Marie Claire Australia December 2009 – Some Notes on Its Article about Intersex

The December issue of Marie Claire Australia has just been published, and it contains an article about intersex for which members of OII Australia were interviewed.

We had hoped that the article would be positive and get things right. It has not. It has done little more than contribute to the morass of disinformation that the Australian and global media have already published about intersex.

Intersex is an issue that should be of interest to all Australians, in fact, to everyone in the world. The prevalence of intersex in the population is, after all, between 1:60 and 1:100.

The title of the article, a special report, is FOR MOST OF US, IT’S SIMPLE: MALE OR FEMALE But what if you’re born somewhere in-between? It is on pages 60 to 66.

We have notes about some of the content of the article, and these follow below.

Cover, Marie Claire Australia, December 2009.

Notes:

• Gina Wilson is not simply an intersex activist from Sydney – she is also President of OII Australia.

• The concept of a “journey” – derived from Joseph Campbell’s male Hero’s Journey monomyth – is not an appropriate mythology to be applied to most intersex people’s lives, especially those of us who are female or neither sex.

• Intersex is not the same thing as Disorders of Sex Development (DSDs).

• We find the invention and use of the term DSD insulting, abhorrent and inappropriate in its application to intersex.

• We are saddened that the article uses the term DSD interchangeably with intersex.

• DSD pathologises intersex and falsely characterizes intersex people as disordered.

• We find the use of and reduction of intersex down to ideologically-motivated constructs like 46, XX DSD, and 46, XY DSD and Ovotesticular DSD insulting, abhorrent and inappropriate.

• “Judy” did not say that real progesterone is banned in Australia.

• Actual progesterone – chemically identical to the progesterone the human body makes – is very different to the artificial substitutes – aka progestins – invented and patented by drug companies.

• “Judy” spoke about doctors refusing to prescribe progesterone, that drug companies do not distribute it in Australia and that it is not available on the PBS.

• She must import her own supplies of micronized progesterone – like Cyclogest or Microgest – from overseas at a high cost.

• She must also import other pharmaceuticals needed for her to live a healthy life – incuding injectable estradiol valerate or estradiol caproate like Progynon Depot. This form is the safest and most effective.

• Oral forms of estrogen are not suitable for lifelong use by intersex people or long-term use by non-intersex people.

Comment from Gina Wilson, one of the interviewees:

I did not say that I had surgery as a child to make me appear more feminine.

I don’t know where that one came from, Julietta. My life story is a bit more complex and nuanced than that.

Despite several very long recorded interviews and e-mail follow-ups with me, this article has factual inaccuracies and does not report DSD as a contested term. Julietta told me she did not speak to a single intersex person who liked DSD, she is aware it is an insulting term to us and yet she was still prepared to put it in there.

Another journalist in the pocket of our oppressors?

Julietta, my eighty-year-old mum, sitting in a nursing home with a chronic illness, is going to read this and so are my siblings. What do you think they will make of your report about my surgeries? What do you think they will make of you reporting I have a “Disorder of Sexual Development”?

You might as well call me a hermaphrodite – it is just as accurate and just as hurtful to me, to my family, to OII and to intersex.

OII struggles against a society that pathologises our difference, a society that often perceives us as freaks. Reporting intersex using the DSD terminology reinforces the notion that we are diseased and in need of a cure.

You did not report your conversation with Gary Warne – the leading Australian paediatric endocrinologist. You told me he said, “If I was intersex I would not want to be called disordered.” That’s a fairly significant omission, Julietta.

Marie Claire Australia Contact Details:

Readers’ comments on Marie Claire Australia web pages for this article:

• Australia
• New Zealand