Old Hermy's Never Die ... They Simply Smile That Way

Old Hermy’s Never Die
They Simply Smile That Way ……

A monthly blog about ‘stuff’ your grandmother could or would never tell you!

Wow! Love the new web site at etransgender.com, its so much more user friendly and a lot less clinical, more a welcoming on-line magazine than a minority interest medical textbook for wako’s and weirdoes like me. Those with an almost pathological mistrust and dislike of the medical profession, traumatised during the virtual dark ages of intersex treatment. When psychiatrists used little gems like ‘aversion therapy’, ‘Electro convulsion therapy’, committal, lobotomy, lygactil and misdiagnosis routinely against intersex patients.
Least we forget
Least we forget the first hermaphrodite to undergo skin grafts or a colonic section (now know as a sigmoid colon). All who had a sex imposed upon them by doctors while still children. The first transsexual to undergo penile inversion, the first intersex patients to take hormones. Any who suffered years of misdiagnosis, persecution, harrassement, physical brutality and even murder for trying to be themselves, for daring to be different and standing alone, question the sexual stereotypes and expectations of society and man’s unforgiving religions.

The ‘life unworthy of life’ exterminated in the concentration camps or subjected to brutal medical experiments by deranged doctors. Those damned at birth to the pits and flames of hell whose fuel are stones and intersex patients. Any who lived the life-long nightmare of hermaphrodism and transsexuality before there was the possibility of surgical intervention and re-constructive surgery. All driven to take their own lives because they could not bare the unbearable burden fate cast like a steel net over them. Any committed to the Victorian lunatic asylums for wanting to be a different sex, or struggling to come to terms with being part of a ‘third sex’.

Least we forget any who helped map the many continents of this ‘third sex’, who cut through the impenetrable jungles of expectation and human possibility. So that those yet to come, yet to begin this most personal of journeys might find before them a pathway, along which to travel with relative ease and certainty - knowing that others had already passed this way before.

This is our history, the history of a ‘third sex’ that is richer and more varied than the monochromatic possibility of either male or female. Like all liberation and equality movements we must remember the past, the recent medical ‘dark ages’ and our histories in order to learn from them, rather than be destined to keep repeating them.

At least things have improved beyond all recognition in the decades following surgical intervention and reconstruction for me, not even having had the balls for a sex change operation. I can even remember a world before sex-change operations and transsexuals. How can things not be better thanks to brilliant web sites like etransgender.com? With the invaluable information, support and social networking it provides. Brilliant! Completely brilliant!

Because no matter how desperate, how lonely and hopeless life may feel you are not alone, not the only one going through whatever it is. Others have and are going through exactly the same confusions and self-doubt, asking the same questions. You are not alone in being damned by the Priests of hatred and intolerance for simply daring to be yourself. So be loud and proud, happy and contented to live as part of a ‘third sex’ in the twenty-first century, in a time of miracle and wonder.

Least we forget those not so fortunate as ourselves, those destined to live the nightmare forever because of man’s unforgiving inquisitions, intolerance and medical ineptitude.

When less than a generation ago in the United Kingdom, homosexuals and transvestites could be given repeated electric shocks by psychiatrists, in order to stop them giving release to their appalling personal abnormalities. While any caught by the police could be imprisoned, their lives ruined, be sectioned in Victorian mental asylums, pumped full of lygactil and in some cases lobotomised.

Treatment for intersex patients upon the British National Health Service was non-existent for over a decade after the first ‘sex change’ operations were performed. Giving a whole new zoo of ‘side show freaks’ to fill the Sunday newspapers, with the sensationalisation of personal suffering and life long misery many experienced, feeling like a women trapped in a man’s body.

Hundreds, thousands, did not survive the medical tyranny of modern psychiatry with its pharmacopoeia of anti-psychotic and psychotrophic drugs. These where the pioneers, explorers and the early settlers of an unmapped, unexplored continent peopled by those from a ‘third sex’, those who were neither wholly male or female but a varied mix and match of human potential and personal possibility. Lone survivors in a world of shadows, outsiders damned by organised religion for the random consequences of physical abnormality, or personal preference and choice.

Hero’s and heroines, they cut a distinct path through the tangled forests of sexual illusion, expectation and social control, imposed upon all from the very moment of birth by an unforgiving religion and technological totalitarianism. Their struggles, personal sacrifices and unnoticed deaths another step along the pathway many now walk with relative ease, compared to those who came before, those who gave everything for those yet to come. In this most personal of battles and war without end against any born different, all who dared to be different, to dream the new dreams of human possibility and potential, the dreams of a ‘third sex’.

For all born before the possibilities of medical intervention and surgical reconstruction it was to be a personal nightmare without end, a life-long curse from which there could be no hope, help or escape, except in endurance of the unendurable, suicide and death.

Even those fortunate enough to be born in a time of possibility and treatment were subjected to the male tyranny of a profession, oppressing people through the widely acknowledged 'medical model of disability'. Further reinforcing social stereotypes and expectations about intersex patients, this inevitably leads to a downward spiral until its victims have absolutely no sense of self-esteem, or self-worth. Other than to be eternally grateful for whatever crumbs, those fasting at the banquet of the 'normals' may throw to us.

There are currently nine hermaphrodites known to the local health authority and twelve transsexuals in my home city on what the medical profession call, ‘pathway’. In the fifties, sixties and early seventies it was a long and winding road that all intersex patients embarked upon. Mostly without hope or help from the medical profession, many becoming lost and confused behind the barriers constructed for self protection and preservation in a completely hostile,
potentially lethal environment.

As for the insidious shackles binding us to the medical profession, the ‘Medical Model of Disability’ states that:

• You are the problem;
• Your disability needs curing;
• You can't make decisions about your life;
• You need professionals to look after you;
• You can never be as equal as a non disabled person.

To further compound these problems, people with intersex conditions other than hermaphrodites had no legally enforceable rights. It was almost the end of the twentieth century and intersex patients were still being committed to ‘mental institutions’ against their wishes, forced to take drugs against their wishes, Given ‘aversion therapy’, ‘Electro convulsion therapy’ and lobotomised against their wishes. Parents could see their children taken away from them for no other reason than the fact that they were intersex patients. You could be refused a job, simply because you were an intersex patient.

This was why the disability movement began to develop and work with, what became known as the ‘Social Model of Disability’, which said:

• 'Disability' is not an individual problem;
• We can't compete on equal terms because there are too many barriers;
• We need to recognise that 'society' (through government and its agencies) has a duty to remove these barriers;
• Disabled people have the same RIGHT to full equality as do all other citizens.

No surrender, the struggle for acceptance and equality like the pathway, goes ever on and on!

Link: etransgender.com