Susan's Place Transgender Resources

The third sex: The truth about gender ambiguity

Neither wholly male nor entirely female, there are more than 30,000 'intersexed' individuals living in Britain today. Here, they talk about their lives

By Colette Bernhardt
Saturday, 20 March 2010

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-third-sex-the-truth-about-gender-ambiguity-1922816.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-third-sex-the-truth-about-gender-ambiguity-1922816.html)

The greek scholar Diodorus Siculus wrote of the mythical double-sexed Hermaphroditus: "Some say [he] is a god and ... has a body which is beautiful and delicate like that of a woman, but has the masculine quality and vigour of a man. But there are some who declare that such creatures of two sexes are monstrosities, and coming rarely into the world as they do, have the quality of presaging the future, sometimes for evil and sometimes for good."

Throughout history, those born with both male and female physical features have been beset by society's interpretations of them as freaks (The Lancet branded a British hermaphrodite "a disgusting spectacle" in 1834), prophets (the part-male/part-female character Tiresias in Oedipus Rex and Antigone was a clairvoyant), or both. What they've seldom been allowed to do is just get on with their lives.