Lovely Orchid

“28 year old female with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome” speaking freely and answering questions about her experiences!

After being away for some time due to a lack of internet access (oh, the economy….) I have returned and found this on my first day back! Such a neat segment!

(for the link fearful, the actual webpage is: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/jgrcj/as_requested_iama_28_year_old_female_with/)

queerintersects:

lovelyxorchid:

There is one thing about my family that is irritating beyond all belief. It rips at the very fabric of my soul and leaves me feeling shredded. It is a question which they always ask despite knowing the irritation it presents.

“When are you going to have kids?”

Obviously my intersex condition prevents me from having biological children of my own since I never developed a uterus despite having a vagina. But it never seems to sink in to my family that I will never have biological children of my own.

What’s harder is that when I bring up adoption (which we plan to do) everyone always seems so disappointed. Like somehow it’s just not good enough, despite the fact that my dad (stepfather) adopted me and is the only dad I’ve ever know and loved.

It’s even worse when I call our cat our daughter. Because animal children are not enough apparently. 

It’s just frustrating. 

And it’s a constant reminder that I will never be good enough as, or enough of, a woman because is seems that, at the core of society, people expect women at some point in their lives to be stuffed with fetus and then expel humans from their loins to prove their femininity. 

And I just can’t do that…leaving me as basically half a woman…which may or may not be ironic. 

What do you think about this? How do you deal with infertility? What do you think of the typical roles women are expected to fulfill in your society?

Yeah, my experience with this is certainly a bit different than yours, simply because of a. my age (I’m only 22) and b. the fact that I came out as gay/lesbian/queer (aka I date girls) relatively recently.

When my parents first told me the half-truth of my condition when I was 11, the infertility was definitely the main blow of what they told me. Certainly the idea of having to lie to my friends about having my period and of course take hormones for the rest of my life was something I knew would be hard and awkward to deal with, but knowing that I would never be able to have biological children was really hard for me for a really long time.

Up until that point, I had grown up imagining myself having the heteronormative dream: a husband, kids, not necessarily the white picket fence as I prided myself a city kid, but you catch my drift.

As I got older, and the questions surrounding my condition (and the physical ramifications of the surgeries performed on me at birth, my sexuality, etc.) encompassed my private thoughts, the fact that I wouldn’t have children was something I had become used to. Of course there would be occasional awkward comments by my family and family friends regarding the given fact of my having children, but just like those regarding the given fact of my wanting/eventually having a boyfriend, I was good at just playing along. Obviously, so were my parents.

Now of course, the situation has changed quite a bit. I’ve actually changed my appearance pretty dramatically in the past few months, and I’d be interested to see what, if any, reaction my extended family would have about it. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m from a culturally Russian family. My parents and most of their close friends immigrated from the former Soviet Union when they were about 20 years old, in 1980. Just about all of my small extended family is in the states, although most of them, as well as some of the other close family friends, came later than my parents - in the early ’90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. I would definitely say that heteronormativity is much more uniformly entrenched in Russian culture than in American culture, and as such, even with my current appearance, I’m not sure what people would initially think.

I know my newly non-femme appearance may not seem to directly relate to the topic of having children, but I would say it does. Heteronormativity doesn’t only relate to norms of sexuality, but to all norms ascribed to the implicitly dyadic roles of male and female. As you so poignantly stated, giving birth is one of the most forceful of these norms for women. Of course, it has to be giving birth within the heteronormative framework of marriage (specifically to a man) or else it isn’t worth shit.

As you can probably tell, my opinion of “the typical roles women are expected to fulfill in our society” is that they are wholly unnecessary and ridiculous. This obviously doesn’t mean that anyone who chooses to fulfill any or all of them is ridiculous. Just that their enforcement is (and I don’t mean to sound hyperbolic) violent and oppressive to ALL of society.

In any case, the fact that I’m now outwardly living my life as a gay woman means that this lifestyle “choice” - yes, I do see it as a choice in a way (I’ll do a post on this later) - and its rejection of the heteronormative standard of “womanhood” most certainly trumps the eventual fact that I will not be having biological children.

My family is from Slavic Europe too and I too am a first generation North American. However, my family is very “gay friendly” due to my grandmother being an extremely liberal person and a feminist, so my experience with hetero-normative is mostly socially learned from school and society and not at home so-to-speak (although women do tend to do the cleaning….but I think that is because my grandmother cleaned houses for a living in her later years so she was just best at it ~_^). As such, I agree that society’s view of femininity tend to be fairly messed up.

I do hope that your family accepts you for who you are and whomever you choose to love. Love is love and that’s all that really matters in life, but I think that Dr. Seuss says it best: Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.