Beyond the Closet: Truth, Non-Violence, and the Courage to Be

There is something intimate about coming out to a friend about your instersexuality, especially if it was something hidden from you for over 30 years. Wondering if my semi-fertility was consistent with the variant I am pretty sure I have amassed enough evidence for, I posited that question to Google AI, and after an exchange of my personal and family history, it said it was not only consistent, but also explained the reason I was only semi-fertile in the first place. I then started sharing this with Andy, who is a new close peronal friend who is also intersex.

During my 10 years of marriage to my first wife, despite our sexually activity and lack of birth control, we had only two daughters, five and a half years apart. In my family tree, this in itself is almost a syndrome. I was an only child, and my mother only had one other pregnancy that resulted in a miscarriage. My mother was the oldest of two children, with her sister born 12 years after her. My maternal grandmother was the youngest of two children. Audrey’s sister Olive was 10 years older. The semi-fertility seems to run in the family.

When our family came back from overseas in 1973, my father was stationed at Wurtsmith AFB in Michigan. We lived on base, and I would ride the school bus to Oscoda Elementary School. It was, to me, a huge 3-story red-brick building that stood atop a hill that kids loved sledding down. It had a basement where the custodian kept his office and supplies.

My third-grade class was on the second story of the building, near one end. Mrs. Krutlin, who used to teach in a one-rom schoolhouse when she was younger ruled over the classroom. Along one wall was the cloakroom where we removed our galoshes, hats, gloves, and snowmobile suits, and stored our lunch boxes. My first day of class, she was going over an alphabet chart, and I felt so bored with how far the class seemed to be. It wasn’t long after that we would be taking turns reading from the Dick and Jane books one after another one aisle at a time. There were also a couple of times she brought a reel-to-reel movie that we would watch in class. We watched 1776 and The Little Indian.

Mrs. Krutlin also ruled with a wooden ruler. One day when she was particular upset with the class for not keeping the cloak room neat, she had us all line up at her desk so she could thwack the back of our hand with the ruler. She wasn’t the most fair of teachers.

The school also had a pass policy. If you were caught in the halls during class, you had to have a pass. Mrs. Krutlin had only one shared pass for the bathroom, and she refused to give it out at either the first or last 15 minutes of class. As we were leaving class one day, I saw where the girl in front of me had peed her seat instead of asking for the pass.

This was different that the basement schools in Germany. There, if you had to go, you just went. You walked over to the door, waited if someone was inside, went inside, did your business, and then came out. There was no bathroom police.

Back in the elementary school in Michigan, one day I can in from recess, sat down, and immediately had to pee. I knew there was no way I could hold it for fifteen minutes, so I just got up, went to the bathroom and came back. No big deal.

Back home, I was referred to a psychologist. The school had reported that I had just gotten up, wandered around, and came back with no explanation. I explained my situation to the doctor, who asked how much warning I had when I needed to urinate. When I answered, he ordered an x-ray for my bladder.

When I was called back to the doctor, he explained that I had a distended bladder. This condition was not normal in boys, so they had to refer me to a specialist who would insert a tube through my penis, and then blow up the ballon in the tube to correct the bladder. The nearest specialist was at Wright Patterson AFB in Ohio.

We drove to Ohio that summer, the summer I turned 9. It was explained that I needed to have the procedure done before I turned 10, because nocturnal emissions would make ineligible to serve in the miltary. The reason I peed the bed was because we lived in the rooms on the second floor of our cold military apartments in Michigan, and the urine itself was a lot warmer that getting out of bed and traipsing across the hall. It could also have something to do with not having a lot of time to debate the matter with myself before it was not a question anymore.

Over the next thirty years I doctors that said that even though my testosterone was low, it was "close enough to normal," a doctor diagnose me with hypogonadic hypotropism, a CT scan that showed what looked like evidence of "a sex change operation" two months before I had gender confirmation surgery in Thailand, and photos from the surgery in Thailand that show what appears to be pre-mullerian endometrial tissue.

I had spot bleeding after I healed up from surgery, and that brought concerns from my primary care physician who immediately chemically cautuerized the "granulated tissue" as she saw it. I have had that cauterization applied multiple times and a cyst form that was surprisingly filled with blood that had to be drained.

When I went for voice surgery because my voice had suddenly dropped registers. the doctor noticed that I had feminine shaped vocal cavity and screamer's nodules that were ultimately responsible for my downward shift in voice. He asked if maybe I developed that cavity throught practice or something else? The answer is "something else." You can't train you vocal cavity into a different shape. On his website, he remarks that my voice transition after healing had a decibel change that was unexplainable.

Recently, I discovered the concept of uterine horns, and after researching what they were and how they developed, I took another look at my surgical photos. What I was looking at was undeveloped uterine horns as clear as day, with pointed tips that were the pre-developed cervix. The granulation was undoubtedly my endometrial tissue just doing what it was designed to do. The cauterization more than likely sealed these structures, causing the cyst.

My body is unique, and similar to others who have Pre-Mullerian Duct Syndrome (PMDS). The emergency room Ob/Gyn even remarked at what an "amazing job" the surgeon did, because the internals of my vulva seemed indistinguishable from a "natal female." Now we know the truth. The surgeon was given too much credit, even though his work is amazing, and another doctor dismissed what I was born with as plastic surgery.

I need to be careful now with my doctor's and make sure that they are aware that I have PMDS and encourage them to study what that means, else well-meaning actions can cause unintentional harm.

I started reading The Case of the Murdered Muckraker. It is a new novel by Rob Osler, number two in the Ms. Morrow Investigates series. The setting is 1898 Chicago, and Harriet Morrow, only three weeks into her job as the only female detective for her company has been sent to the settlement houses near an abattoir to investigate the murder of a local muckraker.

Harriet prefers men’s clothing to women’s clothing, and finds herself having to wear her deceased mother’s dress to appear as an “unremarkable” woman so that she fits in better as she investigates the settlement houses and doesn’t violate the anti-crossdressing and lewd Chicago laws. The case’s benefactor insists on it.

When she arrives, she is immediately put to work tending a kindergarten class and carrying coal from the basements. The place is in squalor. Immigrant women have to tend the homes and the large number of children while their husbands are away all day at the factory. Most of them don’t speak English or are willing to talk with Harriet. What little they know of the murdered man they are reticent to share because of their fear of the police.

While she has gained some acceptance at work, Harriet is forced to live in the closet about who she is. While progressive action is happening to try to help immigrants and the poor, that progressiveness is prevented from extending to the queer community (queer being a newly reclaimed word during this era) due to exclusionary religious convictions. The queer community is forced to stay in the closet.

It has taken over a century for people to live outside the closet, and it has taken courage of people who got tired of trying to hide themselves. The act of self-supression can be so self-damaging that it is far healthier to psychologically to take the physical risk of living truthfully and authentically. We can’t go back in the closet. It is not a healthy place to be.

Saturday, October 11 was National Coming Out Day. It reminds us that there is power in truth and in community. We all have a story to share, and stories bring us all together. While it may seem an individual defiant act to come out, it is also a bridge to solidarity—especially when we stand together in mutual support.

I am seeing a lot more violence lately. It seems we all are. In Season 8, Episode 10 of Supernatural, Benny, a vampire resisting violence to satisfy his needs, goes head to head against a hunter who can’t believe Benny gets his blood from a blood bank and is not responsible for the vampire attacks around him. In The Case of the Murdered Muckraker set in 1898, Harriet’s love interest tells her that violent revolution is necessary against the rich who will continue to harm the poor. Just this last week, the President changed his mind about televising on national TV the firing squad execution of a psychologist who turned to violence decades ago after developing secondary PTSD from the tales of soldiers returning from war in Iraq because the psychologist is a parapalegic.

In all of these cases, it was reasoned that violence was necessary, but is it really? What problems do violence solve, if any. Let’s start with the last case. Televising the violent execution would not have solved the issues underlying why the event occurred in the first place, and it would have triggered secondary PTSD across the country. The facts of the case begin with the fact that the psychologist joined the military to help returning vets as a Muslim dedicated to peace. As the soldiers returned from the from in Afghanistan against the war on terror, they were suffering PTSD from the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians murdered by U.S. troops in the quest to capture and kill Osama bin Laden. Telling stories is a effective treatment to help people process the raw emotions in a healthy way.

However, there was little knowledge on secondary PTSD, so when the psychologist heard these stories again and again, with no counseling of his own, the trauma built up until it exploded in the violence of the Fort Hood massacre. Internalizing the war against Muslims, he felt he had to act, and it was a horrifying incident.

Does the psychologist’s violent act merit the execution? Does his execution act as a deterrent? I will argue that it does not. The true deterrent is to analyze what went wrong. Beginning chronologically, we need to have checks on military force that prevents the slaughter of innocent civilians. Next we need to have media reports on what is happening on the ground so that attention can be drawn to injustice. We need a Congress that has a backbone to stop unjustified mass casualties. We need to recognized that secondary trauma can spread, and that even psychologists and chaplains who treat trauma victims should have counseling, especially in the armed forces.

The psychologist needed psychological help and constraining environments. In a moment of self-consternation, they asked for the firing squad as their punishment. We, as a society, and as a culture, need to only resort to violence as necessary for defense.

It has been said that violence is necessary for revolution. I honestly hope not. Yes, people feel desperate when their needs are not met and their rights are denied, but violence very often does not result in the changes needed. Instead, it usually replaces one set of authoritarians with another. The true path to freedom for all is the path of non-violence and diplomacy, a much harder road, but one that pushes toward lasting cultural change. Meeting violence with violence never ends well. There are casualties on both sides. And yes, peaceful resistance can be met with violence. Violence, because of its long lasting harm, must only ever be meted out when it is absolutely necessary, not because it is deemed a path to meeting one’s objectives. We have to find a way to work together without harming one another.

The violent conflict in the Supernatural  episode resulted in the deaths of one or two people, because one or two people saw violence as a solution. Violence only becomes necessary as a defense of last resort. We can be better. We must be better. Whether we are stepping out of personal shadows, untangling the complex narratives of our own bodies, or choosing diplomacy over division, the underlying thread is the same: authenticity is a daily practice of courage. When we refuse to hide—and when we refuse to meet pain with more pain—we build a sanctuary not just for ourselves, but for everyone still finding their way into the light. We cannot go back into the closet, and we do not have to walk the path alone; standing in our truth is the most enduring form of grace we can offer the world.