On this week's Out & Proud, Trevor Keegan speaks to Dr. Adeline Berry, who shares their experience of being intersex.
They discuss the stigma of not being a boy "properly", undergoing painful surgeries as a young child and the long tail of shame that, their research shows, extends into later life for intersex people.
Intersex, Addy explained, is "an umbrella term for a wide variety of naturally occurring bodily variations that fall outside of strict medical binary definitions of what might be considered male or female".
These variations, they added, can affect your hormones, gonads, chromosomes and sex organs. There are up to 40 variations listed and some people can have more than one.
"Most people, when their child is born, they're expecting it to check all the boxes on being a typical boy and a typical girl and so a lot of parents, the first time they find out that there's anything outside of this is when their child is born intersex", Addy explained.
In Addy's case, their mother was put on Diethylstilbestrol - a synthetic estrogen that was given to up to 10 million women between the 1930s and 1970s as a treatment for women prone to miscarriages - and so Addy said their mother was expecting to have a baby girl.
However, when they were born intersex, Addy said their mother was "repulsed" by them.
"It's actually quite common for an intersex child to be considered, unfortunately, a curse on the family as I was", they said. "My mother would refer to me as an abomination."
"We need education about ourselves but also rather than surgery, we need education for the family because this is the first time that they even find out that intersex even exists."
At the time when Addy was born in England, parents of intersex children would be advised to move away and not tell others about their child's diagnosis. Addy's family moved back to Ireland shortly after their birth, which led to "bitterness and resentment" in their mother, who had been living out her life in London.
Growing up in Tallaght, Addy felt particularly isolated. "As far as I knew, I was the only person like me in the world", Addy said.
Intersex people make up 1.7% of the population, according to the UN. "To put that in perspective, Russia is about 1.8% of the population. People with red hair is 2%, people with green eyes is 2%.
"So everybody has - most likely - met an intersex person, but you may not have realised and they themselves may not know they're intersex for a variety of reasons, because there's very low rates of diagnoses", Addy said.
Some variations can be clear at birth, they said, while others can appear during puberty or are discovered post mortem.
"Some people are born [with] an ovary on one side and a teste on the other, or you might have XY chromosomes, which would be typical for a male but then you're also born with a small uterus and a shallow vagina, for example", Addy said.
In the broader conversation around gender, there can be some confusion between a person being intersex and a person being trans, Trevor noted. Addy agreed:
"There's been a massive anti-trans moral panic for the past 10 years. I don't think there's ever been a great time to be trans on this planet but it's gotten worse recently. For intersex people who are not trans, the attention is particularly unwelcome, but transgender and intersex mean two entirely different things."
Addy explained that a transgender person does not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth.
However, there is some overlap, Addy noted, such as those born with Klinefelter syndrome who have an extra X chromosome: "In studies with a wide sample of people with Klinefelter syndrome, about a third did not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth, and in wide samples of trans people about one third had Klinefelter syndrome."
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