They Simply Smile That Way ……
A blog about ‘stuff’ your grandmother could or would never tell you!
Do Hermaphrodites Have A Sex Drive (Male) And Libido (Female)?
There are generally two acknowledged forms of true hermaphrodism in humans, referred to as either the open, easier to diagnose at birth, and the closed or hidden form. This is when a child is born with perfectly formed genitalia, usually a penis, which then does not develop as it should throughout their life. Due to the presence of flashes or streaks as they are called medically, these being undeveloped internal organs, predominantly but not necessarily ovaries.
Consequently, when I refer to the concept of either a sex drive (M) or a libido (F) in hermaphrodism, having only experience of the closed or hidden form, I do not know if this is true for those suffering from the open type. Whose life experience due to the ease of diagnosis, usually at birth, is probably different to that of an individual with the closed or hidden form?
Which is generally not physically apparent, until puberty turns its faulted mechanism and like a candle flame going out in the wind, nothing happens other than the wax, spitting with remembrance and primal longing, growing colder and solidifying in the darkness of pubescent conflict, physical contradictions and personal confusions.
The majority of individuals suffering from the nightmare of the hidden or closed form of true hermaphrodism, will have become very aware of a difference. A mismatch of emotions and dreams long before puberty starts the wanker, winker sexuality of males more balls than brains, the hunter/fishermen of genetic, physical and social dominance beyond the security and comforts of trees and their monkey nests.
A growing disquiet about the social expectations of sex and that most personal awareness of self, the soul, like an alien, a stranger in a strange land unable to walk the walk and talk the talk. Whose immediate surroundings become yet more distant, increasingly unfamiliar and threatening to those born to be different, forever alone with the alone in the protection conflict and confusion deny to the growing self, through social expectation and peer pressure.
Always a small and sickly child, a brief but intense dance with death aged eight when seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy, I was not expected at one point to survive the night but survive I did. Branded with deaths cold, bony hand, I was forever changed. Somehow less substantial and sure, a long period in hospital and of convalescing further separated me from those of my supposed sex and age.
While like a spectre I drifted slowly onwards towards that moment of personal destruction, when by the age of ten or eleven, still not knowing what I was, other than different mentally and physically. Or having experienced the impending train wreak that was puberty and its sacred right of passage. Being left bruised, blooded, broken and dazed in the mangled wreckage of all that should have been shiny and new to the world of men and their meanings, their needs and expectations as dominant sex of the dominant species. To evolve from the pools of primal protoplasm, amidst the mathematics of structure in the world of shadows, ilm i mithril, the world of material matter.
All my life I had preferred playing girls games with girls, loved nothing more than dressing-up and putting on make-up. If only because before the age of innocence was washed away by floods of hormones and the physical conclusion they bestowed upon the human body. Their forming dreams and desires were my forming dreams and desires, before libido and lust complicated still further an already complicated situation.
I may not have known what I was and why, but I knew exactly what I wanted. To play with dolls and not guns, to one day have babies and be a mummy. While in the daily struggle to be something that I was not, had no apparent empathy and understanding of, social expectations set like an uncomfortable exo-skeleton all around my fractured form.
I became a pretty, camp, little boy and the natural victim of every bully between then and now. This would be a battle I could never win, a pretence I acted out like a wounded animal before having been mortally injured at birth, crawling away to die again, within the soci/sexual expectations of an alien society.
While others of my age had the personal security of a forming libido, or the sex drive of rutting stags bestowed upon them by an ever-ticking biological clock. Whose alarm, set for puberty, having woken all they might one day become. Long ago having started their race, leaving me alone and increasingly confused at the start-line, patiently waiting for things to happen that never did, for my personal alarm, faulted in the moment of construction, to go off, for my penis to grow and testicles to drop.
Finding both comfort and confusion from the fact that I was probably just a late developer – long ago damaged and damned to personal inadequacy and inferiority because of always having a smaller, though perfectly formed penis, than the other boys.
Denied the benefits of either libido or sex drive at puberty, it was for me like an insubstantial mist, the consequences there to be seen all around but reach out to touch it and there is nothing, nothing substantial or sure upon which to build or depend.
Not until my mid twenties did I have anything remotely resembling a functioning libido, yes I may have preferred men, I occasionally sucked someone off or took it up the arse. But it was usually as a passive victim of circumstance as it unfolded about me and beyond control. Like a praying mantis held motionless with expectation and hunger, before effortlessly consuming its latest victim with all the ease and cunning of a serial killer. It was something that I felt no real pleasure or excitement from and for. At best I thought it was better than nothing, having never screwed or wanted to screw anything in my life.
So the answer to the question, do hermaphrodites with the closed or hidden form have a sex drive (m) or libido (f)? From personal experience, is no they do not. It felt as if the male and female elements of physiology, in constant conflict and contradiction, cancelled out each other and like matter and antimatter mixing. Destroyed everything in the touching, the joining of a yin and yan that can never be balanced, never be whole without medical intervention and the destruction of one set of sexual characteristics.
Neither fish nor fowl this was to become a ‘thing’, an ‘it’ existing beyond the certainties of male and female. Life unworthy of life in the social gene pools, an outsider beyond the parade, the charade of personal sexuality and its clever evolutionary consequences. When men do and women are but damaged individuals with penis envy, according to Sigmund Freud.
Perhaps that is why to this day, now an old hermaphrodite; I still like big ones and the bigger the better. In order to compensate for a life long feeling of inadequacy and congenital inferiority – damn that penis envy crap. I just like a good throat tickler and big plate of meat and two veg because size matters and everything else is just excuse and platitude.
Not until my breasts developed did I actually have anything resembling a functioning libido. But that is what I thought treatment was all about for hermaphrodites born with the closed or hidden form, giving those denied a libido and sex life, a libido and the ability to physically have sexual intercourse in their chosen gender.
My libido grew in direct proportion to the size of my breast, thanks to the oestrogen tablets I was prescribed, providing my body with sufficient hormones to develop those all important secondary sexual characteristics for the first time. Because I gradually became weak at the knees in the presence of male beauty, despite the fact I would inevitably have to sit them down and explain that there was something I thought they should know, I was a man, well that is what it said upon my birth certificate.
Sorry to those I damaged, I just could not help it because when love and lust come calling, there is nothing that you can do except fling open the door and say come in. Not one would have anything to do with me after that, though nothing but their personal perception of me changed, I was still the same person they had once thought me to be. I suppose it must have hurt their male pride and questioned their personal sexual certainties, to think that they could be beguiled and deceived by a ‘thing’, an ‘it’, life forever unworthy of life in the company of normal, God fearing men and women.
Like all hermaphrodites I did not ask to be born the way that I was, which in itself is a personal nightmare, especially with the closed or hidden form when you do not know what is happening and why. Without being cast into a medical nightmare seemingly without end, by repeated misdiagnosis because once is just bad luck but twice, well that is nothing short of incompetent.
I certainly hope young hermaphrodites are still not being put through hell by the medical profession, the way many of us were in the days before scans. Because what many of us experienced in their caring, God-like hands, was criminal. Most people would not treat a dog the way they did some of us, it was simply another form of torture, the appalling denial of human rights and civil liberties for all considered to be life unworthy of life.
Before religions gold plated alters and unending litany of lies, were unleashed like a plague upon an unsuspecting people, which is just as destructive to the social fabric of civilisation as war. May God forgive them because I will not, until for the first time in my life I get justice for the injustices they heaped upon me like a growing pile of stones.
At least I finally found Derek Eastwood, a genius of a plastic surgeon who along with the staff at Saint James University Hospital in Leeds, remain the only ones to treat me for being what I was and had my best interest at heart. For that one ray of hope and their common human decency, I remain eternally grateful. Because they not only gave to me the chance of a libido and sex life, they gave the joys of orgasm and possibility of love, which is priceless.
They alone remain above criticism and complaint, thank you, thank you for your treatment and care; you literally saved my life. Giving hope, where previously there was only hopelessness and growing despair. It worked, it actually worked and hermaphrodites can not only have a libido, they can also orgasm, make a fine cup of tea and perfect chocolate fudge cake. Prise the Lord and pass the scalpels, miracles are possible, even in an uncaring profession like medicine.
Without even the balls for a successful sex change operation, neither fish nor fowl but a combination of male and female potential. Each cancelling the other out as like matter and anti-matter, oil and water they could not mix. Could not form a coherent whole, except through a fusion of forms and potential into another form.
I was helped, if not completely cured thanks to the benefits of hormones and reconstructive surgery, because if the treatment of hermaphrodites with the hidden or closed form is to be successful, then beyond surgery alone it requires the creation of a libido. Something lost to many suffering this variation of hermaphrodism long before the further confusions of birth sex, damned many to a medical nightmare seemingly without hope or end.
Lebensunwerts Leben (Life Unworthy of Life)
Why have transsexuals become the contemporary ‘lebensunwertes leben’ in western societies? To be discriminated against, harassed, hated and assaulted by the irrational ghost in the machine, the disdain, dislike, prejudice and fear of anything and everything different to the dominant social groups and there personal sexual expectations.
Denied and damned from the gold painted pulpits by the Priests of hate, despised by those hypnotised by vacuous vicars, the congregations of brain-dead, undead, talking in tongues and kissing serpents, those able to dominate through eternal, unquestioned damnation. For whom transsexuals are the new Jews. To be rounded up, branded, bullied and transported in rusty cattle-trucks to the Fourth Reich’s shiny new gas-chambers and borderless ‘concentration camps’.
What is their problem? If someone does not feel totally one sex, or wants to become a different sex physically. Why should it cause so much excitement and hatred in otherwise decent, caring human beings? Is it because those forever outside the sexual norms and conventions, threaten the fragile security of a self locked into the expectations of a species acknowledging only two possible sexes, male and female?
When physically and psychologically there is a third sex, a mix and match of genetic possibility, encompassing every combination of male and female. Men born with a penis and ovaries, women with a penis, people who feel themselves to be women trapped inside a man’s body.
Because this is evolution in the process of evolving, genetics moulding from possibility, species and forms previously unknown within the swarming primal gene pools of human potential. Every possible fault and abnormality in the human gene sequence, every adaptation and combination that throughout the evolutionary process succeeded or failed, providing the quantum leap, that chance adaptation. Which helped to make clever, vicious monkeys into the dominant species – quicker, faster and smarter, success was ultimately the final judge of evolutionary dominance and dominion in existences many and varied, interconnected feeding-chains.
Vaginal Cream – Is It Good Or Bad For Hermaphrodites?
Having personally used a variety of vaginal creams as my main source of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for decades, I can see that there are both benefits, especially when sexually active and major drawbacks. In that after decades using these creams I began to show signs of prolonged oestrogen deficiency.
Indicating that either the level of oestrogen in the cream was to low, or I was unable to absorb sufficient hormones even when using it according to the manufactures instructions? If you use this as your main form of HRT, beware of the possible long-term consequences of to low a dosage.
On the plus side, it does appear to help with mucus secretion and create a perfect environment, with the correct ph for the shoals of sperm to struggle up. Don’t assume that it just dribbles out, it does not. They are resilient little blighters, when it comes to the single minded primal determination to procreate.
Some of the sperm and gunge I got out had been up there for years, and was very rancid and infected. So make sure you do not allow it to accumulate like layers of rock strata, deep and dark in the places least travelled.
How do you keep yours clean?
Currently I am using HRT in the form of patches, with my body more than able to absorb a set daily dosage. If I am fortunate enough to start having regular intercourse again, I will probably ask if I can go back on the cream – just to make sure that I have the right ph level in my fish tank. Though given absorption difficulties with the cream alone, I might consider splitting HRT between cream and patches.
Does anyone else have long term experience with vaginal cream?
Is State Torture The Political Equivalent Of Domestic Violence?
State torture and targeting are the political equivalent of domestic violence and sexual oppression, inside the west’s illusion of freedom, democracy, collective government, accountable politicians and the modern media’s technological totalitarianism. Which becomes the collective hearts and minds of an organism created for a single purpose, to consume all that was not ‘it’.
Motivated by usury and gain, this was a symbiosis of personal greed and social need. A usury of delusion born of possession and sexual dominance upon the military and industrial complexes, sterile production lines and in the level four secure biological laboratories.
Where plague and pestilence are fashioned into shiny new toys for the Generals to salivate over, with kill ratios large than a golf handicap. Bringing tears to the eyes of any God fearing Christian Fundamentalist with a cocaine hard on and viagra headache, pulsating with fading potency and promise inside a deflating reality, a parallel existence penetrating with primal rhythm and a potential to procreate prolifically in pursuit of personal perfection.
Bullied from birth for being different, a freak, a ‘thing’, ‘it’ and all the other verbal abuses their intolerant, bigoted minds could create like ill-formed lumps of shit. Beyond the consequences of chance when it could have been them, could have been you born to be different, a victim of physical contradiction, imperfection, and personal confusion.
Born to become something inhuman and forever threatening, without sex drive (male) or libido (female) it was like being nothing. An emptiness of potential bound by the cobwebs of failed mechanisms and processes. A Holy Innocent fed a piece at a time to the hunting packs of ecclesiastical wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Crucified and persecuted for being ‘life unworthy of life’, according to the stormtroppers Codex. Preached and proclaimed against by those damned with the sin of sex from birth. Those more balls than brains inside the dominant feeding-chains, the genetic evolutions of form and potential in the world of material matter.
Where to be nothing, devoid of sex drive or libido, is a burden that with the passage of years becomes at times unbearable, a crushing weight absorbing even possibility and social acceptance. Like Peter Pan forever lost to the innocence of pre-pubescent psychology in an abstract world, a parallel reality that is Nazi lying Labour’s very own ‘Never, Never Land’.
Held without reference or understanding by physical failure and social expectations, beyond the hope of being a late developer, an eternal innocent unpolluted, uncorrupted by the animal lusts of sexuality. Absolved from the dominance and superiority of male physiology, or life long consequences of female fertility and physical inferiority, in a world of things to be dominated and possessed by the laws of ownership and power.
The End Is Neigh!
After over six months of pain, bleeding, tears and an inability to do anything physically without exacerbating both pain and bleeding, the end is finally neigh! Hopefully before the week is out, because thanks to my extended programme of self-harm, I have been able to physically force open the join, eventually getting one of Ann Summers (other brands are available) finest past.
In fact, I have all but run out of vibrator and still have an inch or two yet to re-open. What continues to surprise me was/is the amount of gunge and sperm there was/is past the final fuck point. I always assumed it dribbled out dead but happy, oh no! When I orgasmed my genitalia spasmed, taking the sperm as deep into myself as possible. So most went up and not down.
Something that I will have to be a little more careful about, if I ever find an old boy in rude health, to fuck with again. They are determined little blighters those sperm, who it belonged to I have no idea but what amazed me, was the way it surrounded little pellets of ovestin cream and appeared to burrow into it on mass – freaky!
At least the surgeons gave me a big one to compensate for my penis, no bigger than that of a five year old boy, according to consultants who saw the photographs taken after they put me under the first time. Knowing before I did about the consequences of life long inferiority and penis envy, in that I would inevitably prefer big ones on men, and the bigger the better! How right they were.
It has been a long and lonely road without the help of relatively minor surgery, a ten-minute procedure at the most, more a circumnavigation of the world against the prevailing political weather systems. Where spin five miles wide is sent swirling around the oxygenless atmosphere of contemporary sleaze-ball politics, for those more reptile than human.
Those touched by the delusions of the anti-Christ, the religious fundamentalists and their gangs of glue sniffing, feral children, hunting again in packs upon the wasteland of contemporary western politics, urban society. Amongst the ‘spinning men’, the ‘flipping’, ‘fiddling’, ‘filibustering men’, now forever above the rule of law and beyond the consequences of incarceration for their conspiracies, treason’s or collective crimes against humanity and their own people.
I must stress, yet again, if you have a ‘sigmoid colon’ do not assume, having been sexually active for decades. That you can stop having intercourse, stop dilating and having completely neglected yourself for years. Things will still be in working order and fully functional, if and when you find yourself able to have intercourse with someone again. THEY WILL NOT!
It costs thousands for the National Health Service to give hermaphrodites a libido and sex life. Because without it we were nothing, a growing black hole where there should have been either sex drive or libido. At least for me it worked from the moment my breasts developed and I had a libido for the first time in my life.
When with an excited shake of my breasts I could beguile and my libido like a child in a candy shop, ran wild and free. Because even before surgery I kept falling in love with men and there was not a thing that I could do about it. Except eventually tell them, once things started to get physical, I was a man. At least that is what it said upon my birth certificate.
Living as a nothing, a ‘thing’, an ‘it’ was not easy and I for one just felt increasingly depressed at having no sex drive, libido or sex life. Without the treatment offered by the modern medical miracle of libido, orgasm and intercourse I was close to ending my life, before I found Derek Eastwood and the unit at Saint James.
They not only saved my life, they gave me a life of sorts, certainly, more than fate gave to me at birth. They gave me the chance of libido, love and experience of sexual intercourse. Which was, is completely mind blowing, brain melting, leg trembling, toe curling, muscle spasming beyond imagination and human endurance.
Because it worked for me, just as I hope it worked for others born hermaphrodites. Though I am sure that not all born with the closed or hidden form, chose as I did to become female. Was treatment successful for you, did it give you a sex drive?
Either way, I hope you found some personal happiness, contentment, and harmony beyond the spaces between. Beyond the personal physical consequences of being born partly male and partly female, yet wholly neither. All any of us can do, is to play the hand that fate dealt to us, to the best of our ability. Even if the medical nightmare into which we were cast, as a consequence of repeated misdiagnosis and mistreatment, continues without hope or end in this world and the next.
For the music of life in all its forms goes on and on and on and … shine on you crazy diamonds and make sure you are well lubricated, wet as a swamp, hot as hell, unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed. It worked for me and at least I had a life of sorts, especially a sex life that without surgical intervention and modern medicine. I could, would never have known as an ‘it’, a ‘thing’, lebensunwertes leben (life unworthy of life), according to the new Master Race of a global Fourth Reich.
The Final Taboo (Part Two)
That look upon the surgeons face when he first examined me over a year ago, the one I misinterpreted as pity because he knew I had never screwed anyone in my life and why. Was indeed pity but not because of my past non-existent sex life, other than taking it up the arse from time to time?
It was due to the knowledge that I did not have a large enough penis for successful, routine, re-constructive and reassignment surgery. When they peel the penis like a ripe banana and use it to create a vagina. That was why as soon as I was prepared for surgery, they had a medical photographer document my external contradictions and abnormalities, to be kept along with detailed case notes. Explaining and showing through before and after snaps, I was not a transsexual as I believed and had struggled twenty years to find treatment for.
But was in fact a hermaphrodite, which was why I did not need the usual breast implants after re-constructive surgery. At that point I was not initially concerned with what label they hung at the end of my hospital bed, what concerned me more as I struggled to recover, was the fact that I was probably going to spend the rest of my life as a eunuch.
In the days following that brief moment of ecstasy and blissful happiness, believing the transformation of forms now complete and I forever more a woman of sorts. That organ beyond my fathoming, identified by medical professionals who were shown the photographs of my penis as being one belonging to a five year old boy - I was twenty-nine at the time - now forever gone only the dream, over inflated and extended, had burst.
I was in a state of complete shock and growing denial, for twenty years I believed myself to be a transsexual and was eventually offered treatment for that condition. Only to discover I did not have the balls for a sex change operation. I was not even a transsexual but a hermaphrodite and the only thing I knew about that was it meant a creature, or in my case a person, who was both partly male and partly female and consequently, wholly neither. Like a worm that can only multiply through division into a perfect replica of itself. My expectations and personal understanding of who and what I was, now rendered completely useless.
Though in the days following this devastating turn of events, confused, frightened and alone, there was talk of further surgery once I had recovered sufficiently, to again return to the windowless room of my half birth. As for how the surgeon might yet stop what felt like falling down a bottomless well, no one actually said and reading between the lines, I suspect not even the surgeon yet knew.
Washed like a single cell amoeba from the primal protoplasm, this should have been when I told the truth about not having the balls for sex change surgery and being a hermaphrodite, not as I and others believed for two decades, a transsexual. Unfortunately at that point I was already looking down the barrel of fates loaded weapon. Feeling confused and frightened all I wanted to do was crawl home, shut myself away; lick my wounds and cry.
It was just another label that the medical profession attached to patients, so that like dogs and their owners, they automatically took upon themselves certain characteristics and expectations. For most of my life I had struggled towards this moment, when freed from the curse that had blighted it. I might know some happiness, some degree of personal harmony and contentment.
Only for my body to play one last, cruel trick by frustrating all I might have been because I did not have the balls for a sex change operation. Not that gender reassignment surgery was like a Mister Universe competition but size still mattered, if there was to be any hope of a sex life.
As if one long ago destroyed, forlorn and hopeless I returned to my home a eunuch, who for all I knew, would never be anything but a eunuch. I could not yet face what was happening myself, let alone explain this to anyone else. So I kept my own council, even with my closest friends and fell into denial and feelings of personal inadequacy again.
This being that last thing I expected to happen, I was understandably all over the place and at times liable to turn upon good friends trying to help. It felt like I had been pulled from a twenty-year nightmare, into one even deeper and darker as the consequences hardened all around my fractured form. Rather than explain what I could not yet cope with, or face what I was currently unable to face, my natural instinct closed tight about itself as if a touched anemone. I wanted only to deny it to myself, for the wilfulness of convenience and comforts of familiarity.
So I did what any sane person in my insane position, falling ever faster down a bottomless well into God knows what, would have done. I purchased the largest piece of cannabis resin I could afford with my student grant and yes, we used to get grants to study in the olden days. Before economic extremism and inherent greed bankrupt the banks and cost every man, woman and child in the country two hundred thousand pounds of debt.
With nothing to show for it but rising unemployment, austerity, cut-backs and hard times for all but the fortunate few and their familiars. The things they became behind closed doors and far away from the media’s sycophantic, uncritical gaze as they looped reality into cast iron certainty, repeated like the current exclusive footage of the next breaking story, for the piranha of human possibility to strip to the bone.
Combining the cannabis resin with strong painkillers, I proceeded to get completely off my head from shortly waking in the early hours of the morning in pain, both physically and emotionally. To crying myself to sleep listening to the John Peel show, trying to feel positive about something other than being fucked, completely fucked.
For only in the spaces between, where dreams and fears mingled in the confusions of the subconscious, where the shape-shifters and changelings mock and contradict the fractures in reality, violent enough to disturb their equilibrium, was there escape of sorts. Struggling to recover sufficiently to do again the normal, everyday things of life, clean, wash, go to the shops; despite the consequences of fall, of recovering sufficiently to face more surgery and whatever solution the consultant and his team could offer.
But above the confusion and growing personal denial, I knew this to be my only hope of life, if life it was. As I fell ever faster into the echoing blackness, the only certainty being that I would eventually hit the bottom with a sickening crash. Until that inevitability, all I could do was wave and flap my arms, hoping to slow the fall, or magically hover in denial of my fractured destiny; floating effortlessly above the unfolding consequences of life and the truth of my condition. For the lies that others, the politicians and Priests of hate cast over me as if a shroud, were already starting to set into the fabric of time and space like reinforced concrete.
An alternative reality created for the conveniences of power politics and rampant control-freakery, orchestrated by religions shared delusions and madness, regarding the historically accurate, fantasy God of men created in their own image and imperfections. Vibrating with the testosterones of destruction and damnation, buzzing in their blood like a hive of bees, with shared songs and dances of social dominance, I was and the second I returned home would remain forever, in the eyes of those around, a transsexual.
If only they knew, if only I had been able to talk about this most personal human inadequacy. Not that I had known adequacy or normality from the age of ten, nor from the ways things looked, would I ever be anything but a freak, neither fish nor fowl, a primitive mutation and immediate evolutionary dead-end.
If only I had not been forced to concentrate upon and prepare for more surgery and the further consequences of this most personal of failures, not even man enough to change my sex. There was a strange, almost poetic irony to it all but mostly I felt frightened, confused and utterly alone in the slow day’s of physical recovery.
Not that my nursing friends helped the stress and anxiety, when I asked how they thought he might solve the problem? Most said he would probably take skin grafts. What hope I had of finding love diminished in direct proportion to the scarring from skin grafts. It felt so unfair, I had just got my new body and it looked good, very good at least until I was scared with skin grafts. If there was a God of some kind, they really had it in for me!
Whatever chance I had of finally facing the truth about myself, of holding my head high and being loud and proud about not having a large enough penis for successful surgery. Or being something stranger than the transsexual I and others believed myself to be, a hermaphrodite, was slowly fading away. When I looked the word up in Roget’s Thesaurus it said: ‘eunuch, castrato; no-man; gelding, capon, bullock, steer, neuter, it; free-martin, hermaphrodite’.Not exactly something I felt comfortable about facing, let alone admit to friends and the world as being. At least with the lies setting all around like a heavy, uncomfortable exoskeleton, they thought I had balls but shit happens. Consequently I would need further surgery, once I had recovered sufficiently to play for broke. Returning to face whatever hope and solution the medical teams as Saint James University Hospital had to offer.
Even if that meant the terror of skin grafts and resultant scarring to my body, because finally it was my body and not that of a strange freak of nature, part male and part female but forever wholly neither. Cursed by forces beyond my control, for crimes I did not committee. Damned by the Priests of hate and religious fundamentalism of every kind, just for being a freak of nature; denied even a successful sex change operation by my own body and the consequences of physiology, I had never felt so empty, depressed and frightened in my whole life.
Compounded by confusion, increasing feelings of personal inadequacy and failure, I sought refuge in the comforts and familiarities of the past. Thinking hermaphrodite or transsexual, what does it matter? They are just labels, social conveniences that bound together through expectation and anticipation, limitations upon individuality and personal freedom, imprisoning with invisible walls, its shared delusions and restless dreams.
Whatever hope I had of a relatively normal life, the opportunity to marry, adopt children, change my birth certificate, and have legally enforceable rights. Was slipping beyond my reach, stolen away a hope at a time by the skin of lies, already smothering silently and effectively. Simply because, thinking me a transsexual, I was already damned in the eyes of the state and its bog eyed, mad eyed guardians of histories illusions and lies, the Priests of hate and those not already mad, they had driven mad. The inherently bad seeking justification and absolution in God, for the most horrendous crimes of torture and murder.
Of course at the time, now decades ago, no one told me that hermaphrodites had rights, could marry and adopt children. I just thought as with being transsexual, you had no rights and became a thing, existing in the shadows beyond normal society, an outsider. Damned and denied unto death and beyond for being ‘life unworthy of life’, the destruction of which, was a sacred duty and mercy.
It felt like dying every day when I woke to the half-light of the early hours. Emptiness where once there was a stomach, gnawed away by a pack of cornered rats. Some days I cried, some days I cried most of the day. Some days I felt numb and empty as if all I had once been, had drained away leaving a fading form, a freak of nature damned by the consequences of birth and the curses secret workings.
The only fortunate element to this whole sorry affair was that it happened during the long summer holidays. So there were a few weeks for me to recover before I started my second year, even if the next operation did not happen until early September. Because of my mental state, which like a see-saw was up and down, there was no way I could concentrate upon the recommended reading. Only in the doubtful comforts of sleep did I find the possibility of escape, of unbroken dreams playing ‘happy endings’ to crowded emotions.
But even here lurked the monsters, the formless fears and faults of a fractured reality; the brittle truths about the cruel game fate played all about my frantic struggles. To find conclusion and personal harmony for the first time in my nightmare of a life and if I was very lucky, love and some degree of happiness. Not that life had a ‘happy ending’ for people like me, for the cruel forces of fate had not yet finished with me.
Lying in sleeps dusty crevices and dark corners, hide the few remaining memories and hopes of happiness, life had begrudgingly bestowed upon me. Before the moment of fall began and the silences of blackness echoed all around, mocking and condemning that which I might have become. Leaving me to come to terms with being something stranger than a transsexual, something even less than a ‘eunuch, castrato; no-man; gelding, capon, bullock, steer, neuter, it; free-martin and finally in Roget’s, hermaphrodite.
The final taboo from which, I could find no escape even in changing my sex. Because as in life, size mattered and during those final years of trying desperately to be something I did not have it in my heart and loins to be. Just going into a male toilet was a nightmare, I would usually try to wait until it was empty, or if possible go into a cubical. If faced with the predicament of being forced to pee in public, I would try to stretch what I had to make it appear larger, or hide it. So the real man stood next to me, could not do what all men did, glance down and compare the size of their genitalia, or hold unspoken competitions to see who could piss the highest.
It just added to my feelings off shame, inferiority, and personal inadequacy. I felt like an impostor in their violent, aggressive, testosterone fuelled world. I felt like a stranger in a strange land, the language, custom and puberty’s ‘rights of passage’ had passed me by and just to make matters infinitely worse, I knew that even with a change of sex, I still would never have children of my own.
Life finally began to improve for me, following a visit to a consultant endocrinologist in Manchester, who agreed to start prescribing oestrogen. From the very start it felt right and I took to it like a duck to water. Experiencing puberty in my twenties, when my breasts began to develop so quickly, I had planned to start living fully as a woman six months after starting oestrogen. But before then, had to wear waistcoats and think how can I hide them?
Which at first felt tender, occasionally painful as they started to grow, pulling upon muscles and tissue in a way they never had before. I even bought my first training bra before beginning to live full-time and forever more as a woman, only could not wear it, because it made them look even larger.
At the time, I just thought that I was one of the lucky transsexuals. I blossomed and by the point when I had re-constructive surgery, was fortunate enough not to need usual breast implants. Whether puberty was uncomfortable and at times painful as it was when my body changed and my breasts started to develop, for boys when their testicles dropped I will never know. Though many of the transsexuals that I spoke with, had taken oestrogen for years with little or no breast development.
How lucky was I, or so I thought, the truth was there were medical reasons for this, not the least my micro penis, which I ironically called ‘Wee Willey’ from the point when the other boys started to outgrow and outgun me. Shooting puberty like silver bullets with eruptions of bubbling, fishy tasting sperm, at least I got to take it in the face and up the arse.
Barking mad by the age of ten or eleven, when as if from nowhere I wanted to play with dolls, nurturing and caring for them as I would my own children. I already felt happier in the girl’s world, rather than the hunter/fisherman and boosters boy the world expected me to be. Where all this came from and why it happened I was never to discover, even after years of individual and group therapy.
Little wonder that as an effeminate, camp schoolboy, I was bullied mercilessly, constantly by the other boys. Especially when the first flushes of testosterone made their balls pop and suddenly they understood what this boy/girl stuff was all about, sex. By this point as a confused teenager I thought that I knew what I was, thanks to more vicarious elements of the media, a transsexual and what I wanted, a sex change operation.For me girls were just friends and competition with all the advantages, when it came to getting boys. Never did I find one sexually exciting, go to bed with one or fantasise as I jerked myself off imagining giving them ‘one’ and being a man. My fantasies, even the pre-pubescent ones, were not their fantasies. My dreams were not their dreams because something, something hard-wired into my brain had gone wrong. It was being a girl, been fucked by them that I dreamed about when alone in bed. Because all I ever wanted as the playground bullies made me cry again, was to be a normal little girl.
Life was already a spectator sport for me, long before I was finally diagnosed as being a hermaphrodite and from the way things were looking, would remain forever a spectator sport, a half life, half lived. Though just how bad this life of sorts would get by being made into a loveless, barren hell by lies, lies and damned lies from demented, deluded, dangerous politicians, the Priests of hate and their congregations of snake kissers. I could not yet even begin to imagine in the slow days of physical recovery, days filled with the consequences of failure and the formless fear of not knowing how. Or even if, the medical teams could solve the problem of not having had a large enough penis for successful surgery.
There were times, lonely, black times, when I felt the only real solution was to committee suicide. There were times when I already felt myself to be dead, my life having ended long ago in the cold, windy corner of the playground where the bullies gathered. There were times when I clung with growing desperation to the slenderest thread of hope that even yet; I may be pulled alive from my car-wreck of a life. Saved in the very moment of fall by the surgeon and his medical teams.
Even if that were to mean extensive skin grafts, because there was to be no getting off the roller-coaster ride once it had started. No alternative but for me to play for broke, to face with courage and dignity whatever solution, whatever treatment they might yet offer. At least they had my best interests at heart and knew the truth about what I was.
If I thought life was bad enough for me as I struggled to recover, in order to face again whatever hope and help there might yet be for me in this world. I could not even begin to imagine the nightmares and horrors, elected politicians and seemingly sane, responsible men would unleash against me in the decades yet to come.
For fates fickle finger had yet to write upon the blank pages of possibility, the dark clouds already gathering. Were soon to unleash a storm that would devistate my life, my professional and personal reputation, my hopes, my dreams and growing understanding, relationship to contemporary freedom and democracy gone wrong. Very wrong because of politics growing criminal tendency and the demented, deluded and dangerous to whom God spoke directly the secret words of power and control freakery.
A litany of collection plate theology and spiritual protection for those who could afford to buy their way into heaven. Those who reflected and reinforced the fantasy white God of white men, men who could best lie before the high definition excuses of those who thought themselves above the law; with their secret courts and funny handshakes. Because just when you think life can get no worse and fate has finally finished with you, it gets worse and worse and you learn fate has not even started to untangle the knots holding each struggle, each attempt to break free of its tangled consequences.
Conclusion
I certainly hope that diagnosis and treatment for young hermaphrodites is better today than during the wacky, wild, frontier days of treatment for intersex conditions upon the health service decades ago. It took twenty nine long, horrendous years for anyone to diagnose and treat me for being a hermaphrodite, with undeveloped internal organs and a penis the size of a five year old boy, perfectly formed but of no practical use.
Especially when it came to having the balls for a routine sex change operation because the bottom line was, fucked if I did and fucked if I did not. Unfortunately during my teenage years I developed a huge inferiority complex and just felt wholly inadequate physically. Little wonder at the time I was so prickly about the size of my genitalia (one of the classic symptoms of hermaphrodism). Or why just for once in my life, I wanted people to think I had balls, if only for a sex change operation.
Such were the all consuming consequences of this, the final taboo as far as I was concerned. Thankfully, once I stopped trying to live as a man in readiness for surgery, it was no longer a problem and in some respects a decided advantage. I could wear tight jeans and not look as if I had a penis.
Given the financial cuts to the National Health Service, my worry is that young hermaphrodites today will just be given a cyanide capsule and told to go for a long holiday to Switzerland. Even thirty years ago it was not cheap for the health service to give hermaphrodites a sex life of some kind.
But at the time I had no hesitation, or qualms, about becoming a human guinea pig for a new technique they wanted to try on a hermaphrodite. In order to offer a practical surgical solution to the treatment of hermaphrodites with insufficient penis tissue for re-constructive and reassignment surgery, without having to resort to extensive skin grafts and the resultant physical scarring. I signed the consent forms agreeing to the procedure relieved beyond imagination, thinking the surgeon was a genius.
They even pushed it in certain specialist medical periodicals, with pictures of me in my altar identity as a hairdresser from Barnsley. A bit of sexual stereotyping there, I may have been a hermaphrodite but that did not mean I did not have a brain. Whether the procedure was used upon other hermaphrodites with the same lack of tissue for routine surgery, I do not know.
Or whether it proved to expensive, needing the involvement of other consultant surgeons and a longer stay in hospital. I would be interested to hear how hermaphrodites with insufficient penile tissue are treat thirty years later, is diagnosis still hit and miss, or better than in the olden days, before scans and intersex treatment units? Do hermaphrodites have the right to marry and adopt children? Or do hermaphrodites remain a medical after-thought, a reluctance practised in some shed next to the gas chamber?
‘In a time of universal deception, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’
George Orwell.
As if my eventual diagnosis and treatment at Jimmy’s were not traumatic enough, coming as it did after a twenty-nine year nightmare, twenty years of that diagnosed and treat as something I was not. When at the age of ten or eleven, for no apparent reason I started to want to be a mummy and have babies. Barking mad by the age of eleven, it was two or three years later that I started to hear about men changing their sex, thinking at the time that must be what I was, a transsexual.
Until aged fifteen when I first saw a psychiatrist and was promptly diagnosed as being a schizophrenic. Not until my late teens was I eventually diagnosed incorrectly a second time, this time as a transsexual. After all, this started for me fifty-nine years ago, virtually the dark ages when it came to treatment of intersex conditions, especially on the health service in the United Kingdom.
By my early twenties I was living as a woman, in the hope I would eventually get surgery on the health service because a gender identity unit had now opened in London. Where the consultant Doctor Randall, hate at first site unfortunately, did not believe I was a transsexual and refused to treat me. Ironically he was right but I did not know that at the time, any more than I understood that the symptomatology and experience of a hermaphrodite and that of a transsexual are radically different. Of course had he examined me physically and not mentally, he should have known I was a hermaphrodite and why, which I now know and understand but did not at the time.
After that most disastrous of consultations, it was to be another six years without hope before a surgeon established a unit in Leeds to treat intersex conditions, where I was examined physically for the first time. Because the surgeon knew there and then I was not a transsexual but a true hermaphrodite, which I always consider as falling into two kinds. The lucky ones being the open kind, those who at birth have clearly observable physical abnormalities and consequently receive treatment for the condition, all be it in most cases without the child’s knowledge or consent.
Then you have the ones like me, ones I regard as hidden or closed hermaphrodites that at birth appear to have perfectly normal genitalia, perfectly formed. That does not develop as it should throughout the individual's life due to undiscovered combinations of internal organs, in my case a small penis and what the surgical teams called undeveloped internal organs.
Just before the first operation, with me out cold the hospital photographed my genitalia and the other physical anomalies for my case notes. When shown to other consultants they identified my penis as that of a five-year-old boy – I was twenty-nine at the time. At least after finally being diagnosed correctly as a hermaphrodite and treat surgically, I understood why my penis never developed and I started to feel the way I did; not because of some psychological problem or trauma but because of physiology.
Twenty nine years to be finally diagnosed and treat as a hermaphrodite only to be targeted, harassed and destroyed for another thirty years for being something I was not, something that was a misdiagnosis. But such are the powers of lies and spin, for a few years even I began to believe it myself.
The moment that I returned home from the hospital that first time the lie was becoming a form of truth, a heavy steel net cast over me in the moment of escape by the Priests of hate and Crusader armies of Christian fundamentalists. For whom I was and would remain as long as I could draw breath, ‘life unworthy of life’ to be condemned to the gas chambers and flames of Hell, whose fuel are stones and men.
The truth was, having gone into hospital for gender reassignment surgery, expecting the long struggle for treatment soon to be over, completed as I scrambled only slightly blooded and broken over the wall of paradise. With a new centre of gravity and life, hopefully touched, blessed with love and lots of sex because in the first twenty nine years, I had never screwed anyone or anything, I had never even been to bed with a woman.
But I just thought that was the way that life went, some people had a large penis and were hung like prize bulls, other’s like me, had a small penis that did not hang at all. As for being sexually aroused by girls and later women that just did not happen, the engine driving the sexual instinct coughed and spluttered only to never successfully start. It was men that eventually turned me on.
Even puberty appeared to pass me by, while those of my age masturbated to pubescent fantasy’s and page three day dreams, all I wanted was to be a woman being fucked by them.
At the time it felt like having a tactical, battlefield nuclear weapon detonated inside my brain, devastating the world all around, laying flat the personal perceptions, the painstaking social constructs of self and individual identity. Leaving only a shattered wasteland, devoid of familiar, recognisable structures and a once vibrant inner world, peopled by a lifetime of dreams, hope’s, nightmares and fears.
Constructed as if rock strata a layer at a time; past present and future folding the layers into continents and mountains, washes of emotion gouging out valleys, running to stagnation and absorption upon the fertile flood planes of the imagination. Without reference points and familiar gravity’s, the centre would not hold and all fell apart.
Not as I told my closest friends upon returning home following the first operation, the surgery had not succeeded due to a failure of the blood supply. Which it had, some ten hours after coming around from the anaesthetic, happy beyond imagination this thing, this small thing that had blighted my life and was about as much us to me as a bicycle to a fish, now gone forever.
For this failure had not been due to the medical teams at Saint James University Hospital, or even shit that from time to time happens, usually when you least expect it. The truth was it failed, because I did not have a large enough penis for successful, routine, sex change surgery.
Not if I was to have anything resembling a sex life following reassignment because to slip into medical speak, there was not enough tissue to work with and I was fucked, completely fucked.
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