My Indentity

My Identity is My Identity

by Sophia Siedlberg

I have seen it, all over the place "Intersexuals join the LGBT movement", and "The GLBT organizations include Intersexual" (Funny how the G and the L keep swapping for first in the list, Men and women arguing again I suppose). Well I don’t see myself as an "intersexual". I mean my being born with 5 alpha reductase deficiency is not a sexual orientation. And quite frankly the thought of a bunch of Falwell Fundies pouncing on me calling me a lot of bizarre things when in religious terms I am a Qumran Ascete is perhaps too cruel an irony. I mean yes, while there are common issues, (Society wants people to live in a place called Stepford, seems pretty simple really), but I have a few problems with being defined by others, as others.

I mean when you look at it, it gets a bit contradictory. The alphabet soup is a nice idea but it does not "Deconstruct gender binaries" (Or whatever the actual ideal is supposed to be these days). If anything is constructs the "Gender binary" I think "Gender binary" is the observation that there are sort of two forms loosely called male and female, over-emphasized to mean man and woman, Ah "Gender Binary" means "Bickering opposites", hence GL or LG then GL and LG. You see "L" means "Lesbian" and "G" means "Gay" in most literature this means "L" means a woman who is attracted to other women and "G" means a man attracted to other men. So we have, errm yes, Woman(W) and Man(M). "B" means "Bisexual” meaning someone attracted to either men or women, note the medical term ending in "sexual", whereas "Gay" and "Lesbian" are references to happy and sunny Mediterranean islands. While someone who is "uncertain" is a medical term. "T" is "Transgender" a term invented a long time ago by one Virginia Prince who was a cross dresser and quite openly proud of it from what I have read. And Prince was pretty clear that this is what "Transgender" meant. Well these days the term is applied to Transsexual folk, Intersex Folk, in fact many folks who just don’t like being called "Like Virginia Prince". why? Well Prince did sort of emphasize quite strongly that "Transgender" meant "a man acting as a woman" So someone who has had surgery to be a different sex, or someone else who was born with some medical condition that makes sex unclear is hardly "Transgendered" by Prince's own definition surely. What you may probably have noticed by now is there is a lot revealed by these terms. How they have this little hierarchy of sexual constructs being applied to people.

Of course this hierarchy is as rigid as the Stepford Wives fantasies of the Falwell Fundies. It is all done with the best intentions, I have no issue with that, it is just that we find the unsettling "Norms" creeping in. I mean you cannot get more biologically essentialist than saying:

"Man with male anatomy attracted to men with male anatomies, Woman with female anatomy attracted to women with female anatomies. Man with male anatomy or woman with female anatomy attracted to either anatomy and Man with male anatomy or woman with female anatomy interacting with the world as the opposite in clothing only"

(This is what LG-GL-BT means after all). Suddenly the rainbow flag turns monochrome. Oh dear, that was not supposed to happen was it? If anything the most glaring is the swapping of "GL" and "LG" in the literature. You see here it becomes evident that we are really talking squabbling men and women again. I mean come on, doesn’t this seem a bit petty? Which letter comes first? It is fair to say I do not see myself as being part of any of this, not because of any noble ideals the LG-GL-BT movement stands for being something I may not agree with, but because I sort of get this color blindness when I look closer at the multicolored magnetic letters on the fridge spelling out "LG-GL-BT" At best the letters become pink and blue at worst just monochrome.

I do not see "intersexual" as my identity, OK I have a biological condition that renders my "Biological sex" into the meaningless concept it actually is. But I am "Asexual" (They have to end everything with "Sexual" unless they are "normal", as in happy and living on Mediterranean islands, Gaily living on Lesbos). I know I am an "Idarean" I live on a wonderful mountain called Ida with a lake called "Salmacis" in the foot hills. Ah no, the likes of me don't get exotic geographical names or happy states of mind as identities, just a medical term ending in "sexual".

By behavior I am an "Asexual" by biology I am an "Intersexual" and I am now it seems a "Disorder of Sexual Differentiation". I see so no exotic locations then, it's a pity that, Well I cannot complain, there are the Falwell Fundies who would brand me an "Abomination" (A king James word that was put in place of about twenty classical Hebrew words because King James could not read Hebrew). Of course that makes G-d an "abomination", (Such are the vagaries of Hellenic translation of Hebrew) Yes the bereshyth does say that G-d made men and women in G-ds own image. Ooops! G-d also does not do lots of sex either, Oops! And G-d is not all that keen in being split into three little bits, plated in gold and sold at MacDonald’s as veal burgers either, certainly when the gold plating was procured by one Aaron the gold bullion dealer and the disowned brother Of Moshe who told Aaron that gold and veal are not a good idea, Oops, I think the Falwel fundies have been labeling G-d a bit too much.

Labeling, that is the problem really. I genuinely do not know what it is like to be any of the following.

And quite frankly no human being fully fits any of the definitions offered by "LG-GL-BT". I mean people are people, How can someone identify with a limiting and arbitrary label? That is what this is really, labeling, the very thing the whole edifice was built to prevent surely? We have "Pansexual, Spammersexual, Greek Islander, Happy, (Notice who gets the nice labels, and who gets the not so nice libels) Asexual, Glibsexual, Meterosexual, Googlesexual, errm Polysexual, Sexualsexual, Spacedoutsexual" the list is ever growing. I suspect there is a bit of Freudian navel gazing going on.

Why can we simply not use the term "human" and think in terms of our "humanity". why does it have to be references reducing people to bits of meat, I mean this "Rainbow of diversity" seems to be broken into little bits, Like the real thing is broken into wavelengths. OK it may serve a purpose but people are not robots. To identify as a set of mechanical acts or rigid states of being is to go right against the whole point of the exercise in the first place. and yes the color is drained from this rainbow when we get identity politics, every human being is an individual, And the problem with the rainbow as a symbol is you end up with people pointing to specific bands and saying "This is me". Well no I am not a color on a symbol or a wavelength of light, I am me.

Well where do we go from here? I suppose we stop looking at our differences and stop trying to shoehorn those differences into rigid categories. I suspect the most destructive is defining everything in terms of sexuality and then linking sexuality to identity, because all this does is define people as bits of meat, nothing more. It is also very unhelpful for people to be saying "This is my experience all are the same as me" because all that does is exclude people after defining them as bits of meat. In terms of my own experiences as someone born with 5 alpha, I am not the same as someone else born with 5 alpha, And I am not a "Disorder" (Sexually differentiating or otherwise) In fairness to ISNA I can see why they took that approach, it is the term "Disorder" I am uncomfortable with. The argument is that this allies people with people who have disabilities. Well read Thomas Shakespeare, and you will find that "Disorder" is not a popular term among other communities either. I would suggest Conditions of Sex Differentiation, personally, and leave it at that. I mean the real message that should be put across is that sex dimorphism is not as rigid as people claim it to be, and the "in-between" is not broken up into little bands either. because the "in between" is also far from rigid. To use the term "Disorder" is to evoke the notion of "un-fitting, non conforming, outside the order" The problem is the "order" is not totally dimorphic. How can variations in sex differentiation be "Disorders" when in truth they are part of the "order" in the first place? (Do we need a lecture in evolutionary biology to prove this?)

If people are going to use a rainbow to describe variation as a metaphor, think of it like this. The range of colors between Ultra violet and infra red is 3000 angstroms to 7000 angstroms (300 nanometers to 700 nanometers). that is superficially 400 and more in depth 4000 different wavelengths. Actually you could divide the scale of the wavelengths to a factor of infinity. So consider how it will look in 20 years time in the days of custom medicines, and the ever more complex picture of biology that gets revealed, The rainbow would be a good analogy if described accurately and not as six bands of demarked color. (Incidentally such demarcation does not appear in a true rainbow, we get hues).

No two people are the same, not even monozygotic twins. and even the most rigid of Falwell fundies would have to admit that, to do otherwise would in truth bring the wrath of their biblical G-d, as symbolically the their holy spirit is all (Shekinah El-Shaddai), would they break the holy spirit down into bits? I doubt it.

By this I mean come on, open your eyes. Especially the Falwell fundies and the LG-GL-BT movement. We are human beings and we exist, we are all different, no two of us are identical, and if you like, yes that is how G-d seems to have intended it. Or how Nature seems to manifest it (Whichever belief you have).

Consider it