Posted on 01/18/2017 3:03:07 PM PST by nickcarraway
Sara Kelly Keenan says she’s living proof that gender isn’t binary
Sara Kelly Keenan was sitting in a booth with her father at Santa Cruz Diner eight years ago this month when he admitted that doctors had wanted to assign her a gender when she was born: “They said that they could make you a 3-inch penis if I wanted them to, but I said, ‘Hell no, that’s my daughter, she’s a girl!’”
“That’s when I realized that he knew I was genetically a male,” says Keenan. It took 49 years and the onset of advanced Alzheimer’s for Keenan’s father to confirm what she had suspected all along—that Keenan wasn’t fully male or female. In December, Keenan’s gender designation was finally recognized when New York City, where she was born, issued a birth certificate with “intersex” on it. It’s the first known intersex birth certificate issued in the U.S.
“I no longer need to check a box that is a lie, I no longer need to perjure myself to file a tax return or get a driver’s license,” says Keenan, who uses female pronouns because, after five and a half decades, that feels most natural. “I’ve existed in the shadows for 55 years and now, I, and people like me, have the right to legally exist in an authentic way in our society.”
Keenan was born genetically male—with XY chromosomes—but with female anatomy. Knowing the truth and now also having the birth certificate to match feels empowering, she says. Growing up, Keenan felt like she never really fit in with women or men, and that the world didn’t know what to do with her.
“I prove, by my biological existence, that gender is not strictly binary,” says Keenan, who lives in Ben Lomond. “I want the world to wake up and realize that the world isn’t flat as was thought hundreds of years ago, and that biological sex exists along a spectrum.”
Other gender-nonconforming people across the nation have been making headway in the fight for legal visibility too, including Jamie Shupe in Oregon, who was the first to legally change their sex to non-binary in June 2016.
Keenan realized she could do the same in California, so in August she went to the Santa Cruz Superior Court and next to the boxes “Male” and “Female” wrote in “non-binary.” After the court initially refused to accept the paperwork, they granted Keenan a non-binary court order.
Now a Triangle Speaker for the Diversity Center and a volunteer with the Intersex and Genderqueer Recognition Project (IGRP), Keenan has been fielding calls from national and international news sources covering the first intersex birth certificate. She’s using her “15 minutes of fame,” as she calls it, to help other intersex and genderqueer Californians. Keenan and the IGRP are working with people in New York and Washington, as well as locally in San Francisco, Alameda, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties to help them file for their true gender designation.
It goes beyond a piece of paper, says Keenan, and it’s about securing the right for non-binary and intersex people to make decisions about their own bodies. “To have been lied to for 49 years of my life, to have been denied the reality of my own biology, it was an unintentional act of cruelty on the part of parents and doctors,” says Keenan.
When Keenan was born, the conventional medical wisdom relied on Dr. John Money’s now-discredited theory that said children do better if surgically assigned a gender before 18 months. In some cases, and often without fully informed consent, a doctor would choose the gender for the child by performing genital reconstruction surgery—an enlarged clitoris, a penis with a urethra that didn’t come fully to the tip, or genitals that didn’t look fully male or female would be surgically fashioned to look “normal.” Doctors—like the ones who wanted to give her a penis when she was a baby—still do this, says Keenan, instead of waiting for the person to reach the age of consent.
“The United Nations Commision on Human Rights calls it genital mutilation, calls it medical torture,” says Keenan. “When we look at African countries and say ‘Oh, they’re so bad for mutilating female’s genitals as a matter of social custom,’ well, we’re doing the same damn thing to babies every day in America. That has to change.”
Doctors used to advise parents to keep these surgeries secret—and still do in some cases, which is why Keenan didn’t know about her intersex biology, even though she had surgery as a teenager to remove some testicular tissue. Doctors told her it was to stop her growing, since she was already 6 feet tall by 9th grade.
That history of secrecy has made it impossible to collect data on how many people are born intersex—estimates say one in every 2,000 babies—or trace the impacts of growing up outside the gender binary for those given that choice, says LGBT Alliance steering committee secretary Adam Spickler.
But the New York City Department of Health’s decision to allow “intersex” on Keenan’s birth certificate was monumental, says Spickler, who is also a Diversity Center Triangle Speaker along with Keenan. (Keenan had actually tried to get listed as “non-binary,” which includes gender identities that don’t fit into male or female, regardless of anatomy, but the department refused.)
“It’s emblematic of the progress we’ve made and the progress that has yet to take place. We’re in the midst of the early stages nationally, politically, culturally, of a really earnest conversation about gender beyond the binary,” he says.
Spickler and Keenan agree that there’s more to accomplish.
On the state level at least, changes have begun that LGBTQ activists are looking forward to. The California DMV has signaled to the IGRP that the agency will create a third gender option within about a year, says Keenan.
“For me it’s just the first step in pointing out that intersex people have always been here,” says Keenan. “We don’t need to cover it up. We’re just a flower in humanity’s garden and we don’t need to have our beautiful petals cut.”
You have to remember that this happened before DNA typing was common, if it was even available.
As I recall, reading about cases like this years ago, doctors usually assigned these unfortunate souls as female because it was easier for them to make a child look like a girl than the other way around.
Today, I presume that they use DNA to figure out what to do.
Down’s. Autocorrect is messed up.
I see what you did there...clever
An interesting list, but not all of them should be difficult to assign sex. XX with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, early or late, is a girl who needs hormonal therapy and who may or may not need surgery to correct pre-treatment viralization. XY with hypospadius is a dude with plumbing rather than gender, problems. The one XXY patient was a clearly a guy the XO patients I’ve seen are clearly girls. Androgen insensitivity is probably the least rare hard call on that list. Though XY, the Y is blocked from working and we don’t know to turn it on. They look like normal gIrls and may not learn otherwise until puberty.
Basically it is not only our genes but also our responses to hormones that make us male or female.
Some of these intersex conditions are produced by a genetic insensitivity to testosterone (sounds like what this is). When this insensitivity is complete, the result is a person who despite their XY chromosomes, has a body that appears outwardly just like a woman, sometimes a very attractive woman, with a female personality. Often they don't know anything is wrong until they start wondering why they never started to menstruate and find out that they can't have children. It would not make sense to glue a penis on such a person, if this were even possible.
they now have a eunuch category.
Not wearing glasses and thought it read “Ben Lomond Person Receives First Internet Birth Certificate”.
I thought, well, that’s efficient.
They were not able to determine DNA at the time of this persons birth.
The first reliable DNA tests were available in late 1983 and were expensive and required a large sample of blood.
There also were no CT scans or MRI either and x-ray is not really enough to peer into a baby and make a critical judgment in such a case. And there is no way a doctor would split a newborn open to get a clear look.
All they had to go on was appearance. They call these cases ambiguous genitalia for a reason..it can be VERY ambiguous.
It sounds like this was a case where the scrotum was partially open at the top and the urethral opening was near the base of the tiny penis.
The penis and the clitoris are actually the same body part except in the female the urethra does not run through the clitoris/penis
The ovaries are also the same part as the testicles. They take a final form based on hormonal state and XX/XY status.
They probably thought the child had undescended testicles that could be brought down later when the child actually had ovaries.
The tissue forming the labia is the same tissue that forms the scrotum and that is why if the labia is fused it appears to be a normal scrotum.
When considering these facts it becomes clear how easily a mistake could be made back in the early 60’s
These unfortunates deserve our love and prayers. This is nothing at all like simple gender confusion!
The routing of the urethra through the enlarged clitoris that has been mistaken for a penis is delicate and the result leaves an increased chance of urethral strictures. Basically the clitoris is opened with a surgical incision line along the bottom and a small catheter is placed along the slit and into the urethral opening below. The slit is then stitched closed and left to heal...there may be modern improvement on this crude technique but that’s how they would have done it in the early 60’s. Lastly, the scrotum/labia would have been closed.
Later if the testicles could not be brought down or were otherwise absent or damaged testosterone would have been administered to increase the size of the penis/clitoris and prosthetic testicles implanted to attain a normal appearance.
This is, of course, a painful sentence for the child if a mistake is made :-(
If the child is actually XX and is mistaken for male then the horrific mistake is generally discovered when the child’s ovaries are triggered to produce estrogen at the beginning of puberty. You can imagine the horror the child would face as secondary sexual characteristics of a female began to take form.
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Well, nobody but 1930s school teachers ever thought the world was flat.
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Girls born with complete androgen insensitivity are ultra feminine specimens indeed as the small level of testosterone all girls have is of no effect.
It’s interesting that some females develop the ability to ejaculate. They used to think this was just a slight spurting of urine at climax but in turns out it is indeed a clear, slightly viscous fluid...or semen.
Girls mistaken at birth for boys and later given testosterone develop the ability to ejaculate. All the parts are present in both sexes...i.e. boys have breasts and with hormonal treatment are capable of lactation. Girls have a clitoris that develops to look precisely like a small penis if testosterone is administered. There is a single genetic type for humans, there is a flag that sends development down one path or another, XX/XY, it’s like a flag bit in a software program.
Yes, you start out with parts for both with one involuting to nearly nothing and the other developing into standard boy or girl parts... if all goes properly. Female is the default choice as it takes a working Y chromosome to get a male. Alas “nearly nothing” is not the same as nothing. I lost a childhood friend to cancer arising from her vestigial male bits even though I’d have sworn she was an exemplary female.
Someone voting in their economic best interest (continued welfare, continued funding to the nonprofit they work at) isn’t crazy or unmanly.
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