Lucky to be intersex: How one woman overcame secrecy & shame to embrace her truest self

When Maria Tridas, a supervising producer at LGBTQ Nation’s parent company Q.Digital, was two years old, her father felt a lump in her stomach while changing her diaper. When he took her to a doctor, the lump turned out to be undescended internal testes. The doctor told her parents that she had androgen insensitivity syndrome, a genetic condition in which a person is born with XY chromosomes but has all or some of the physical traits of a female. It is one of the over 40 different biological variations within the intersex community.

Though the doctor didn’t use this term at the time, Tridas is intersex, a term for a person who has any combination of different biological sex traits that fall outside of the usual male-female binary. An estimated 1.7% of the population is intersex — that’s 125,884,605 people (roughly the population of Japan) — and, like Tridas, many of these folks never even realize they’re intersex until a doctor informs them.

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The doctor advised Tridas’ parents to simply put her in a dress and raise her as female. At age 12, she underwent surgery and began hormone replacement therapy to ensure that she would go through female puberty. But while her Catholic parents explained to her that this was “just the way God made her,” they also encouraged her to treat her intersex identity like a secret, worried that others might misunderstand or mistreat her for it.

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In college, Tridas joined a sorority, thinking that if she spent time with a group of women and presented herself like the most feminine girl she could be, her intersex identity would merge into her female identity. But at the same time, she was realizing her attraction to women. She eventually got into a serious relationship with another woman in grad school, and they began discussing why Tridas didn’t experience menstruation like other women — that’s when Tridas began doing additional research to learn more about her intersex identity.

But Tridas never even heard the word “intersex” until April 2015. While working for The Huffington Post, she was editing a video about Pigeon Pagonis, an intersex activist who, like others, has protested the infant surgeries that are often non-consensually conducted on intersex people. She realized how much her own story of self-discovery matched with Pagonis’ story.

After that, Tridas searched online to find a community of other intersex people to whom she could relate.

“Finding community is a great way to learn more about yourself,” she told LGBTQ Nation, “but it’s hard because so much of the treatment for [intersex people] is shrouded in secrecy and shame, so we’re told not to talk about it, not to connect with others, and not to deconstruct the ideas that are put into our head about, you know, ‘God made a man and a woman.'”

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While there are differences between the lived experiences and self-identifications of transgender and intersex people, both communities share the common political fight for bodily autonomy. In fact, October 26 — known as the Intersex Day of Awareness — marks the first public demonstration of intersex people in North America, which took place in 1996. That year, intersex activists demonstrated outside of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ annual conference in Boston as a way to highlight the Academy’s opinion that intersex individuals needed cosmetic surgery to “fix” their genitals or other biological variations.

Since then, October 26 has become a day of grassroots action to end the shame and secrecy around intersex identity; to reflect on what it means to be intersex; and a day of political action and education to help end the ignorance, discrimination, violence, and nonconsensual medical procedures that are still inflicted upon intersex individuals worldwide.

These surgeries often occur before intersex people can consent and before their greater development of a gender identity, sometimes literally scarring them for life and creating other medical and identity challenges later on. While it may seem like common sense to stop performing such procedures on infants and children, it remains politically charged.

In January 2022, when out gay California state Rep. Scott Weiner introduced a bill to ban such procedures on individuals under the age of 12, he faced pushback from the California Medical Association as well as parents who felt responsible for their children’s medical decisions.

But while the fight for bodily autonomy continues, Tridas says she has more fully integrated her experiences to self-identify as a proud “intersex dyke.”

“I feel very lucky to be intersex because I think it’s provided me a unique perspective on the world, and what’s important, and how I prioritize things in my life,” she told LGBTQ Nation.

“Once you educate yourself about what it means to be intersex, you realize that it kind of relates to the larger picture of the world and that everything is so diverse and that humans are diverse, gender is diverse, it’s all on a spectrum,” Tridas said. “When you give yourself the knowledge about who you are at your core, it allows you to build your outer shell, that person that you are presenting to the world in the most beautiful, honest, and confident way.”

“The world has changed,” she said. “We have a lot more access to language, and I’ve educated myself and learned more about my identity. I think that it’s all sort of swirled up into one thing now and it kind of brings you the best, the best of Maria.”