I was born in 1971 in a tangle of biological tubing and medical confusion - blue as a drowned smurf, gasping, metres long umbilical knotted like a sailor's mistake. The doctor took one look, hoisted me up like a prize marlin, and said, "This one's gonna be tall!" He had no goddamn idea. Nobody did. They all thought I was a boy, which was the first in a lifelong chain of major bureaucratic fuckups by a lazy universe.
They sliced me open before I could form a memory. The first surgery - one of many - an initiation rite into the church of fix it so it looks normal. They carved and stitched, rebranded the body before the mind had fully checked in. Years later I'd find the scars like hieroglyphs from a religion I never consented to join.
Age Three: I swallowed three months of birth control pills like they were candy. My mother panicked, I got pumped full of milk and prayers. Looking back, I started on estrogen twenty something years early - God bless the accidental prophet in me.
Age Five: my best friends were girls, because of course they were. The boys were loud and smelly and interested in strange ballistic objects. The girls, though - they were warmth. Human voices, conspiratorial laughter, gentle trickery. My people, and a sense of home I couldn't name yet.
Age Six: I was driven to Sydney for "undescended testicles," which was a hell of a euphemism for whatever clandestine carpentry they actually did down there. They told my parents one thing, my body started to tell another. I wouldn't decode even half of it 'til my fifties.
The years blurred into pain and confusion. Stomach cramps, blood in urine, doctors with smirks that could kill empathy on sight. "Psychosomatic," they'd say. "Hypochondria." Fuck them. My body was screaming in a language no one cared to translate. I learned the anatomy and lyrics of dismissal and negligence.
Age Fourteen: My hips had grown wide and my chest ached in the shower. I wept. "Make me one or the other," I begged a God who probably shrugged on a cigarette break.
Age Twenty-four: A heatwave night, ceiling fan barely turning, and I whispered - half delirious but fully alive "I am a woman." That sentence cracked open the world like a thunderclap and seeded a whole new life. The universe didn't reply, but it did shift its weight with a chuckle.
Then came the hormones, the doctors, the disbelievers. The estrogen and spironolactone. My body softened like wax in the sun. I grew into something tall and strange and beautiful - a walking contradiction with long legs and a scarred history. And the only part of any of it I knew for sure was I liked it.
Hope was a drug. Depression was a goddamn sport. But the changes - oh, the changes - were holy. The mirror stopped being an enemy and became a witness. Years went by. Pain came and went like a bad landlord. Blood in the urine again, "That's normal for some," "It's IBS," "it's in your head." said the doctors. My gallbladder was on the wrong side; my liver threw a party on the left of my ribcage. They told me to diet when I had pneumonia. I nearly died. Doctors became ghosts I tolerated for paperwork but nurses became saviours.
Then came the betrayal - the lovebombing friend, a freak gone nuclear. Deadnaming, online poison, the endless bad theatre of identity wars. I survived by laughing at the absurdity of it all and the realisation that all of life was this surreal. December 8th, 2009 at 6pm I stopped giving a damn.
That was liberation disguised as surrender.
Fast-forward to 2024. Fifty-two years old. Back on hormones after a year or two too long without, out of laziness. Flushes, sweats, the great menopausal circus. Then came the pain again. Deep, lower than gut, familiar in a way that made the hairs on my neck rise. ER visits again and again. Scans, shrugs. They said maybe anxiety, maybe adhesions. Consciously I feared but somewhere underneath I knew better.
Then - the call.
"You have a uterus," my GP said, voice bright with disbelief. "And an ovary. Maybe two."
It was the moment the universe winked and whispered, "Gotcha."
Fifty-three years of confusion resolved with an ultrasound, an MRI, and a karyotype in one single month that fed a ludicrous, glorious truth: I am an intersex woman. A chimera, a mosaic, a human-human hybrid. A myth that forgot she was real. And suddenly, the decades made sense. The cramps, the blood, the cycle, the whispers from the deep interior. I'd been ovulating for forty years in the background of a mistaken identity. Every ER dismissal, every misdiagnosis - all of it recontextualised by the simple revelation that my body didn't care about bureaucratic paperwork or names because she'd always known who she was.
The second diagnosis: Stage II endometriosis. The moral: don't fuck with the cosmic blueprint ‘cos you get what you get.
I'm 6'6", greying in asymmetric patches, half miracle, half bad joke, but wholly myself. I've been trans, I've been misread, I've been mislabeled. I am a cathedral built out of contradictions, and every brick hums with the ache of being alive.
Some nights I still whisper, "I am a woman." And now, the universe laughs softly and replies,
"You always were."
It happened sometime after the realisation that I'd been right all along.
I was sitting in the car park outside the clinic, clutching the printout that said Uterus: just look at this goddamned thing!, and I could swear I heard music. Not heavenly harps - more like the slow thumping bassline of the cosmos laughing at its own joke.
I blinked, and the world cracked open like a dropped egg. The wind turned violet. The clouds gathered as audience. And then they arrived - a council of shimmering, muttering deities shaped like anatomically correct diagrams from a biology textbook gone feral.
The Uterus Gods. Maiden Mother Crone in some kind of whittled down version not because there's no more to womanhood but simply to fill in the hole in me just uncovered.
Three of them - one young, sleek and glittering like an ultrasound image made of mercury, one ancient and covered in bloody stretch marks, and one middle-aged - nervous and twitching, smoking a cigarette from a black & gold box labeled HRT.
They sat me down in an ethereal no-space waiting room made entirely of paper gowns and half-finished hospital forms.
"About goddamn time," said the eldest. "Fifty-three years you've been ignoring our calls."
"I thought I didn't have you," I said.
"Classic gaslighting," said the twitchy one, flicking ash into a specimen cup. "They tell you we're not there so you stop listening. You never stop listening, though, do you?"
"I thought it was just cramps," I said, a little defensive. "Phantom pain. Hormone weirdness."
The glittering one leaned in, eyes bright, and red. She laid a hand on my shoulder "Pain is the language of the silenced organ, babe. You were fluent before you could speak."
The older God interrupted "You never thought that yourself though, did you?. Others did, didn't they."
It was an accusation, not a question. I wanted to cry, but the tears came out as glittering estradiol droplets that floated around the room like slow pearlescent fireworks.
"Listen," I said, "I spent my whole life thinking I was just.. broken. Wrong wiring. Missing pieces from someone else's model kit."
"Sweetheart," said the eldest God, "you were custom-built. You're the prototype that remembers we were never binaries in the first place. You're not an error - you're a fucking beta release that's just hit Golden Master."
The nervous one grinned, stubbed out her cigarette on a hospital invoice, and said, "You've got forty years of backlogged ovulations by the way, my dear. We've been doing the paperwork ourselves. Your turn to catch up on the maintenance."
"Maintenance?"
"Oh yeah," she said, fishing a glowing clipboard out of thin air. "Every cycle logged. Every burst follicle noted. You think your pain vanished into nothing? Nah, it all went into the database. You've been quietly menstruating in the footnotes of medical history."
I started laughing - the manic, free laugh of a woman whose life just made too much sense.
"So what now?" I asked. "What's the plan? Am I supposed to start burning sage and leading the revolution?"
The eldest god smiled, wide and slow. "No, darling. You just keep living. Keep telling them what they don't want to hear. Keep being tall, and inconvenient, and beautiful. Every word you speak is a sermon to those who were told they were wrong about themselves."
The glittering one handed me a cup of tea made of starlight and uterine lining. "Welcome home," she said, brightly. "We missed you!"
Then they dissolved back into the air, leaving the smell of copper and divine mischief. I looked down at my hands - shaking, holy, who knows which chromosomes in which fingers - and I realised I wasn't hallucinating. Not exactly.
It was communion with myself.
In the waiting room I sat with two other patients half my size. Like dreams of ever shrinking doorways, or folded up unable to breathe inside a half-sized car, I felt like I didn't fit in every sense of the term. The magazines were all about "Women's Wellness," which felt a bit like handing the survivor of a shipwreck a brochure for luxury cruises.
The stall smelled like latex gloves and disappointed deities at my forty-year-belated grease & oil change. I was sweating through my paper gown, high on equal parts anxiety and antiseptic.
Then the door opened and he arrived - my gynaecologist. My actual fucking gynaecologist - a calm and withered storm in a houndstooth coat, hair like a platinum fox who's seen too much. His eyes said I've delivered triplets in a flood and still made it to happy hour.
He shook my hand like he was defusing a bomb. "Ah," he said, reading the chart. "Our… remarkable patient."
The word remarkable hung in the air like a stunned bat.
He pulled up the scan - the greyscale oracle. Scrolled through my innards like a reverent hacker. A uterus. An ovary. Possibly two. Definitely divine mischief.
"So," he said, in the tone of a man trying to explain quantum mechanics to a toaster, "you appear to have a… functioning internal reproductive system." Doctor speak for your existence is already undoing a few assumptions.
I stared. "You mean I'm -"
"- complicated," he interrupted gently, which again is doctor-speak for holy shit, you're rewriting textbooks.
I leaned back in the chair trying to steady myself but it felt more like the whole room needed it. Ceiling lights hummed like dying insects. He clicked through images, each one a Rorschach test of identity.
"This is your uterus," he said, as though introducing a celebrity, one fat and flopped forwards over the pillow of my bladder. No elegantly reclined goddess this one, she just looked tired.
"Pleased to meet me," I said, slowly, leaning forward into myself.
He didn't laugh. He was in research mode.
I lay on the table, and paper crinkled. He poked, prodded, palpated - the sacred rites of modern medicine. Pain bloomed like fireworks.
"Sorry," he said, "you're very tender."
"Story of my life."
He smirked despite himself, then turned serious again.
"You know," he said, "you've got more internal plumbing than most of my patients."
"Built like a Swiss Army knife." I said.
He nodded, typing furiously into the computer clacking like prophetic knucklebones. "Chimeric intersex, perhaps ovotesticular DSD. Fascinating…"
"Fascinating's what people say when they don't want to admit they're terrified," I said.
He gave me that look doctors give when they realise you're giving more than their usual sort of specimen - you're alive in there.
We talked history. Childhood surgeries. Mystery scars. The great cover-up of biology. He asked about cycles, hormones, pain. I answered like a witness under oath in a trial for existence, until I saw he was looking for the satisfaction of curiosity and not food for dismissal.
At one point he stopped, looked up from the chart, and said, almost reverently "And how are you. In there," he tapped my forehead. "the person. This is a lot. Are you…".
I didn't let him finish. I said I felt like I was floating through space with no handholds. Shot up like some sputnik spinning about and nobody coming to save me. I felt like I'd gone from boy to approximation of something I hoped for, and now it felt like I was there all along. Like I was a hypermasculinised woman at heart. I asked "Is that what I am, what I always was?"
"That much is apparent." It hit like lightning and landed somewhere warm.
All the misdiagnoses, the wishful thinking, the casual cruelty - it reformed into a single, less terrifying story: a body that had known itself and kept receipts.
I said, "You've just told me I've spent half my life in the wrong chapter of the anatomy textbook."
He shrugged, almost smiling. "Better late than never."
He printed the report, the holy writ. Stage II endometriosis. Uterus intact. Ovary thriving, but after all this time things are a little sticky in there.
He handed it to me like a relic.
"You're healthy," he said. "Remarkably so. Keep an eye on the pain, I'll send your GP notes. You're an unusual woman, but a woman all the same."
Unusual woman.
That was the punchline the universe had been writing for five decades. I walked out under fluorescent lights that looked suddenly like halos. The nurse smiled the kindest smile - or maybe she just wanted the exam room back.
Either way, I felt ten feet tall, newly minted and everything read as joy. Outside, the world looked sharper. I laughed until I cried, right there in the parking lot. Because at last, after half a century of paperwork and pain, the world had finally caught up with my body. And the Uterus Gods, somewhere in the sky above were clinking their starlit teacups and saying,
"Told you so."
The sky above the highway was a dirty bruise of sunset when I left his rooms. The city was behind me - a sprawl of concrete confessionals, the stink of everything that could make bad air but strangely good coffee. Ahead lay the open road, bitumen shimmering like liquid mercury in the low light. I was a tower of exhausted divinity, high on diagnosis and disbelief, with half a tank of petrol and a head full of ghosts.
The GPS sounded drunk. "Turn left," she said, then "Recalculating," then "Turn left again." Typical. I flicked the instructions off. Even the satellites didn't know what to do with me.
I drove through the slow bleed of dusk into the dark, and one by one they appeared with me, every version of me that had ever been denied, misnamed, and dismissed.
Three-year-old me in the backseat, sticky with birth-control sugar, grinning like a mad scientist. Fourteen-year-old me staring out the window, chest aching, whispering prayers to an absentee God. Twenty-four-year-old me on that summer night, whispering "I am a woman" to the ceiling fan.
The versions that had been told "psychosomatic," "wishful thinking," "lucky to get HRT." and that most absurd of lines "lay off the chili, it's not good for you".
All of them crowded into the car, quiet, watching the neon slide by and finding a new place to sleep in memory.
"See?" I said to them. "We weren't crazy."
They didn't answer and they didn't have to. The silence felt like forgiveness.
I wanted to talk to everyone who'd ever doubted me.
To the doctors who wrote 'anxious' in their notes - I wanted to send them a fuck-you card made of ultrasound prints and righteous fury "Turns out I was right you bastards."
To my parents, too young and scared to understand what they'd signed away, I wanted to say "You did your best with the map you were given but it was upside down Mum."
To my younger self, the one who cried in the shower "You made it, sweetheart. You just spent a bit too much time undiscovered."
The road hummed beneath like a mantra. A crescent moon rose like a smirking grin behind me over the horizon, a pale half-hidden ovary in the night sky. Somewhere out there, the Uterus Gods were probably hitchhiking, cackling, leaving glitter in servo stops, comforting other lone travelers.
Past the mountains and into the tablelands the highway emptied. Just me, the road, and the whisper of wind through open windows. I could feel every scar like a map of old wars, every cell humming with the electricity of truth.
I laughed until I cried, then laughed again.
For the absurdity. For the beauty. For the sheer goddamn rightness of it all.
When I finally reached home, the house looked… different? No, just truer. I parked the car, stepped into the night air, and it felt like stepping into a body that had been waiting fifty-three years for me to arrive.
Inside, I peeled off my clothes and stood before the mirror. Tall, scarred, alive. I touched my abdomen low, whispered to the ache that had followed me my whole life, and it whispered back, soft and certain: We're home.
I climbed into bed. The sheets were cool and kind.
The Uterus Gods, the ghosts, the past - they all folded themselves quietly into the dark.
And for the first time in decades, I slept the sleep of the true.
Later, in months that should have been quieter - I went back. A cystoscopy, done under lights that smelled faintly of industrial bleach and human denial, and the slightly confused urogyno's voice humming through half-sedated corridors.
The procedure was supposed to be clinical, sterile, a line in the ledger. What they found was not. A pathway - a fistula, a goddamn bridge - leading to my cervix. A map laid bare, and with the soft authority of someone trained to call catastrophe "tidy," my explorer said, "You'll just feel a pinch," as he took a biopsy.
If I'd been fully conscious and armed with a little more indignation I would have clocked someone.
"Just a pinch," indeed - a phrase that could launch a thousand lawsuits. The pinch lasted long enough to be criminal. He said it like a man describing a papercut; I felt it like a betrayal. If not for sedation and the tender levity of my own survival instinct, I would have been a single-moment riot in an otherwise composed hospital.
Later, my best friend would say "Welcome to womens' health my dear." I felt every word of it.
The results came back with the bluntness of pathology: A free upgrade to stage IV endometriosis. Just like that, the thread that stitched my history into chaos was illuminated - the deep, invasive, subterranean architecture of pain I'd carried like contraband.
It explained the cycles of agony dismissed as temperamental nerves, the blood read as a medical joke, the decades of being told "it's in your head, maybe eat less chili." And then slowly like a tide, like a small miracle that insists on not being dramatic - life resumed.
Not resumed in the old way; reconstructed, re-anchored in an anatomy that finally matched my inner weather. I found my handholds and stopped spinning. HRT adjustments were clinical and spiritual in equal measure, apps and pills and the odd holy nurse who mended not just the flesh but my trust.
The pain continued but now it had a reason for its lease. Human psychology can be a fickle thing, but a little understanding goes a long way.
Eighteen months later, I'm me. Not the old me who learned to read the world through bruises and dismissal, but a me who has the vocabulary for her own body and the legal tender of self-compassion and understanding. Two metres tall, half-myth, half-honest, half brother but all sister, with a scattering of hair that went grey in pretentious patches as if to illuminate the margins of my life.
I am all scars and all luminous in ways the mirror used to refuse. I crush on everyone; I love with the reckless generosity of someone who knows the price of being seen. I'm simultaneously tired of it all and overjoyed at all the old made new again simply by who I'm experiencing as.
Sometimes, in the dark when the house hums and the moon hangs there like a red metaphor in the sky, I whisper that summer-night sentence: "I am a woman." Now the sentence has context, history, anatomy, and a chorus line of gods who nod like co-conspirators.
The doctors who once shrugged now file a new kind of respect into my chart. The Uterus Gods, I imagine, are still hitchhiking somewhere in the background quietly annotating the truth into every record, every chart, every result.
I've written angry letters in my head to the people who labeled me - to those who treated me as an interesting case study in self-delusion rather than a living soul full of experiences - and mostly I've learned to release them like old peppermint wrappers. My parents were given a map they didn't know how to read; they tried. The clinicians who said "psychosomatic" were sometimes cowards, sometimes incompetent, sometimes just distilled humanity in need of better training. I forgive the lot because otherwise the lack of it would become another prison.
I sleep now in the slow, clean way a woman does when she knows the currency of truth.
It's not that the pain is gone - pain is a stubborn, articulate and insistent tenant and it still defines the lease of my life. But it sits in a room downstairs now, allowed its dignity. In the mornings the light is honest and cruel in equal measure; it shows the lines, the scars, the laugh-marks. I tend them like a gardener tends a riotous, beloved garden.
So here is the final communique: I am an intersex woman who once lived half a life built on other people's assumptions. I have scars that read like secret histories now revealed, and an anatomy that taught the world something it was loath to learn. I have been called remarkable. I have been called hysterical. I have been told "it's just a pinch."
I have been right.
Almost eighteen months after the ultrasound that revealed an entire world, after the diagnosis that flipped my portrait around and made it more beautiful, I am me. Not a project. Not a paradox. Not a clinical curiosity. Just a tall, improbable, incandescent human being who finally has the vocabulary to tell the truth aloud.
The universe once whispered, "Gotcha."
Now I chuckle, crank the stereo, and reply, "Yeah. Gotcha back."
Karen Carpenter starts off:
I'm on top of the world lookin' down on creation
And the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I've found, ever since you've been around
Your love's put me at the top of the world.
And damned if it's not a love song from me to myself.