Issue 3
We live in societies that are still so far from understanding what it means to have a variation in sex characteristics, let alone accept and celebrate our variations. In this isolation and uncertainty, what does it mean for us to live with and love our bodies and ourselves? How do we even begin to find and connect with other people when we are often disconnected from the language to even know other people like us exist, and when we are often told (explicitly or implicitly) never to talk about our own experiences? In Issue 3, we explore what finding and making connection means for us—both (dis)connection with ourselves, and finding connection with families, friends and an intersex community.
Steph Lum and Georgia Andrews, YOUth&I Issue 3 foreword
Being intersex can often make you feel confused, different or not included. However, in your life, you’ll find people who can understand you either by sharing the same experience or because they are able to accept every part of you and willing to celebrate your differences.
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What happens when I draw two parallel lines? Looking ahead into the singular dimension, there is only one road. In reality, there was always a duality. My perspective, I just never saw the other road.
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Hace aproximadamente 7 años, empecé a tener comunicación con una joven de nombre Marcela, originaria del Municipio de El Fuerte, Sinaloa — el pueblo donde yo crecí pertenece a ese municipio.
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Approximately 7 years ago, I began to communicate with a young woman named Marcela, originally from the Municipality of El Fuerte, Sinaloa—the town where I grew up belongs to that municipality.
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From the day I was born, they said I’m different and rare. They said I should hide what is under my clothes at all costs. They said I am a mixed gender.
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Tenho 20 anos. Sou Intersexo e nascido no interior do nordeste brasileiro, apesar de ter nascido nacapital, passei minha infância e adolescência no interior. Essa cidade em que morei era pequena e todos queriam saber da vida de todos.
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I'm 20 years old. I am intersex and I was born in the interior of the Brazilian northeast. Although I was born in the capital, I lived my childhood and adolescence in the countryside and since it's a small town, everyone wants to know about everyone else's life.
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It is a lonely kind of existence in many ways—not only having to live with a body that's so uniquely different, but it makes for a very confusing puberty right at the time when everything changes and you are supposed to be figuring out who and what you are.
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It is weird how the body that I continue to live in, to this day, still feels like a painful dismorphic entity.
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La conexión es un elemento muy importante en la vida. Todos tenemos la necesidad de establecer conexiones con otras personas, tenemos la necesidad de estar conectados con amigos, estar conectados con la familia, estar conectados con un compañero de vida y, lo más importante, estar conectados con nosotros mismos.
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Connection is a very essential element in human life. We all have the need to establish social connection with people; we have the need to be connected with friends, with family, with a partner, and, most importantly, to be connected with ourselves.
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There’s no such thing as me—or at least, there wasn't. I never really had the chance to figure out who I was on my own terms. I always had to be who people thought I was, or perhaps who they allowed me to be.
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All my life I’ve felt disconnected from my intersex body. I never could wear my dream clothes because I didn’t have the body for those clothes, and all my dream dresses had too much space for breasts for me to even think about trying them on.
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Having this condition made me feel very uncomfortable and every time l tried to figure out who l was, l used to cry and ask God why l was different from others. Sometimes, l feel that l am less than a human being.
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There is something strange about being seen simply as the man I am and yet knowing that what lies between my thighs was called at birth ambiguous.
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The discrimination I’ve seen Fear of the unknown No one has the right to harass As everyone can be anyone
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One day I woke up and told myself that if I could survive for 26 years with only the few individuals that are connected to me, then I can continue to make it without those who choose to stay apart.
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Vaka Cheka nhengo yako uye uka Buda ropa. Mhuri yako yakapomerwa zvakaipa zvese zvepanyika pakuzvara kwako. Kuti wainzi chituko chenyika ino. Nokungoti wakazvarwa Uri Intersex.
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They cut you and you bled. Your family was blamed for all the evil in the world at the expense of your birth. You were called the curse of the world, an abomination of the land, just because you were born differently.
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Nos dan la vida, llegamos a este universo y otras personas deciden por nosotros dejándonos sin pasado, cuando descubrimos quienes somos y que nos ha sucedido, nos agarramos a esa brújula que nos da el norte para así poder caminar hacia un futuro Feliz.
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They give us life, we come to this universe and other people decide for us, leaving us without a past. When we discover who we are and what has happened to us, we hold on to that compass (brújula) that gives us the direction to walk (caminar) towards a happy
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Siente orgullo de tu esencia, de quien eres / Be proud of your essence, of who you are
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Crecí pensando que era un bicho raro, que no tenía oportunidad, y que para mí todo había acabado. Puedo jurar que ni siquiera había empezado, pues me sentía vacía, perdida y desorientada
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I grew up thinking that I was a freak, that I had no chance, and that everything was over for me. I felt like my life hadn’t even started, because I felt empty, lost and disoriented.
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Selon moi pour faire connaître une cause, un mouvement, une identité. / I believe that art is a good way to reach an audience and raise awareness about a cause, a movement, an identity.
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El secretismo cómo receta médica, como una manera de cubrir lo extraño, lo diferente, una forma de tapar la rareza inusual.
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For too long secrecy has been the medical prescription. A way to cover up the strange and the different. A way to cover up the unusual rarity of being intersex.
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