Follow-up On “God Doesn’t Make Mistakes”

After I posted “God Doesn’t Make Mistakes” I found another article about intersex, this time it was about a woman who was raised as a boy.

Lady Colin Campbell: 'My father said I should take rat poison’
As Germany recognises a 'third sex’, Julia Llewellyn Smith talks to the controversial socialite Lady Colin Campbell, who was wrongly raised as a boy
The Telegraph
By Julia Llewellyn Smith
02 Nov 2013

Lady Colin “would have been one who would have qualified for the German remedy”. She was born with genital deformities, which led to her being registered as a boy and christened George William Ziadie, even though doctors would later confirm she was biologically female.

“The international protocol in those days was to do what they did; it was perfectly standard. In 1949, the feeling was that it was infinitely better to give a handicapped child a little plus, and male was much better than female.”

From around the age of three, however, it was clear to everyone who knew her that Georgie, as she’s always been known, was a girl. She dressed in shorts and T-shirts – “but that’s what all children in Jamaica wear, so it made no difference” – but played with dolls and loved sewing. “Cousins would say to my mother: 'Why is Georgie being brought up as a boy?’ Still, my gender wasn’t that big a deal until I hit puberty. Then it became a real issue.”

As I have said many times, we have an internal sense of our maleness and femaleness. We know what gender we are not because society tells us or the way we are raised, but an internal knowledge of our gender.

Her trauma didn’t end there, but at age 16 her parents tried to force her to take testosterone,

But when her parents found out, they placed her in the hands of a sadistic husband-and-wife medical team. They hospitalised her “for the most terrifying three weeks of my life”, forcibly injecting her with male hormones that made her voice begin to drop, her nipples to shrink and hair to develop on her upper lip.

She put her foot down and treatment ceased. But for the next five years, her father continued to refuse to help her. “He used everything in his power to prevent the inevitable denouement” – in other words, allow his son to live as a daughter.

“Our family was extremely well known and he would have done anything to avoid publicity and embarrassment,” she continues. “I remember walking with him from the owners’ and stewards’ car park upstairs to our box at the racecourse. People were staring, because my situation was sufficiently well known, and although I wore trousers it was very clear I was not a boy. You could see to him it was the worst ordeal of his life.

“The only way out he could conceive was that I should commit suicide. He told me: 'The one solution to your problem is a dose of rat poison.’”

If you read “As Nature Made Him” you will see the same thing happened to him; David Reimer always knew he was a boy. No matter how much people told he was a girl or they tried to force him to live like a girl he knew deep inside that he was a boy.

No one can say “that is the cause” just like no one can say why we are left-handed, our gender identity is internally programed and cannot be changed.

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Alice Dreger works with people at the edge of anatomy, such as conjoined twins and intersexed people. In her observation, it's often a fuzzy line between male and female, among other anatomical distinctions. Which brings up a huge question: Why do we let our anatomy determine our fate?