Olivier Morin, AFP / Getty Images
Thea Hillman, who has fought the label "hermaphrodite" for most of her teen and adult life, says she was “heartbroken” Friday morning when she heard South African runner Caster Semenya could be banned from competing as a woman after new tests showed she is a hermaphrodite, having both male and female sex characteristics. Semenya, who reportedly had no idea prior to these tests, has made a very personal discovery in front of the whole world.
“My heart goes out to her and her family, because it is an awful stigma,” says Hilman, 38, of Oakland, CA. “It’s shaming and hurtful. For her to now have to think the whole world is focused on her genitals is so wrong. She is a scapegoat for people’s anxieties around medical gender issues that are confusing.”
Hillman tracks her own “coming out process” as an intersex, and her medically chaotic childhood and teen years, in her book Intersex (for Lack of a Better Word.) (Manic D Press.) “I can completely feel the pain of her family,” says Hillman. “People make you feel like a freak. I spent my childhood going from doctor to doctor, always knowing I was different and that something was wrong.”
In Hillman’s case, she began seeing some masculine signifiers in conjunction with the early onset of puberty symptoms at age two. This began a chaotic medical race to find “a cure for my otherness." She was he diagnosed with a genetic condition, Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), which is a defect that prevents the body from producing the hormone cortisone. It interferes with development in both males and females and can affect normal growth of the genitals. It's hormonal in nature, and different, but falls under the intersex category and she says she is often labeled hermaphrodite. “I’ve had to beg people ‘please don't call us hermaphrodites,’" says Hillman.
“In my case, it is a hormonal imbalance, but I look like a girl and have all the girl parts,” says Hillman, who describes herself as a bi-sexual who dates women. Three months ago she gave birth to her biological son, Abel.
Hillman says she believes the Semenya is being exploited and that her privacy is being violated. “She’s lived as a girl, she doesn’t feel different than that, but now society is going to focus on her physical, private parts that are none of their business,” says Hillman. “To now call her a man and a woman. That is deplorable. The message is ‘you have a body that is in need of fixing.’ There is a tremendous sense of shame that affects your self-esteem and your intimate relationships.“
Hermaphroditism (from Hermes, Greek god associated with male sexuality + Aphrodite, Greek goddess associated with female sexuality) is “an obsolete medical term,” says Dani Williams “a trans-woman” who is the executive director and legal counsel for The Transgender, Gender, Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGI) in San Francisco, CA. “Even clinicians now prefer intersex. It refers to a set of conditions characterized mainly by genitalia which are either "ambiguous" (i.e., not clearly male or female) or at odds with the subject's chromosomal gender.
Williams legally represents about 400 transgender and intersex females who are incarcerated at male prisons throughout the state of California. “These women have been marginalized their entire lives. It’s not a long-shot to directly connect that fact…[which] led to where they are now. They have been told since they were young that they are different, they don’t fit in.”
Hillman says the voice that tells her she doesn't belong is one she has struggled to shut off. However, Friday, she was sorely reminded.
“Listening to this news is completely upsetting to me,” says Hillman, who has emerged as an intersex activist. “People don’t understand how hurtful and frightening it is to have a history of what I call ‘the medicalization’ of your body. I eventually found a community of people who were also intersex and I could identify with, but it’s like a cancer that no one accepts.”
