the survivor organizations out there for CAH, PAIS, AIS, XXY, 5 alpha, Sox gene failures etc. or for the intersex groups. Instead, parents are usually told their child has rare condition that can be fixed. Of course if the child has a micro penis - the normal procedure is to cut off the penis, build a vagina from colon tissue, and teach the parents to dilate the "vagina" daily until such time as the child can do it him/herself. (No, I'm not kidding.)

WE MUST STOP THIS NOW!

We thought we were on the right path in the '90's but then the medical profession insisted on calling us Disorders of Sexual Development. Those of us who've managed to survive their mutilations and pulled their psyches out of our objectified and traumatized trash bins, as well the rest who escaped notice demand that our situation be studied with extreme ethical oversight: DO NO HARM! We demand that further study follow real scientific protocols, with controls, and data acquisition aimed at developing therapies and or procedures that enhance our lives as human beings not as objects for further study.

For hundreds of years, those of us with variations of human sexual development have been isolated from the rest of the population either as freaks, objects of study, or for self preservation. The last due to the socio/cultural faith of the binary: that humans are male or female. It's time for the socio/cultural faith to change. We are not abominations - we are humans desiring the right to keep our bodies intact until such time as WE deem a change is in order.