INTERSEX: A SHADE OF NATURE

Originally published on accesstogoodhealthinitiative.com

In our early ages, we are taught that everything comes with an exact opposite: black and white, good and evil, liquid and solid, men and women etc. We’re told that humans come in two ‘types’, two genders, two sexes. That’s it. But as we mature and begin to experience new things, we come to the realization that everything doesn’t actually have a direct opposite. Everything comes in different shades. It is left for us to understand and accept those shades of nature.

This becomes a bigger issue when one is born in an African socioeconomic culture where everything not understood becomes evil. At some point, it was witchcraft for a woman to have twins, a taboo for a woman to have beards and a total calamity for a boy to act like a girl or vice versa. These cultural defaults make it difficult for the typical African man to adjust or accept something he really doesn’t understand. This leads to countless number of discrimination and abuses upon people who nature decided to make a shade of something else.

It might not have been easy for those wishing to represent a different gender from the one naturally allocated to them because they feel they are in the wrong body. But, what if the body you were born in doesn’t neatly ‘fit’ into being biologically ‘male’ or ‘female’? What then? Such people are referred to as intersex and they face the worst kinds of abuse and humiliation.

Intersex people are those whose anatomy and/or physiology isn’t typically female or male. Instead, intersex individuals often have a mixture of sex related traits and are a unique biological blend of characteristics. Intersex conditions occur in 1 out of 1500 births and this phenomenon is becoming a common condition as the years go by. In most cases, medical intervention cannot correct the condition and intersex people will have to live that way throughout their lives, most times in seclusion. Sometimes intersex variation is identified at birth, due to ‘ambiguous’ genitalia, but in cases where the external phenotype is unaffected, many people do not know their biological differences until puberty or adulthood. There are different forms of intersex conditions:

In some societies where surgery is not an option, the stigma surrounding intersex, and the consequential discrimination, has so much violent outcomes. Most intersex people end up taking their own lives to avoid further humiliation or stigma.

Director of SIPD Uganda, Julius Kaggwa recently commented that: “In many African countries, the traditional way of dealing with perceived sexual ‘abnormalities’ has largely been staying silent – and wishing them away through various kinds of traditional rituals, which often meant killing the intersex infants.”

Hate crimes, such as the killing of 17-year-old Muhadh Ishmael, born with both male and female genitalia, in Kenya two years ago are still very common.

Recently in Nigeria, a boy in Delta State was utterly humiliated and asked to display his female genitalia to be videoed and ridiculed. This video was posted all over the internet with the caption ‘Boy With Vagina Caught’, like it was a crime to be born intersex. No one understood it because the subject of Intersex is not a common term. The boy in the video was raped and yet humiliated by his neighbors for having female genitalia. Such actions should be frowned upon.

We therefore call for the following actions from the Nigerian Government:

1. We call the government to take action to protect intersex persons in Nigeria and promote the knowledge of the condition.
2. That the perpetrators of such offense should be arrested and justice be granted the innocent boy.
3. That the rapist should be arrested and handed over to the police for some legal action to be taken.

In recent years, the UN has begun working to condemn violence against intersexual people and to support their human rights. For this to happen, we need to first understand that being intersex is a natural phenomena caused by variation and chromosomal abnormalities just like albinism, eye colors etc, and should not be used against those who unfortunately fall into that shade of nature. Intersexuality is just part of humanity’s natural diversity. Surely, individuals’ have a right to decide the fate of their own bodies.