June is CAH Awareness Month | What it means to me in 2020

CAH Awareness Month & June Pride Month 2020

Up until this year, I typically have not celebrated June CAH Awareness month, because of the CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia) organizations and groups not even acknowledging my sex is intersex and that I am an intersex man. I do believe that this is all due to their prejudice and bias. Serendipitously, CAH Awareness Month lands during June PRIDE month! So I boldly made the connection in a meme above that I blasted out on social media.

When I came out against my birth certificate in 2014, my CAH support groups pretty much showed me the door. All because of their transphobia and homophobia, I was suddenly rejected when I told them I was going to live as a man now, married to a man. Worse, they were not happy that I had changed my view of my having a disorder, to now celebrating being born intersex. To this day the CAH organization website does not even acknowledge that little kids, like me, can be accidentally assigned female in ERROR at birth. I have since uncovered a very serious problem with prejudice as outlined below.

Here are the problems with most CAH Organizations and Support Groups:

Most CAH Organizations and Support Groups refuse to call CAH intersex. They do not like the word hermaphrodite either. They prefer to be a disorder of sex development, or simply a diagnosis.
Most CAH Organizations claim that 46XX Intersex should be raised as a girl and that the child should undergo nonconsenting, medically unnecessary cosmetic genital surgery to appear a female.
Most CAH Organizations appear to be very transphobic, by not accepting that we 46XX CAH Intersex people can be boys/men, without having genital surgeries. They conflate sex with gender when we intersex bodies do not always match endosex bodies.

They literally deny my gender identity as a man, and here is some reason to why I think this might be happening:

My chromosomes are 46XX and my body is intersex not female. Most would say I would have to be a female, when I am not. My sex is intersex and I happen to have the gender identity of a nonconforming man.
I am a 46 XX CAH Intersex Man who has a small phallus, ovaries, a vagina, uterus, and small breasts. I also sit to pee. Most would define this as being “more female”. When obviously this is not true in my case. I am a man and I am not a bearded woman, like some of my intersex woman friends.
These organizations and groups can be very transphobic since my naked body does not appear as a typical endosex male or female. I am a 46 XX CAH Intersex man, who was assigned a girl in error, so now inject more testosterone, like a trans guy to live my authentic self.
I now have an intersex birth certificate, that corrected my female birth certificate. Most of these organizations deny these intersex bodily variations created my sex. To them, CAH is a diagnosis, and they want it to remain that way.

I do believe intersex phobia, transphobia, and homophobia is the driving force around all this. These organizations do not want us to grow up appearing queer, gay, transgender, or God forbid we celebrate being born hermaphrodites, and/or calling our sex intersex! The way I see it, these surgeons who abide by all this CAH Organization phobia are literally cutting the gay off to “normalize” our bodies and force us to live heteronormative lives!

Like Hida Viloria, I was spared. My body is whole and not surgically altered against my will as a child. However, I was assigned wrong at birth as a girl. I corrected this and emancipated my true gender identity as a nonconforming man in 2014. I legally would change my birth certificate in September 2018, and become the first in Colorado to get an intersex birth certificate. Hida Viloria will receive an intersex birth certificate before I did. Both of us soon after the first intersex birth certificate in the country, Sara Kelly Keenan. I now call myself a nonconforming gay intersex man and was honored to do a TEDxTalk: Born Intersex: we are human, in 2018, soon after receiving my birth certificate.

The saddest thing about all this is that there are intersex babies that grow up after these genital corrective feminizing surgeries that are not girls that go on to live as men. Brian Douglas of the documentary Gender Revolution by Katie Couric is like me! He is another CAH 46XX Intersex man. Catastrophically he was harmed with surgery when he now lives full time as a man now but decided to change his birth certificate to male. Since that worked better for him. I know others too that live as men now, who were physically and psychically mutilated. This simply has to end! Our self-determination is about our human rights!

So to celebrate CAH Awareness Month, I decided for the first time, to call a phobic skunk a skunk! These CAH Organizations and Groups have to STOP denying our existence as boys when we are born 46XX CAH intersex and simply get over their intersex phobic, homophobic, and transphobic bullshit! Stop hurting innocent little babies!