‘My body isn’t really male or female’
VOGUE SUPERMODEL HANNE GABY ODIELE COMES OUT AS INTERSEX, CALLING INTO QUESTION SEX-ASSIGNMENT SURGERIES DONE ON THOSE WITH AMBIGUOUS GENITALIA
“Is it a girl, or a boy?” Sometimes the answer in the delivery room is, “we’re not sure.”
A Vogue supermodel’s disclosure that she’s intersex and was born with internal testes doctors surgically removed when she was 10 is exposing the controversial history of procedures to “fix” babies born with ambiguous genitalia.
“Hi, I’m Hanne and I was born intersex,” Hanne Gaby Odiele says on a YouTube video for interACT Advocates for Intersex Youth. “This means that my body isn’t really male or female.”
The 29- year- old Odiele, originally from Belgium, has modelled for fashion powerhouses Chanel and Dior. She is also among the one in 4,000 people born with both male and female traits.
Odiele was born with androgen insensitivity syndrome, where, despite being genetically male with male chromosomes, t he body doesn’t respond to testosterone properly, preventing the penis and other male body parts from developing normally.
With the complete form of the syndrome, the child, at birth, looks like a girl. The genitals can have normal female appearance, but with undescended or partially descended testes and an unusually short vagina with no cervix.
Females born with AIS also don’t have a womb, Fallopian tubes or ovaries.
According to a 1998 New York Times article, girls with AIS “often grow into unusually beautiful women, with long legs, clear skin, ample breasts and thick hair; a number of famous models and actresses are thought to have androgen insensitivity syndrome. Yet women with AIS do not menstruate, and aren’t fertile.”
Odiele, who is married, underwent surgery at 18 to reconstruct her vagina.
“It’s very important to me in my life right now to break the taboo,” Odiele told USA Today. “At this point, in this day and age, it should be per- fectly all right to talk about this.”
She’s also speaking out against “unconsented, unnecessary and irreversible surgeries that cause way more harm than do good.”
According to the United Nations, up to 1.7 per cent of babies are born with sex characteristics that don’t fit typical binary definitions of “male” or “female.”
Sex- assignment surgeries, the UN says, can cause infertility, lifelong pain, loss of sexual sensation and mental suffering, and are a viola- tion of human rights when carried out without proper consent, the world agency argues.
According to Odiele, her doctors told her parents that without surgery, “I might develop cancer and I would not develop as a normal, female girl.”
“I am proud to be intersex,” she added, “but very angry these surgeries are still happening.”
According to the Intersex Society of North America, which includes Canadian health- care providers, new- borns with intersex should be “assigned” boy or girl, “depending on which of those genders the child is more likely to feel as she or he grows."
Surgery to make the genitals look “more normal” shouldn’ t be performed until the child is mature enough to decide for him or herself, the organization says, adding “there is no evidence that children who grow up with intersex genitals are worse off psychologically than those who are altered.”
Still, the issue of when — or whether to operate — has been a minefield since the 1950s, when doctors at Johns Hopkins University proposed t he “optimum gender of rearing” approach to treating intersex children. According to the Intersex Society, the Hopkins team doctors could make any child into a “real” girl or boy “if you made their bodies look right,” ideally before 18 months of age.
Today, many ethicists argue surgical sex assignment of newborns or very young children with no capacity to consent should never be performed, as long as there exists no physical harm in delaying surgery. Still, children with ambiguous genitalia continue to be operated on.
While Odiele said, “most people don’t know it exists,” i ntersex and the biology of gender surfaced at last s ummer’s Olympics in Rio when the gold in the women’s 800- metre race went to South Africa’s Caster Semenya, a woman whom The New Yorker described in a 2009 profile as having a torso “like the chest plate on a suit of armor.”
Semenya has long been r eported to be i ntersex ( though she has never confirmed it) with testosterone high above natural levels for a woman. Prior to the suspension of an IAAF ( International Association of Athletics Federations) rule last summer requiring female competitors to race within what was deemed an acceptable level of testosterone, i t was believed Semenya took testosterone- inhibiting drugs to meet the guidelines.