Testimony of a happily married intersex eunuch (Lianne Simon’s story)

[This guest post comes from Lianne Simon, a woman who was born with sexual ambiguity and raised as a boy until she was 18. She has offered to answer any questions you have in a follow-up post. I trust that you will be respectful and appropriate.]

I’m a Christian, a housewife, and an author. I also have a condition that resulted in sexual ambiguity.

Intersex is an umbrella term for a number of different medical conditions that result in some variation of sex development away from typical male or female. Rather than load you down with technical details, I thought I’d give you a few examples.

Let’s say you have a sixteen-year-old daughter. Her sexual development’s been normal, except for two minor issues—she hasn’t gotten her period yet and she doesn’t have any pubic hair. So you send her to a specialist and he discovers she has Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. She’s got XY chromosomes, but because of a mutation on her X chromosome, her body doesn’t know what to do with male hormones. She has a vagina and a clitoris, but in her abdomen are testes instead of ovaries and uterus.

Let’s say you have a newborn. At first glance, he looks like a boy, but the doctors say they need to run some tests to be sure. It turns out your child has Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, the most common cause of ambiguous genitals in XX babies. It’s a medical emergency and a lifelong issue. She’ll need to take steroids to survive. Any injury or medical procedure can turn into a crisis. The doctors pressure you to feminize the child’s genitals, but they just got through telling you how dangerous surgery is for these kids. Her genitals are only a cosmetic issue, and surgery can damage sexual function.

Now, the same hormones that made her phallus so large affected her brain. She doesn’t doubt her gender, but she’s a tomboy and has typically masculine interests throughout her life. Including an attraction to other girls.

Let’s say you have a newborn with ambiguous genitals who has one testis and one streak ovary. The condition is called Mixed Gonadal Dysgenesis. The doctors tell you the best thing to do is feminize the child’s genitals and raise her as a girl. They’re the experts, so you give in. They remove the child’s gonads, cut off the oversized clitoris, and use a skin graft to create a vaginal canal.

At three or four, your child starts insisting he’s a boy. Most kids who are born with at least one good testis and who aren’t immune to testosterone are boys. And you let the doctors castrate him and cut off his genitals because they were too small or not shaped right.

The doctors told you to never let your daughter find out what they did to her. And they said that you must never doubt her gender. All your child knows is that there’s something so shameful about his body that you can’t even talk to him about it.

I have a genetic variation similar to Mixed Gonadal Dysgenesis, but with symmetric development. Both of my gonads contained a mix of testicular tissue and ovarian stroma. The old medical term for that was hermaphrodite, but it doesn’t mean that I had both types of genitals. There’s really only one bit of tissue that becomes a penis or a clitoris or something in between.

XY/XO also affected my heart, kidneys, adrenal glands, and thyroid. It changed the shape of my face. I have visuo-motor and spatio-temporal deficits that keep me from learning to dance or play most sports. I was cross-eyed, and I’m still dyslexic.

I was so tiny and frail as a child that my parents thought I might not survive. All I knew was that I was the smallest of my peer group and had a cute pixie face. Like most girls I knew, I liked to dress up and play house. Helping Mom in the kitchen was my favorite thing.

At eight I was the same size as my five-year-old sister, so I borrowed her clothes sometimes. We went to church every Sunday, but it was in vacation Bible school that I learned about Jesus. I didn’t understand much of the Gospel, but I wanted to love God, be a good girl, and obey my parents.

When I was a preteen my health improved. Fifth grade was the first time one of my classmates was smaller than me. I had my first serious crush on a boy that year, and my father decided it was about time I started acting like a boy.

My older brother was tall, and strong, and handsome. If I was good and tried really hard then maybe God would make me a real boy. Since I wasn’t a boy, I must have some deep-seated moral fault. Perhaps it was my dream of being a wife and a mother.

At seventeen, I was withdrawn, seriously depressed, and still not very good at being a boy. I had lost the top of my singing range, but had no other signs of puberty. I was feminine enough that not even my best friend believed me when I told her I wasn’t gay.

That year, a Christian boy loved me enough to befriend me, share the Gospel, answer my objections, and by his example, lead me to Christ. As a new believer, I assumed I could become the boy that everybody seemed to expect. Instead, the mask that allowed me to function socially crumbled. I had to face the world myself.

I thought things would be better if I got away from my parents, so at eighteen, I went from a sheltered home to a boys dorm. The boys made it obvious that I wasn’t like them. And one proved he could do whatever he wanted to me. Death stalked me in those days. The Lord showed me that if I didn’t cling to Him I’d die from my own recklessness.

Living meant putting my gender issues to rest before they killed me. Up until then, my mother, a nurse, had handled my medical care, but I went to see a doctor about my condition. He said testosterone and anabolic steroids would give me a male puberty—muscle mass, broad shoulders, facial hair, a deep voice, body hair, and a raging sex drive. By the time he was finished with my body, I would look like a boy. But I liked my body the way it was—at least most of it, and after living with boys in the dorm, I wanted nothing to do with becoming like them.

The doctor thought anorexia and depression were my two most pressing issues. Estrogen would help me gain weight and get rid of the hormonal cause of my depression. And he was sure that people would accept me as a girl. Especially with breast development.

When I returned home, my mother said it was the first time in my life she knew I’d be all right. With my legal status changed to female, my social issues disappeared. No one but my doctors even had to know.

So I settled in to a new town and a new job, and told not even my closest friends about my condition or my past. I knew I was a girl, but I sometimes struggled with my right to be one.

In 1999, I finally met someone else with an intersex condition. She was just a normal lady. Perhaps I wasn’t a freak after all.

Unaware of my condition, my church had for years been praying that God would send me someone. When I was urged to contact a Christian matchmaker, I reluctantly agreed. Several months later, he introduced me to the man who would become my husband. Every time I shared something personal, he reacted positively. So I dumped my entire past on him in an e-mail. He cried. Shortly thereafter we got engaged. The week after that we met in person for the first time. Two months later we were married.

It was my husband who encouraged me to get involved with intersex support group work, and to write. He’s the one my dear Lord has given me to lead me closer to Christ.

Very few Scripture verses deal directly with intersex. Matthew 19:12 suggests that eunuch was an umbrella term that included those of us “which were so born from their mother’s womb.” Acts 8:26-39, the conversion and baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, indicates that nothing special (beyond faith in Christ) is required of us to be baptized. And Isaiah 56:4-6 promises eunuchs who are faithful to the Covenant a place and a name better than sons and daughters.

Look around you. Do you see a place in the church for eunuchs? By God’s grace I live as a woman. Jesus Christ paid for me with his blood. If I asked to join your church, would we debate which sex God intended me to be, or would you give glory to God for the work of Grace He’s accomplished in my life?

[If you have any questions for Lianne, please share them in the comments. Thank you so much Lianne for sharing your story!!!]