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Summary
Summary
From one of the world's foremost intersex activists, a candid, provocative, and eye-opening memoir of gender identity, self-acceptance, and love.
My name is Hida Viloria. I was raised as a girl but discovered at a young age that my body looked different. Having endured an often turbulent home life as a kid, there were many times when I felt scared and alone, especially given my attraction to girls. But unlike most people in the first world who are born intersex--meaning they have genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, and/or chromosomal patterns that do not fit standard definitions of male or female--I grew up in the body I was born with because my parents did not have my sex characteristics surgically altered at birth.
It wasn't until I was twenty-six and encountered the term intersex in a San Francisco newspaper that I finally had a name for my difference. That's when I began to explore what it means to live in the space between genders--to be both and neither. I tried living as a feminine woman, an androgynous person, and even for a brief period of time as a man. Good friends would not recognize me, and gay men would hit on me. My gender fluidity was exciting, and in many ways freeing--but it could also be isolating.
I had to know if there were other intersex people like me, but when I finally found an intersex community to connect with I was shocked, and then deeply upset, to learn that most of the people I met had been scarred, both physically and psychologically, by infant surgeries and hormone treatments meant to "correct" their bodies. Realizing that the invisibility of intersex people in society facilitated these practices, I made it my mission to bring an end to it--and became one of the first people to voluntarily come out as intersex at a national and then international level.
Born Both is the story of my lifelong journey toward finding love and embracing my authentic identity in a world that insists on categorizing people into either/or, and of my decades-long fight for human rights and equality for intersex people everywhere.
Author Notes
Hida Viloria is a writer and intersex activist, chairperson of the Organization Intersex International (OII), and founding director of its American affiliate the Intersex Campaign for Equality, also known as OII-USA. Hida's mission is to obtain equality for intersex and nonbinary people as part of a broader vision for a world that accepts and values difference of every kind.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Viloria, a writer and activist who identifies as both male and female and uses s/he and he/r as pronouns, describes he/r life as an intersex person and what led he/r to become a spokesperson for intersex and genderqueer/nonbinary people. Born in New York in 1968 to parents who had recently emigrated from Central America, the author was raised as a girl and was mostly unaware of he/r anatomical difference from other girls. It was not until s/he was in he/r mid-20s that the author read an article on intersex people and began to piece together clues. Eventually, s/he came to identify as intersex and as someone who experiences he/r gender as fluid. The memoir is written episodically, with scenes arranged in roughly chronological order and introduced with a location and date ("San Francisco, California, May 1996"). The author's childhood and adolescence are touched on, but the majority of the narrative focuses on he/r activist awakening and recent advocacy. The present-tense narrative and recreated dialogue are clunky at times, and readers unfamiliar with certain events and organizations described may wish for more context. Despite these drawbacks, the book will be a valuable resource for those seeking first-person narratives by intersex people. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Writer-activist Viloria was born to South American immigrant parents in 1968 in Queens with sexual anatomy that wasn't typically male or female. Viloria was raised as a girl and, aside from knowing early on that s/he (the author's chosen pronoun) had crushes on he/r female friends, didn't feel outside-the-norm. After a traumatic pregnancy at 20, s/he learned that he/r larger-than-average clitoris placed he/r on a spectrum of people known as intersex. S/he moved to San Francisco, enjoying he/r ability to emphasize whichever masculine or feminine aspects felt right on any given day and the sex and dating that went with it. After meeting other intersex people and learning of the horrific treatments most had endured as infants to fall plainly on one side of the gender binary, Viloria felt compelled to fight for he/r community. S/he outed he/r intersex status more publicly, appearing in documentaries and on TV news programs and international conference panels in service of the rights and acceptance of intersex people. Viloria's personal, positive, vibrant, and emotional work of advocacy will educate and affirm.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE SUBFIELD OF feminist scholarship devoted to narratives of what's commonly referred to as "the body" is having something of a heyday. Disability studies are growing in popularity, as is the prominence of intersectional theories around gender, body modification and "the politics of difference." Often, the lines of inquiry (or "interrogations," as academics like to say) concern themselves with power dynamics imposed by cultural norms, including those that conspire to make physicality itself a form of trauma. But three new memoirs dealing with bodies - often exuberantly so - would appear to have little use for the trauma narrative. Hida Viloria, the author of born both: An Intersex Life (Hachette, $27), was born with "ambiguous" genitalia, raised as a girl, and was 26 before encountering the term "intersex." Growing up, Viloria, who prefers the pronouns "s/he" and "he/r," aligned with the idea of being an androgynous-looking woman who was primarily attracted to other women. Viloria's most notable anatomical variant, a larger-than-average clitoris, proved to be a greater source of pleasure than of shame, and so there was little incentive to investigate the root cause, much less fix what wasn't broken. As a memoir, "Born Both" can be as difficult to pin down as its author's identity. Equal parts life history, anatomy textbook, sex diary and public service announcement, it seems in places to have been written as an activist gesture rather than a literary one. Gaining visibility as a public spokesperson for the intersex community, Viloria appears on "20/20" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and fights for causes such as outlawing the "normalizing" surgery now referred to as I.G.M., or intersex genital mutilation, which many intersex people undergo as infants. As such, the final third of the book devolves somewhat into a morass of abbreviations, reports from conferences, and policy discussions folded into canned dialogue. But all this can be forgiven because amid the public service announcements, Viloria does us the even greater service (it's more of a gift, really) of showing us what it means to live not just as both a man and a woman but also as a third gender that eventually emerges as the right one. It's not hard to see why. Many Native American tribes "believed that, unlike regular people," intersex people "had an elevated view of life's experiences and could 'see down both sides of the mountain,' " Viloria writes. Viloria also shows how gender privilege works both ways. Despite enjoying the swaggering confidence that comes from presenting as male, Viloria tires of "the limitations around expressing my emotions and the tough veneer that I have to put on to protect myself every time I get around a group of young men." Roughed up by cops while getting arrested at a protest in Berkeley, Viloria finds that the police suddenly become gentler when they believe they're dealing with a girl instead of a boy. The charges are later dropped. "I know getting out of trouble wouldn't have been so easy if I hadn't been able to hide behind being a girl," Viloria writes. "I'm completely aware that I played that card." The author's life experiences, especially the sexual ones, have a greater range than most of us could possibly imagine. Viloria has sex with both women and men as both a woman and as a man (stop and think about that for a moment). In daily interactions with the world, Viloria has seen down both sides of the mountain and tunneled through for good measure. Ultimately, there's no need to choose a side. "'I'm both,"' Viloria says. "Or alternatively, 'I'm neither.'" The bodies in Carla Valentine's the chick and THE DEAD: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors (St. Martin's, $25.99) belong to other people - or at least did at one time. Valentine, who now curates a collection at Barts Pathology Museum in London, worked for eight years in Britain as a certified A.P.T., or anatomical pathology technician. The book covers this period, one in which Valentine spends her days assisting in autopsies and other forensic investigations by removing organs from corpses, replacing those organs post-examination (at least when possible) and then sewing, washing and grooming the bodies into presentability. As a child, Valentine recounts, she tried to perform autopsies on her toys and was "enthralled by any dead animal I found on the street." After university she pursued an advanced degree in forensic and biomolecular sciences and gets an entry-level gig at the mortuary, cleaning up after organ dissections (the job requires steel-toed Wellington boots). Eventually, she was hired as a trainee A.P.T. "And thus," Valentine writes, "began a new chapter of my life in death." "The Chick and the Dead," which spins its title from the well-worn idiom "the quick and the dead," is filled with such turns of phrase, and Valentine's tone, which is meant to come across as playfully irreverent, sometimes gives way to glibness if not a surfeit of cheesy puns. Scarce space in mortuary refrigerators is described as "popular real estate; people are dying to get in there after all." Nor can she resist reminding us that "working in a mortuary is not a dead-end job." But even though Valentine might have the sense of humor of an aging uncle, her zest for gross-out depictions of bodily functions rivals that of any 10-year-old boy. And it actually works spectacularly well, at least if you're into that kind of thing. In a chapter focusing on the five stages of decomposition, she has no problem telling us about the preservatory effects of maggots - "many experts call them 'the unseen undertakers of the world' " - or the time she cut into a distended abdomen and "the green, taut flesh rippled and burst like a balloon from hell and I was rewarded with a face full of the most hideous gas I'd ever smelled in my entire life." If the book succeeds as a morbidly galloping parade of every possible kind of dead body, it falls short when it comes to the author's life. There are occasional mentions of parents, references to ever-changing roommates, and a disastrous affair with a co-worker, but they form a blurry background against the sharp focus of the cadavers. For what it's worth, Valentine's bio says she runs a dating and networking site for death professionals, a detail that may or may not have any relevance to her observation in the book that "watching someone carry out an autopsy is, in many ways, like watching someone have sex." Let's maybe not stop and think about that for a moment. A more genteel exploration of life's inevitable decay can be found in Martha Cooley's GUESSWORK: A Reckoning With Loss (Catapult, paper, $16.95). This splendid and subtle memoir in essays captures 14 months in the ancient rural village of Castiglione del Terziere in northern Ttiscany. Cooley is on sabbatical from her teaching job in New York City, though the word she's chosen for this leave of absence is caesura, which refers to a break between words or notes in a line of poetry or music: "In life - mine, anyway - it's a deliberate interruption, a chance to reckon with divisions imposed by loss." The losses have been piling up. Cooley has lost friends to drugs and suicide and cancer and various other illnesses. Her parents are in declining health, another friend lives in the diabolical grip of A.L.S., silent and immobile even as his brain carries on. Her husband of just a few years is a widower; his late wife was Cooley's close friend. "She was my age, 57, when back pain turned into rampant cancer," Cooley writes. "How did the inexplicable happen: her leaving us, loss uniting us?" In "Guesswork," the body is both canvas and carapace, both superficial construct and, for better or worse, the whole damn point. Vacationing on the island of Giglio in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Cooley and her husband find themselves in the literal and figurative shadow of the Costa Concordia, the giant cruise ship that struck a rock and capsized earlier that year, leaving 32 dead and two still missing. The boat has remained partly submerged in the water, a body that can be neither exhumed nor buried. "In the case of tragedy," Valentine writes in "The Chick and the Dead," "demystifying it helps you to regain control of the emotions. I did that with death." If Viloria's demystification of her body evokes a similar reclamation, then Cooley, for her part, knows that she will find equilibrium only if she can fully embrace the wild fluctuations of grief. "On some days I'm lured mesmerically to the rabbit hole of loss, and am forced to thrash around down there like trapped prey," Cooley writes. "On other days all the losses seem to recede like any object in a rearview mirror once the accelerator's been pressed, and I've no trouble keeping my foot on the pedal of the present." It's a lurching way to live; simultaneously brokenhearted and in love, crushingly bereaved one moment and surprisingly O.K. the next. Must we pick a side? Maybe Viloria said it best: "I refused to choose, because... I am both.' " MEGHAN DAUM'S latest book is "The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion." Her column appears every eight weeks.
School Library Journal Review
Through short scenes and vignettes, Viloria, who is intersex and prefers the pronouns s/he and he/r, chronicles he/r life, from growing up with a tyrannical father to working as an activist and advocate for intersex and nonbinary people. S/he was outed in college, and he/r parents cut off support. After comments from sexual partners, Viloria realized s/he was intersex and built a community. Along the way, s/he fell in and out of love, went back to school, and explored he/r gender presentation and identity. He/r personable, chatty style comes through whether s/he's relating the details of romantic relationships, detailing the nervous thrill of meeting Oprah Winfrey, or explaining he/r positions on issues facing he/r community. Viloria's thoughts on pronouns and the language used to describe intersex people are especially compelling. Though s/he touches on complex subjects, including rape, domestic violence, racism, and genital mutilation, he/r comfort in who s/he is and he/r desire to create a better world for intersex people permeate the ultimately hopeful narrative. VERDICT An affecting work for fans of memoir or those who wish to learn more about gender identity.--Jennifer Rothschild, Arlington Public Library, Arlington VA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A noted intersex activist tells the inspiring story of her struggles living as a lesbian hermaphrodite.Until she was 20 years old, Viloria lived her life as a female. But when a doctor said that the size of her clitoris "just [wasn't] normal" and asked to run tests on her, Viloria began to question her identity. Her femaleness had never been an issue at home; neither her mother nor her doctor father had ever discussed her physical differences and never allowed for any surgical alterations at birth. At the same time, however, her Catholic upbringing had made it difficult for Viloria to acknowledge to her parents that she was a lesbian. A move to San Francisco in 1990 propelled the author on a journey of sexual self-discovery that included relationships primarily with women and occasionally men. Five years later, and after reading a newspaper article on intersex people, she finally came to the realization that she, too, was intersex, or as she would say later on, a "hermaphrodyke." Viloria began experimenting with her identity and, for a time, dressed and acted like a male before settling into a more consciously androgynous mode of self-presentation. She also became involved with intersex organizations, where she not only learned the vocabulary to articulate her identity, but also about the surgeries that deprived other hermaphrodites "the opportunity to explore who and what they were, from the beginning." Her awakening consciousness to the plight of intersex people drove her to shed all remaining vestiges of inhibition regarding her differences and become a passionate advocate of the intersex community. In her personal life, Viloria came to understand and eventually break self-destructive patterns that had kept her from the loving lesbian partnership she had always wanted for herself. Intelligent and courageous, the author's book chronicles one intersex person's path to wholeness, but it also affirms the right of all intersex and nonbinary people to receive dignity and respect. A relentlessly honest and revealing memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In this groundbreaking memoir, writer and intersex activist Viloria eloquently gives voice to living as an intersex person, especially one who takes pride in he/r gender fluidity. Viloria's parents elected not to have nonconsensual surgery performed at birth; the author discovered s/he was intersex-a person born with sexual anatomy that doesn't fit the standard definition of male or female-after becoming sexually active as a teenager. After coming out in he/r 20s, Viloria found a community but also realized that many had not been spared unnecessary surgeries that scarred them for life, both physically and psychologically. This experience combined with an evolving sense of self inspired the author's involvement in the movement for intersex rights. Speaking frequently about the uniqueness of embodying yin and yang elements in equal measure and how intersex people can manifest this difference as profound and compelling, rather than shameful or transgressive, Viloria describes the ways in which language, especially labels, matter deeply when discussing identity. As the author demonstrates, the words "disorder" and "diagnosis" are stigmatizing, unhelpful, and even harmful. Owing to the dedicated research and advocacy of writers like Viloria, the intersex community is making meaningful progress toward equal rights. VERDICT This brave and empowering book deserves a wide audience.-Barrie Olmstead, Sacramento P.L. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Author's Note | p. ix |
Prologue | p. 1 |
Chapter 1 The Hazards of Being Female | p. 3 |
Chapter 2 A Herm Grows in Queens | p. 18 |
Chapter 3 A Hermaphrodite by Any Other Name | p. 43 |
Chapter 4 Metamorphosis | p. 56 |
Chapter 5 Gendercide | p. 77 |
Chapter 6 The Grass Is Not Always Greener | p. 95 |
Chapter 7 Finding the Vocabulary to Talk about Being Intersex | p. 109 |
Chapter 8 Invisibility | p. 118 |
Chapter 9 Girl/Boy, Lesbian/Gay? | p. 136 |
Chapter 10 Nonbinary Blues | p. 144 |
Chapter 11 Burning My Man | p. 159 |
Chapter 12 Going Public | p. 175 |
Chapter 13 The Lows of Being Out | p. 189 |
Chapter 14 The Highs of Being Out | p. 207 |
Chapter 15 The Struggle at Home and Abroad | p. 221 |
Chapter 16 City of Intersex Angels | p. 259 |
Chapter 17 Practicing What I Preach | p. 284 |
Epilogue | p. 324 |
Acknowledgments | p. 331 |
Notes | p. 335 |