Finding the Words

This excerpt by Martha Coventry was originally published on the Intersex Society of North America's website in 1997. It can be viewed in its entirety at http://www.isna.org/books/chrysalis/coventry

"When I was growing up, and well into adulthood, I used to have a waking nightmare that a squad of men in uniforms would arrive at my door, take me into the night and execute me for not being a real woman. In my mind, they were always justified and I never raised my voice in protest. When my youngest daughter was two and I was 35, I was incapacitated nearly to the point of self-destruction by some unknown shame. I began intensive therapy, desperate to discover why I felt so bad, so tainted, so wrong. One Sunday morning, feeling inches away from disaster, I called my therapist. “I don’t know if this is important,” I told her, “but I had this operation.” There. I had said it out loud, and in that instant a tiny sliver of light appeared.

I knew nothing of what had been done to me when I was six years old. One evening, my mother came into the bathroom where I was playing in the tub. She told me that the next day I would have to go to the hospital for an operation. I remember something rushing out of me at that moment, like wind through a closing door. Did I put my hands down to protect the clit that stuck out innocently from between my labia? Not a word of explanation was ever given for the surgery, and when they cut out my clit, they cut out my tongue. I could not cry out to save myself, and that stifled scream wedged in my throat, blocking my voice. Endless fears about who and what I was took the place of words and they settled like darkness over me.

At age eleven or twelve, I had my first orgasm. Somehow I had brought myself to the edge and I just touched the opening to my vagina and it happened. Shockingly. Perhaps it was this new and powerful experience of pleasure from a place that held so much pain that made me determined to find out the truth about my body. A few nights later I crossed the living room, my bare feet on the cool cork squares carrying me towards my parents, the two people who were my only safety. They sat at the dining room table. Big black and white photos of my sisters and me were laid out under the light. My mother picked mine up and I heard the word “boy” come out of her mouth. Fear heaved in me. I was a boy. I was supposed to be a boy. It was too late to stop myself. “What was that operation I had?” I blurted, as my gut tightened against the blow of the answer. My father, a surgeon, looked at me. The father I loved with abandon. The father who agreed to let this be done to me. The father who cherished me above all else, turned and, with no idea of what his words would do to the rest of my life, said, “Don’t be so self-examining.” The moment of silence that followed that brusque dismissal lasted for almost twenty-five years.

In warfare there is a technique called sapping. Saps are trenches that are dug underground, unseen, silently, beneath an enemy’s fortifications. Eventually the walls collapse under their own weight. To be lied to as a child about your own body, to have your life as a sexual being so ignored that you are not even given the decency of an answer to your questions, is to have your heart and soul relentlessly undermined. The thing that makes you wild and free is insidiously crippled. To reclaim that childhood state of wildness, you have to rescue your own life and learn to speak about who you are. The life you had no power to save when you were three weeks, or eighteen months, or six years old, or thirteen, you have to save at twenty-eight, or thirty-six or fifty-five. You have endless chances. And it is never too late."

The editor encourages you to read the rest of this powerful memoir at http://www.isna.org/books/chrysalis/coventry