Reflections On Phoenix, My Intersex Son

    I've only really written on this subject before in passing, but I don't think I've ever really written on it directly. The truth is my views on these matters have changed significantly over the years, especially as they have more recently struck much closer to home. Now, I have received permission to talk about this more publicly in the hopes that it might help others as well.

     Intersex is a condition where a person is born, to varying degrees, with both male and female anatomy or characteristics. The type of intersex most people are probably familiar with is hermaphroditism, where the anatomy is more or less fully formed and functional for both, but there are other less well known forms such as testicular femininity, where a person's testes never descended and they have a vagina but no ovaries. Other forms are things like XX male where the person is chromosomally female but anatomically male. There's a range of possibilities for variance where the development of the genitalia and physical sex is concerned.

     I first learned about hermaphroditism when I was a kid. To be honest, I thought it was weird but kind of cool and even made the person just a bit special. I didn't really know the extent of what was possible until a documentary I watched about not only the condition of intersex and ambiguous genitalia, but also what used to be the response of the hospital delivering the baby once it was discovered, that is, that they would almost always automatically assign the baby as a girl and perform "gender corrective" surgery almost on the spot, often almost forcing parents to agree to it. My understanding is that this practice has become less prevalent as it was discovered that just performing a surgery and raising the child as a girl doesn't always result in them staying a girl by their choice. Many who now choose to be young men were "gender corrected" at birth and forced to be raised as girls because of their ambiguous genitalia. Besides the documentary and other media I've engaged with about this issue, we also went over it in my psychology coursework in college. Fortunately, this practice of forced assignment has become less and less over the years since those documentaries were filmed. In some ways, knowing this however has informed my understanding and beliefs about transgender people as well. How do you know this did not happen with someone who was raised one gender and believes themselves to be another? There are few if any real publicly available records about how many of these surgeries were done on children shortly after birth.

     I have three children, all of them grown adults now. My daughter Tressa, my son Aidan, and Phoenix, born Kalissa. A few years ago, after some pretty intense personality and identity issues which I once wrote about on Phoenix's behalf, Kalissa began identifying as male, absolutely convinced that "she" was actually a "he" and was born that way. Heidi and I had changed Kalissa's diapers when "she" was little, and while Heidi noticed something a little bit different, nothing really struck her as completely off. We raised Kalissa as a girl, and really most people who first met her and Tressa thought they were twins even though they were a year and a half apart. But after the intense identity crisis, even involving multiple "personalities," Kalissa's identity settled as male, not female, and he took the name "Phoenix" to reflect this.

     To be honest, this hasn't been the easiest of transitions for the rest of us, and in some ways I think we thought at first that it might just be a phase she was going through. But as the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, he struggled with it. On the one hand, he didn't want to upset us, but on the other hand his largely female appearance felt like a lie and sent him into many depressive states. He asked us to use the male pronouns with him, and to refer to him as male, and we have really tried to honor this request, but it was hard being asked to completely change how you refer to someone you've known for over two decades. The brain doesn't make that switch easily. And so we would slip up and he would correct, but it hurt him every time. And besides, as far as we knew, he was anatomically female. Then he told us he found his "boy parts." We didn't know what to think, and we weren't going to ask to see them. Again, at least a year went by like this.

      Finally, maybe to prove to himself he wasn't crazy, he took a picture of his genitalia and showed it to his mother. Heidi was shocked, and even describing it to me (I was spared the photo) became incredibly emotional as she described it. Phoenix had both kinds of anatomy. Neither appearing fully formed per se, but they were there, and as he describes it, his male genitalia is at least partly functional. His genitalia at this stage of his life can only be described as "ambiguous." Phoenix wasn't crazy, and we should have listened more deeply sooner. Phoenix is intersex, and as intersex has chosen to identify as male.

     The truth is, it was probably a blessing that this wasn't caught when he was born. Given who we were and how we thought in 2000, we might have opted for the surgery and done far more damage to him even as we would have thought we were helping. How did it happen? We actually have a theory that can only be verified through some intensive genetic testing. Phoenix has a second set of teeth under his adult teeth in addition to his double set of genitalia. He's also remarked that one hand doesn't quite match the other. We wonder if he wasn't originally conceived as two fertilized eggs and then one was absorbed into the other as a chimera. It's speculation, but it's something for us to look into.

      Why am I making this public? First, because Phoenix wants people to understand that he is not transgender as we first originally thought. As far as he is concerned, he was born male but with female attributes as well. He wishes to be seen as a straight male instead of a transgender male or a "queer" female. At this juncture, it's a reasonable request to honor given what we now know. It's not my place, or anyone else's place to tell him who or what he is. Second, because I want people to understand that Phoenix and other intersex people are not aberrations or "mistakes" that need to be corrected. This assumes that somehow God made a mistake when He made Phoenix or any other intersex person. I assume most people can understand the inherent flaw in that logic. There is male, there is female, and yes, there is that small portion of the human population that is somewhere in between, and they are not mistakes. They are a beautiful testament of God's design meant to teach us both compassion, and respect for the the maleness and femaleness in all of us.

      I imagine like many parents in my position, I still have trouble calling Phoenix my son and Tressa and Aidan's brother, but I'll get over it. If I love and respect him as who God made him to be, I will do so. Knowing what I know now, and from where I started, I will defend his choice to be who he is because it's the choice which God gave him regardless of what anyone else demands he be or not be. I believe that the love which is commanded and required of those who call themselves disciples of Jesus demands no less.