Euro DSD, Bindell and the gloves are off!

By Sophia Siedlberg.

October 13, 2008

Two events have come to my attention of late, the nomination of Julie Bindel for some Stonewall award. (This as you will see would be rather like giving Adolph Hitler the Nobel Peace Prize during WWII). And this leads on to the other event, the formation of "Euro DSD" where one Prof. Dr. Olaf Hiort has decided to set up a "Specialist team of European Doctors to deal with the issues of DSD's" (Tiergartenstrasse 4 anyone?).

OK, so you may well be asking why I am being so hostile to Bindel and Hiort? Well, it seems to me that not one day of my life goes by without some norm-born either getting awards or getting some new "Plan" together that will ultimately threaten me.

Logically one could assume that I am taking these events a little personally, but then if you had any idea of my own medical history you will probably understand better why I feel the way I do about all this.

I was born with 5-alpha reductase deficiency, which at the time (early 1960's) was misdiagnosed as PAIS. And the medical literature of the time "advised" that I be "assigned" and "raised" as a "boy". It was a disaster; surgery to achieve this goal was certainly not up to the challenge and I regarded the assignation of "male" to be an act of malice or surgical rape. (And those who know of me in the medical profession know just how angry I am about that.) Putting my feelings aside, even today surgery to assign someone male is somewhat messy. To clear up a number of misconceptions, it is almost impossible to surgically create a viable penis. It is certainly true that "It is harder to build a hole than a pole". In the US this was understood and as such a policy of surgical feminization to most intersexed children seemed to evolve. Unfortunately, it became evident that not everyone who was feminized accepted being "assigned" to this sex accepted their female assignation either.

It is obvious that it is not uncommon for people to reject the sex they were "assigned", be that "male" or "female". I myself rejected being assigned "male". Now for me the problem was compounded when in the US the Intersex Society of North America stated that they were only interested in helping those who rejected being assigned female. (Actually this was not entirely true, they tended not to support anyone who rejected the sex they were assigned, but on paper they did make it very clear that they only considered victims of feminizing surgery as victims of medical malpractice).

One of the founders of ISNA (Dr. Alice Dreger) was also instrumental in the creation of the "DSD" terminology and it is clearly obvious from Alice Dreger herself that DSD is about imposing the initial sex assignment, and the DSD guidelines are little more than surgical and psychological violence in order to achieve this. It is really about social cleansing so anything with "DSD" in the title is something I am gong to be uneasy about.

"Euro DSD" is an insult, plain and simple. It is an insult because no actual intersex people have been consulted. Often the so called "activists" who were advocating "DSD" in the past were either militant lesbians or self hating transvestites who had gender reassignment surgery when it was clearly not a good idea (but they consented to it; I as an 18 month old child did not).

Please note that by "self hating transvestites" I am not referring to actual transsexual people because the people responsible for DSD are incredibly transphobic and have also been planning a bit of "social cleansing" for transsexual people as well. Read Lynn Conway and Andrea James on the subject of Alice Dreger and J Michael Bailey.

Now in Europe the issue seems to be that some "Consortium" of doctors have decided to impose the DSD guidelines on intersex people in Europe. Well, what does that actually mean for me? I have 5-alpha reductase deficiency and they reccomend that people with this condition are made into "boys" because of some very dodgy studies done by Imperato McGinley in the 1970's. This is fine if you have 5-alpha and identify as male. But if you do not identify as male then you are "deviant". The reality is that 5-alpha does not automatically involve a "male gender identity". In fact Cheryl Chase of ISNA admitted to me once that the actual ratio of male to female self identification was between 50:50 and 40:60 in favour of male. But not "100% of the time" as Mc Ginley claimed.

But will that wash with the Der Eigene brigade in Europe? I doubt that very much. The message I get from this is a simple one. I was surgically raped as a child. I was subjected to an act of socially sanctioned malice, which for me is no different in terms of motivation to the sort of things Mengele got up to in the war. You see, I regard the "assignation of male" in my own case to have been a violation of my life and my body. They don't see it that way. They regard me as "sexually disordered" for having the botched job undone later on in life and regard my distress at what was done in the first place as a "gender disorder". That is they are playing "blame the victim". This brings me onto Julie Bindel.

You seem not satisfied with having violated my body, brutalized me during childhood and then probably sanctioned the same on at least 40 to 50 percent of those children presented to them with 5 alpha. Society has its little pack of dogs, in the form of the gender police, who in the media, police the boundaries of gender (while lying about being liberal) and make out that someone who is "transsexual" (Oh yes, I am a “transsexual” because I rejected what was done to me. Not that I mind that so much because I will stand by transsexual folks any day, but then I do notice how society loves to scapegoat transsexual folks.)

This is my problem with the likes of Bindel. She writes in newspapers such as the Guardian (in the UK) claiming that "Transsexuals are an insult to genetically pure women". (Women who were born with XX Chromosomes.)

Well, when some radical lesbians go all into androgyny, they are insulting me an intersexed individual, how about that? I am a transsexual now, not intersexed? Oh, how convenient. But the best bit is that these "Radical Lesbians" and people like Bindel are defending a misogynist medical profession by saying that I should be male. They just call people like me "transsexual" to cover up their nasty little agenda.

Now what will happen is that what I have just written will be hotly denied by the likes of Bindel and I will be branded as "mad" or "disordered" (meaning they will respond like rapists blaming their victims). Well tough shit Julie, if you defend what was done to me as a child and call me names for rejecting it, then you are no better than someone who defends pedophiles. Which brings me onto the obvious question: why are Stonewall giving this woman an award?  Because she is nice to the lebensborn lesbians and is thus "liberal"? I don't buy that.

What these people simply fail to understand is that there are a lot of us who have had just about enough of being bullied by the gender police. And I find it particularly ironic that Stonewall that got its name from a riot where people had said "Enough" about the self same things now gives awards to the gender police. And no one from Stonewall can fault my logic because they know of the rancid bigoted bullshit she comes out with. I can only assume that they are the same themselves - gender police. All that has changed is the choice of sexual partners but the right to control one’s own body is the last thing on these people's minds.

Now The Stonewall Awards and EuroDSD will say that they do not answer to people like me, angry people who rant. But then this is why I am in the grassroots intersex organization called OII, and not some norm born society puppet organization who does not give a damn about the people they claim to represent. The moment Stonewall accepted Bindel's nomination was the moment they finally lost their mandate. The same applies to "Euro DSD". They lost their mandate when they rode roughshod over European organizations representing intersex people and years of consultation by imposing a set of socially cleansing "Guidelines" written by a group of bigots in Chicago.

Well they don't have to answer to the likes of me, or OII, but history will record that this is the day both Stonewall and Euro DSD (The latter sounds like a theme park where they inject porn into cartoons) lost their mandate and engaged in violating people's human rights.

And here is the question, Do I get to spend the rest of my life free from the nastiness of Dreger and Bindel? Or their ilk? If not, expect me to fight back because I have had enough, and I am not alone in that.

This article is being revised.