Hello!
Disclaimer/trigger warning: this discusses a LOT of LGBTphobia and mentions conversion therapy. I also use the word "queer" since personally, it fits me and as a non-binary person, it doesn't offend me. If I'm not supposed to use that in this forum, please let me know! I don't want to hurt anyone.
I'm new here and am under an anonymous name due to safety issues. Over the past year, I've been looking back at how I was raised and how my parents have treated certain topics...and the more things I put together, the odder my childhood looks and the more it points towards intersex as a possibility.
I have a sister who is two years older than me, and she was given all the basic sex ed. At age 9, she was told what internal or external parts she had. She was told what cycles were. She was told the basics of how reproduction and intercourse work. And, since my mom is LGBTphobic, she was told that only a man and woman should be married "like it says in the Bible."
Even when I reached the age the my sister was when she was told these things, I was NEVER told that I had parts, what a cycle was, how sex worked, or even phobic ideas. Furthermore, I wasn't even allowed to know what a bra was until I saw my sister wearing one and demanded to know what it was. I didn't even know what a cycle, uterus, vagina, ovaries, etc. etc. were until I had my cycle at 12 and a half. It felt like my mom didn't even expect me to have one. And since we were both homeschooled, it's not like I had access to outside education.
What's even odder is that my sister, all the information she was told, she was specifically told to never tell me about it, even as I got older. Even by the time I was 12, ANY mention of cycles, genitals, sexuality, etc. etc. was SHUT DOWN around me. As soon as a TV show mentioned that stuff? My mom rushed to turn it off. As soon as a TV news feature about LGBT matters came on? My mom would turn the TV off. She would monitor what I read in the newspaper. But despite her phobia for religious reasons, she never told me "gay people will go to hell," or anything like that. It's not like she just went, "Hm, it seems like Vea might be gay. I'll scare them with the concept of hell." LGBT words couldn't even be mentioned around me. It's like I was walking around with an invisible brand on me that read, "If they learn anything about genitals, sex, puberty, LGBT...SOMETHING will happen/they will figure something out."
And at first I thought that perhaps my mom was very overprotective of me (being the youngest and all) or was just crazy phobic. So I didn't think much of it. As I got older, around tween age, I started to realize I didn't identify with female (I go by they/them now) and was not straight. But it's not like I was outwardly a flaming pinnacle of queerness. I clearly presented as cis and straight. I still wore skirts and was just whiny about having to shave all the time (I was forced to by my mom and if I didn't it would cause a HUGE problem...didn't happen if my sister didn't shave her legs). My mom would demand that I Nair my faint mustache. She approached me when I was about 14 or 15 years old and asked me if I would want to get certain hormone creams to increase my breast growth (at that point, my breasts were just...not growing, but my sister also had very small breasts at that age and was never asked about that).
When I was 15, I was taken to an endocrinologist and diagnosed with likely Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. But for some reason, that didn't put my mom at ease. Since I was homeschooled, the only other place I had to go was the community college I attended as a highschool student. I wasn't allowed to walk outside by myself until I was 18 years old. Couldn't and still can't drive. And when my mom would drop me off at the college, she would watch me walk to the buildings I took classes in, and if I took a slightly different path, she would call me and ask if "I were meeting up with certain people." Certain people meant "are you meeting up with queer people." She never ever wanted me to know LGBT people. She would interrogate me about any friends I made at college. If they were queer, she would do everything within her power to stop me from being around them. When I went to a convention for school, she told me to Nair my stomach hair because "what if you have a medical emergency there, the EMTs have to take your clothed off, the see that, and decide that you are a 'certain kind of person' and to not save you because of it." My dad has said the same thing to me and he is pro-LGBT. He never said people might think I'm trans and it could be dangerous. He would say, "People might think you're a certain kind of person and it could be dangerous," even though he has said the word "transgender" in front of me before. And he has told before, "Your sexuality is your choice, hell, you can even be transgender nowadays."
Again, my sister was NEVER treated like this at ALL.
Early last year, my mom decided that she wanted to put me on "hormone therapy" to try and "feminize" me (fortunately, I was avle to avoid it). Since I have PCOS, she could easily come up with a lie as to why I would need it. I was 17 at the time, so I had less legal power than I do now. She also indicated that if I wasn't put on the therapy and didn't show interest in dating men, she would "have to take me somewhere to get that fixed."
(I should mention, I am in liberal West Coast United States. This level of phobia is...very odd for this area.)
So, needless to say, I was pretty freaked out. I decided to speak with one of my college professors who is an LGBT ally. I wanted a trusted adult to know what was going on. She was raised in the DEEP south and had seen the extremities of LGBTphobia and what people's parents did when they came out of the closet.
I gave her a letter explaining what was going on, detailing almost all of what I said above. When she was done reading it, she told me if I had ever considered that I might have been born intersex and this was my parents' way of hiding it from me and preventing me from finding out. She had has a friend go through a very similar experience; he was treated like this by his parents and only found out he was intersex when he was in his 30's. At first I didn't take the idea seriously. I have cycles. I have a uterus and ovaries (I've had ultrasounds before for the cysts in my ovaries). But then I started to think back to specific things from my childhood:
My parents were absolutely crazy about home videos. They have STACKS of cassette tapes, and when my sister and I were younger, they would make us watch them. One time, we came upon the tape which had my birth as a part of it. When we got to it, my parents fastforwarded past it. Furthermore, we were allowed to see videos of my sister as a baby, completely unclothed, being bathed and such. When I asked where mine were (I was 8 years old when I was watching them and was envious), my parents said, "Oh,well...we can...show those to you...later," and never did. And again, I doubt it's a case of "you were the youngest child and we didn't have time." My parents have CASES of home videos. Additionally, overall, when we would watch tapes of me as an infant, my parents would just....randomly fast forward all of sudden for no reason.
And more specifically: One time when I was 5 my aunt was babysitting my sister and I while my mom was out grocery shopping. It was getting around my bed time, and my aunt decided to give me a bath to help my mom out while she was running errands. In the middle of it, my mom came home, walked into the bathroom, and saw me, unclothed, being bathed by my aunt, and my mom just LOST IT for no reason. She started yelling and screaming and more or less dragged my aunt out of the bathroom. No explanation. And my aunt has never been an untrustworthy person. She could be trusted with children 100%.
And as I thought back to that stuff, it definitely felt....off. So I decided to turn to online research. And when I was looking through info, I found the name of a more obscure condition: Progesterone Induced Viralization. It doesn't affect the chromosomes of a female fetus, but it will masculinize the genitals to varying degrees (enlarged clitoris, adhered labia, etc. etc.). It could happen when a pregnant woman was taking progesterone based drugs while she was pregnant to prevent miscarriages. And when I read that, I remembered that my mom, who had had multiple miscarriages before my sister was born, had said she had been on progesterone the entire time she was pregnant with me. And yes, medically speaking, there is no proof the that sort of drug works for miscarriages, but my parents were DESPERATE for kids, and I have no doubt they would have tried anything even if there wasn't much proof behind it.
And when I read about PIV, I remembered something from when I was around 14 years old. When I was 14, I didn't realize that my mom was phobic, so, one time, after she demanded to know why I wasn't shaving my legs, I made the mistake of telling her that sometimes I felt masculine. Obviously, she flipped out, but she also went on a rant about how my dad would blame her and say that it was her fault for me turning out this way...even though like I've said before, my dad is not phobic. And I'm just thinking...almost ALL that stuff mentioned above has been coming from my mom. All the phobia, the stalking, the forced medical choices. And I'm thinking...maybe I was born with PIV because of the medication my mom was on, and this is just all one...giant guilt complex she has.
To add, I was recently going through the medical records I have access to (only ones from the past 5 or so years) and it turns out my endo doc had actually tested me two years ago for intersex chromosomes during a routine blood test without mentioning it to me (at least, she didn't tell me that she was testing my chromosomes for the purposes of intersex investigation) and then gave my parents the results. And they never told me about it (for the record, I have 46XX). They never told me that I had ever been tested for being intersex.
And when it comes to the external parts...it's been kind of tough for me to tell. I've found that if the PIV isn't that severe, surgery can easily make things look normal by society's standards. But even if it looks normal, the nerves of the clitoris can never be truly preserved no matter how hard doctors have tried. And while I look what could pass for normal down there, I have close to no sensitivity in my clitoris. I can AGGRESSIVLE push, pull, shove it around and at the most it might feel slightly more sensitive than everything else around it. It literally took me almost two weeks to find it (started search three weeks ago and found it about a week ago) because even though I was again, aggressively and forcefully searching around, I never felt it.
This has all just been...it feels like puzzle pieces are falling into place...but I don't know if I'm just overanalyzing or actually crazy. Does this sound like just extreme phobia? Even though my mom is obviously phobic, it's weird that she never even told me "only a man and a woman should be together" like she did my sister. It was more like, even when I was too young to have an identity, she thought there was "something" about me that meant I would be gay or trans. Yet she's never outwardly asked me "Are you gay? Are you trans?"
Does it sound like maybe PIV was actually an option for me? If so, I really don't know what to do. I'm 18 now, but I'm still at home trying to get out (it's a bad home situation too) and my only allowed independence is taking shorts walks in the neighborhood. I'm just really not sure what to do about it and how to pursue figuring it out.
I know this is a LOT, and this IS my first ever post here. So, to anyone who even reads all the way down to the end of it, thank you so much.
