The Other Half

This is Jennifer, Avril's spouse. She invited me to guest post on her blog from time to time.

I was an odd child. While appearing to be a healthy little boy, I wanted to do girl's things. I would dress in dresses, play with girl's toys and do many other things that would upset my parents. Severe punishment was usually the result. So I hid my feelings and tried my best for decades to be the person they wanted me to be. For the life of me I'm not sure why, but I picked the name Jennifer for myself when I was 11. When I was a teenager I developed both male and female characteristics, but was told that the female traits would go away in time, so I kept hiding who I felt I really was.

Hiding things from somebody, especially a wife, is never good. I was lucky she loved me enough to hang in there and help me find the real me.

I am odd in other ways, like not having any sense of smell. It's a blessing and a curse. I can sit next to a 5-ton pile of steaming manure and not smell a thing, but then again I can never smell a flower or any other pleasant smell. I thought it was just an interesting side note in the book of my life, but it turns out my inability to smell was the clue that unraveled the whole mystery.

In high school they teach that XX=female and XY=male. This is true ~99% of the time. 99% is pretty good, but not perfect. There are perfectly healthy XY females and XX males out there. Some people are born with XXY, XYY, X all by itself or any other mix of X and Y you can imagine.

With my physical symptoms, it was thought that I was probably XXY, but a genetic test showed I am XY. At this point most doctors stop and call a condition 'idiosymptomatic', which basically means you have the symptoms of a disorder and they'd like to go ahead and begin treatment without bothering to see what's really going on. The normal treatment is to inject testosterone, but without knowing what's really going on, playing around with things like anabolic steroids didn't seem like a great idea to me.

That and I knew that I am female inside. I would never be happy looking more male. I told them to stick their needles right up their lazy asses. If I wanted to know what's really going on with my body, I would have to do my own research.

It turns out the dead sense of smell plus the symptoms of XXY indicate what is known as Kallmann Syndrome. Further reading revealed that the same gene which causes Kallmann's can also cause gender identity issues and that many XY females have abnormalities in the same gene. I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but there's something interesting to be found at Xp22.3. Many thanks to Zoe, who blogs at this link for helping me find the answers.

I still don't have all the answers, but this much I know: I have a female brain and a body that's a mix of male and female.

What could be more essential than the brain? Your brain is who you are. You can cut off an arm or a leg and the lost limb becomes little more than inanimate biological waste. If you disconnect anything from the brain, it's no longer a part of you. Amputated limbs are no longer under your control. Disconnect the brain and you're dead, no matter how good a shape the rest of the body is in.

Then there's spirituality. It's blatantly obvious that if there is more to us than our physical bodies, that spiritual element must connect to the body at the brain.

Either way, biologically or spiritually, I am a woman. I've been much happier and a much better person to live with since I've embraced that fact instead of trying to be a person that I am not. Someday I hope to be able to live in my day-to-day life as the woman I am, but for practical reasons I must continue to live as a man outside of my home to provide for my family. But I am extremely lucky to have a wife who loves me enough to accept who I am. It would appear she fell in love with me, and not the false gender image I was projecting when we met.

I thank God for that every day.

That's what this blog is about, the struggle of reacting normally to the abnormal situation we find ourselves in. But we're doing it together and not apart.