Genderless

Not genderqueer but genderless, possible intersex.

This Is What It’s Like Growing Up With No Gender
“I don’t know what it feels like to feel like a girl or feel like a boy.” Lola Phoenix has a rare condition that stops male and female sex hormones being produced, but the NHS refuses to help. Phoenix tells BuzzFeed News what life is like when you’re agender.
BuzzFeed LGBT Editor, UK
By Patrick Strudwick
Aug. 24, 2015

Some people who do not identify as female or male – or whose identity is a mixture, somewhere in between, not akin to any gender, or simply unfixed – call themselves genderqueer, or gender-fluid. But Phoenix, like many others, prefers “agender” – a total absence, internally, psychologically, of gender.

The West London Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) – one of the NHS’s main clinical hubs for people needing gender-based healthcare – has refused to reduce Phoenix’s breasts. Phoenix produces the letter the consultant psychiatrist Dr Andrew Davies wrote earlier this year to Phoenix’s GP explaining why he would not recommend breast reduction and would, instead, discharge Phoenix. In it, Davies concludes:

“Whilst we acknowledge her strong wish for a smaller breast size and acknowledge her reported internal sense of being agendered we would not countenance endorsement of an irreversible surgical procedure unless the individual had been able to demonstrably consolidate a social transition including name change to the preferred gender role.”
[…]
“I have septo-optic dysplasia [SOD],” says Phoenix, before explaining that this rare disorder comprises malformations, present from birth, that include an underdeveloped optic nerve, a dysfunctional pituitary gland, and the total absence of a small part of the brain called the septum pellucidum.

“So I’m blind in my left eye and I don’t make a lot of hormones – cortisol [the stress hormone], thyroid hormones, oestrogen, testosterone, or growth hormone.”
[…]
It took doctors three months to diagnose the condition after Phoenix, then named Amanda, was born. The baby spent the first six months of their life in hospital, jaundiced, premature, and with a body temperature that frequently plummeted to inexplicably low levels. Some babies die before doctors diagnose SOD; before Phoenix was diagnosed, the medical staff were so baffled they resorted to extreme measures to try to keep baby Amanda safe.

Nature is amazing with all its variety but humans don’t like people they can’t fit in to the binary gender boxes. We like to fit thing in to a nice list diagnosis; she is not trans, so she doesn’t fall under any treatments for trans people. You would think that somewhere in the 68,000 ICD-10 codes they could find one to help her,