The sun was shining on a glorious spring afternoon when Mani Mitchell sat down in the kitchen of the family's home, in New Zealand's rural south, to ask her mother about the day she was born. Far from a cosy reminiscence, she knew the conversation would be difficult – for years, she had felt an elusive secret hung in the air between them, but discussing anything intimate was just not what her family did. As she joined her mum at the kitchen table, Mani – then in her early 20s – finally managed to pluck up the nerve.
At first, her mother fidgeted and avoided her daughter's eye, before slowly opening up in a low-key, almost dismissive, tone, as if she were discussing the weather. "She said: 'Oh, well, you know, the waters broke early in the morning and Dad got up and drove me to the hospital,'" recalls Mani. "Mum was sent down to the birthing room with a young nurse and apparently I was born about 20 minutes later. The nurse bent down to pick me up and her first words were: 'Oh, my God. It's a hermaphrodite!'"
Dropping this bombshell on her child had a powerful effect on Mani's usually unflappable mother. "She started screaming and ran out of the room," says Mani, now a Wellington psychotherapist. "So I'm left with these two pieces of information; my mother screaming – because I had never seen her show such strong emotion in my life – and this word ‘hermaphrodite'. I didn't know whatit meant and I certainly didn't locate it as meaning anything for me."
She didn't know it then, but Mani had been born "intersex" – the now widely accepted term, replacing the clumsy "hermaphrodite", for people with ambiguous sex physiology, be it internal, external or both. So-called "hermaphrodite" genitals – a fully functioning penis and vagina – are mythical. Mani had ambiguous external genitalia and had undergone "corrective" surgery when she was a baby. Commonly, intersex people like Mani, who are raised as females, have a small, penis-like protrusion where the clitoris is usually found.
Although the condition remains, in Mani's words, shrouded in "silence and secrecy", it's astonishingly prevalent, with some doctors claiming that one per cent of the population can fall into the category, along a spectrum of conditions ranging from misplaced urethras to enlarged clitorises and ambiguous exterior genital physiology. Internal conditions include male or female chromosomes in the opposite sex, hormonal imbalances and male gonads in women. Yet despite its frequency, this "third sex" is poorly understood, and carries "freak show" connotations that make those with it reluctant to speak out.It wasn't until years after the kitchen encounter with her mother, who has since died, that Mani found records of the genital correction surgery she'd undergone as a baby. "I got that piece of information when I was in my early 30s, and it would take another 10 years before I could find the people to work with to make sense of that," she says. Prior to that "there was a lot of running away". Today, though, Mani is comfortable in her own skin. "I don't see myself as exclusively female or male," she says. "But I also know generally how uncomfortable the world is with difference."
There are many variations of sex organ appearance, hormone levels and other variable sex determinants. If you suspect you or your child are intersex, and it's a concern, you can talk to support groups, in addition to your doctor.
Contact the Australian branch of Organisation Intersex International at http://oiiaustralia.com, or for New Zealand, http://intersex-nz.blogspot.com.
For information about Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, visit http://home.vicnet.net.au/~aissg/In our December 2009 issue, our special report about people with intersex said the term "disorders of sex development" is another term used to describe intersex. Gina Wilson, Australian president of Organisation Intersex International, says her organisation does not support the use of this term.
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