June.28,2010

My personal experience….

I actually watched this documentary while in Hawaii and I could finally understand my friend back in High School….. she was a woman from the outside, but one day in the lockers I found out she had a penis, but she looked like a girl like me as well. She said she also had the genitals of a girl (actually she was menstruating). This was the reason why she had never kissed a boy… how could she face being in the situation of everyone knowing her difference, her secret? She told me that he parents did not want to discuss it and told her to keep quiet and that everything would be fine as nobody had to know…. so sad. It was our secret, and I kept it. I spoke to her since, and she has gone through surgery. She is now the mother of 2!

Also, one day I scooted a beautiful girl while shopping in Tokyo and asked her to enter the competition. This was end of 2002. She applied, past the audition, but later on she asked me if it was okay to have a penis because she knew she would have to be wearing a swimsuit and did not want to face rejection. I had no idea what to do….. I told her that I would support her if she was to stay and compete. But later on I believe she did not want to face the press, the rumors, the pressure of being different if it was to be revealed somehow. She decided to quit to protect her family… now I think it is a pity because she could have been a role model and a spokesperson for many other women born with 2 sex in Japan. Do you know that each year many babies are born with 2 sex? We are mammals also it is quite understandable that some of us would be hermaphrodite. (In biology, a hermaphrodite is an animal or plant that has reproductive organs normally associated with both male and female sexes)

THE THIRD SEX (from CBC Newsworld documentary)

Someone around you has a secret, a family secret. He or she was born with both male and female genitals. He’s not handicapped nor is he mentally challenged. But he is faced with a continuing unresolved personal issue: should life go on this way?

The strain of not being able to share with others is unbearable, as the frustration of medical dead-ends leads to stress and the issue of being physically a man, but feeling like a woman (or vice versa) can become obsessive or even fatal.

Patrick Manon Patrick Verret, was born intersexed, was raised as a girl and is now living as a man. The sexual identity of a person is usually the first question one asks about a newborn: “Is it a boy or a girl?” To most parents the answer is a simple one. But what about the parents of a child born with both female and male genitals? It’s a reality no one dares to speak about, the so-called third sex. Most people are unaware that this situation exists, and institutions are not designed to recognize a sex outside male and female. The majority of parents of intersexed children still choose surgery to avoid social stigmatism, but many intersexuals are critical of the choices made for them when they were infants. While Dr. Nihoul Fekete thinks parents should determine the sex of their child at birth and that surgery should be performed right away, Vincent Guillot (Paris), the founder of Organization Intersex International, calls the surgery he had as a child a “mutilation”. He describes himself as neither male nor female.

The Third Sex explores the plight of several intersexuals and their families in Canada, France and Thailand. Arthur (Paris) and Patrick (Montreal) were both raised as girls, but in adulthood have decided, with the help of surgery, to live as men. Thai boxer Nong Tum is in the process of becoming a woman while continuing to practice her sport. And the mother of an Ontario boy born with an extra chromosome describes the dilemmas she faces as a parent. There is genuine concern that a child would face devastating public humiliation if their unusual secret is revealed. Patrick Verret Patrick Verret as a man.

In Toronto, some families receive support from Barbara Neilson, a social worker who specializes in the care of intersexed children at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. She understands first-hand, not only the fear and shame of parents from every ethnic community, but also the reality of children face living with a DSD (disorder of sexual development). But more and more, adult intersexuals want to speak out about their situation. Sometimes publicly, but usually through the internet, they’re sharing stories, asserting their unique gender identity, and are often denouncing the mutilation that many say they’ve suffered at the hands of modern medicine.

The world of sport has long been faced with controversy about the gender of some athletes. It became an issue at the Olympic Games in the 1930s when people openly questioned the actual gender of some women athletes. Dr. Patrick Schamasch, the International Olympic Committee’s Medical and Scientific Director, outlines the IOC’s changing approach to gender verification since the 1960s. As they better understood the complexity and difficulty of gender verification they were forced to adopt new rules for competition. The Third Sex was directed by Guilhem Rondot and produced by Mark Collings and Luc Sauv� ( PRB Media, Gatineau, Quebec) in association with CBC Newsworld and Radio-Canada.