You might have heard the statement “if you are born of a woman, then…” or “if na woman born you, then…”. When you hear it, what comes to mind?
In most conversations, especially in Nigeria, that statement is a call to validate one’s existence. And if you cannot, at any point, ascertain that you came from a woman, then you are considered abnormal. The question now is: has anyone stopped to consider that a child can come from a man? Absurd. I agree. It is not ‘normal’, but have you considered the possibility?
“Where have you ever heard that a man is pregnant? That does not exist in this part of the world, I can tell you that but I hear the whites have such cases”.
Anonymous
Well, a lot of myths are in circulation on the topic of intersex fertility, many of them spread either by doctors or by persons who have no idea of what the condition is.
The typical Nigerian insists that there are only two sexes that are required by nature in order for the human species to continue to thrive. What most persons have not been able to come to terms with is the fact that sex is a spectrum. Between and outside the male and female genders, exists people who are either both or none. About one in one hundred people have some intersex characteristics. However, in our society today, they are hidden away.
What medicine does when it frames intersex people as “tragic” is present them as usually infertile. The fact, however, is that many intersex people are capable of reproducing. In fact, some of the procedures or surgical steps taken to “normalize” their bodies often are the things that render them infertile.
Read also: Intersex People Are Not Homosexuals
The challenge of most intersex people is that accurate diagnosis can not be done at infancy. They are supposed to wait for their bodies to develop before any decisions are made. Parents are supposed to wait too, but they don’t. For example, children born with external testes but absent or very small phalli are often surgically assigned, female. The removal of their testes, of course, renders them infertile. Doctors frame these children as being born “incapable of reproduction” because of their small or absent penises, but this is laughable. Deep penetration is not even necessary for pregnancy to occur. Size, we know, is really is irrelevant to the delivery of sperm.
In framing intersex individuals as usually infertile, doctors present procreation by intersex people as something that is impossible. And when there are cases where it happens, they call it a medical miracle and the doctor who facilitates this is called a hero.
The topic of intersex fertility was very popular in medical journal articles in the first half of the 20th century. Then, doctors wrote about “cases of hermaphroditism” encountered as adults by people born as intersex. But such is not the case today.
Since there is no reason why intersex people should be born with less capacity for fertility that is in the past, there are two possible explanations. Either medical interventions are rendering more intersex individuals infertile, or doctors have no incentive to publish what they would deem “sex assignment failure.”
But one can not really blame people on the rural areas where this is rampant. Writing about it as we are now doing is one way to put the word out there. This kind of advocacy is not a one-off. It is something that will have to continue so it can sink in.
Intersex people are not tragic figures due to infertility. Some of them don’t want children, and some of them adopt. Some of them do indeed produce children themselves. The corrections they are often subjected to is what ruins their chances of reproducing.