October 20th, 2018: Born Intersex: We are human!
TEDxJacksonville, at the Florida Theater.
My SHORT Autobiography:
I am a survivor of psychic mutilation, a parent of three kids, and as of Dec. 9th, 2022, I became a widower when my beloved husband died after a long battle with leukemia. When he died, we had been married for thirty-three years. Today, I am a seminarian at Meadville Lombard Theological School, an Intersex Activist and Educator, a Musician, and an Artist. At one time, I was even a “Gender Space Pirate” performer.
I am also a person born with intersex natural bodily variations whose social activist and educational work focuses on an individual’s right to bodily autonomy and the right to express their true gender identity. As a gender nonconforming androgynous intersex man, I have legally emancipated myself and, in November of 2017, medically and legally proved to the Florida court that my biological sex is intersex. September 17th, 2018, and with much persistence, I received the first in Colorado with an intersex birth certificate. I create my own restitution from being assigned wrong at birth.
Through personal narrative and education, I hope to build bridges of understanding so that all people, no matter how they label themselves, may experience the wholeness that is a basic human right in a socially just world. I am highly motivated to do this work simply because I was hurt all my life by the mandates society put on me when I was assigned the wrong gender at birth. I firmly believe that the Self-Determination of our gender identity is every human being’s human right. I would love the opportunity to educate your organization: Book Mx. Anunnaki Ray To Come Speak.
You can also follow me on Facebook: Transgender/Intersex Civil Rights Community & Mx. Anunnaki Ray Gender/Intersex Activist Instagram @anunnakiray and Twitter: @anunnakiray
My affiliations and accomplishments:
- Received the first Colorado, USA, Intersex Birth Certificate
- Jacksonville TEDx Speaker October 20th, 2018.
- What It’s Like: A WJCT Podcast with Anunnaki and his husband James
- I am currently participating as an Intersex Advocate for Partnership for Child Health: Jax Youth Equality.
- On hold due to my husband’s death: The Anunnaki Foundation. Our Mission: Together, celebrate intersex and gender variant children while promoting the self-determination of gender. Our Vision: Creating a just world that gives the self-determination of gender with genital integrity. Together we promise to give a voice to all intersex and gender-variant children who have no voice.
- Featured in the emerging documentary: Stories of Intersex and Faith with Megan DeFranza, Ph.D., and author of: Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God
- Featured in the emerging documentary: 2bMe with Emmy Award-winning producer, Sylvia Caminer & DolGerFilms.
- My blog has now proudly reached all but eleven countries and my social media pages have gathered over 45,000+ followers together.
My Detailed Autobiography:
I was born in the late ’60s, a 46 XX Intersex person. This means my biological sex is intersex and not one of the endosex/dyadic sexes, the male sex, or the female sex. My intersex variations are such that they assigned me, a female at birth and raised me a girl, but this was not my true gender identity.
Biological Sex (Sex Characteristics) and Gender Identity are two different things. Although I was born intersex, I ended up developing a boy/man’s gender. But, I am also gender non-conforming as a man. So my Gender identity does not match my biological sex (intersex), which is now legally determined by my birth state of Colorado to be intersex. Gender non-conforming refers to people who do not follow the stereotypes about gender. For the longest time, I used the word “androgynous” to describe my gender and natural appearance, and I still like it the best. I knew they had made an error calling me a girl as young as three and four years old. The world was not ready to listen to me as an unconsenting child. So I am now the survivor of psychic mutilation.
It would take a life of much emotional and physical pain and suffering that finally led me to the courage to reclaim my true self at forty-six years old. Due to psychiatric and medical mismanagement, I almost died on several occasions. This includes multiple suicide attempts, iatrogenic harm from doctors, multiple miscarriages, and over eighteen surgeries. I now regret over half these surgeries, but I did not know better then, and doctors had persuaded me.
My differences led to my being a social outcast, and many family members did not want anything to do with my family or me. Being an outcast has even justified rape and being beaten. My attacker getting away with it in court even. Prejudice and not being understood have affected my family in many ugly ways. Although many people with intersex natural bodily variations are healthy, I deal with a few health concerns that have confused and frustrated doctors.
My Medical Story
Several genetic and metabolic specialist would discover that along with being born with intersex traits, muscle biopsy, intestinal biopsy, and genetic testing proves that I also deal with mitochondrial dysfunction (causing complex I dysfunction), oxidative phosphorylation disorder, atypical Celiac Disease (significant gluten, and carbohydrate intolerance; with positive villus biopsy), along with a variant of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Which causes a multitude of symptoms, including autonomic dysfunction, also known as dysautonomia.
These conditions, together, have caused me many problems with adrenal involvement, which involves a form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH). In this blog, I write about my form of intersex and how my body developed differently: Eight Names for the SAME thing: Penis, Phallus, Clitoris, Phalloclitoris, Micropenis, Microphallus, Clitoromegaly, and Pseudo-penis. For this blog, I collaborated with Stefanie Grübl of Vielma, who graciously has created illustrations and sculptures to show genital diversity. At this time, they have often assumed my “strange ovaries” and fluctuating male hormones (androgens) to be caused by a severe case of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) and/or by differences in my adrenal function. The problem with this rationale is that my symptoms are very different than other PCOS people, and an examination of my physical body does not match that of PCOS. Nevertheless, Virilization has happened to my body. Since I obviously have many reasons to have a virilized body, my most recent doctor has diagnosed my intersex variation as:
Intersexuality – with hormonal variations and ICD-10- CMCode: Q56.0 Hermaphroditism, not elsewhere classified.
To top this off, I also deal with many of the problems of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I have found much help in the autism community and among people with FASD. It ends up that ASD has proven to sometimes be a part of mitochondrial dysfunction and celiac disease. I also know a few intersex people who have also been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or personally claim to be on the autism spectrum. Some also say that FASD often goes hand and hand with intersex, transgender and gender-variant and gender-expansive people. I find these commonalities very interesting.
My Cousin was also Born Intersex.
About ten years after my birth, around 1976, another intersex child was born in our family tree. This child would have been my second cousin. They were given a boy’s name at birth and in the first year of life, assigned female by surgery, given a female name, and raised female like me. I have been told they were in very ill health, were intellectually impaired, and had been in and out of the hospital most of their life due to various illnesses. I was told they had to undergo many surgical corrections to their digestive system, bladder, and body. I was also told this person was wheelchair-bound, had one kidney fail them, received a kidney donation, and died from complications of sepsis at nineteen.
I want to learn more about this person and see if they know what type of intersex variation my second cousin had. I would also like to learn more about their health problems. It is a mystery at this time if their medical conditions were related to mine or not, or even if they felt they were raised the right gender or not. There is much stigma and secrecy in families who deal with intersex. It is often hard to get answers. Especially after a death and dealing with survivors who have shame. Some things we may never know.
My Famly Life
I was married to my husband for thirty-three years, meeting in 1989 and marrying on August 5th, 1995. He devastatingly died after his long battle with CMML Leukemia and a failed bone marrow transplant in December 2022. He made me promise before he died that I would find new love again and continue my activism and education.
With much medical intervention, we successfully had two biological children, who now share many of my health problems, but do not appear to have intersex traits. We adopted our youngest angel, and this was a huge blessing. We love our family very much. The biggest problem is that in our world, people think you should have a mom and a dad. In our house, this can never be. Although I am female fertile and was able to become pregnant, I never felt like a mother. I like to compare myself to a Seahorse Dad. For a seahorse, the male is the one who gives birth. Although I like to consider myself a nurturing parent, I have never felt like a mother, and my kids call me “Vader”, which is the German word for father. I like to consider myself a Maternal/Father, and because of this, I honor who I am by going by Mx, instead of Mr., or Mrs. Our kids have two amazing dads now, my husband going simply by “dad”.
My Work as an Educator and Activist
As of today, I have proudly educated many times now at Universities, Non-profit organizations, and Churches. This includes being on an educational panel where I educated Harvard Medical School students with Kimberly Mascott Zieselman, the President of InterACT Advocates for Intersex Youth, and Intersex and Faith friends, Megan DeFranza Ph.D., Liane Simon, David Brukiewa’s family, and several others. This educational panel happened after the medical students watched our documentary Stories of Intersex and Faith. Being a part of Christian Theologian Megan K DeFranza’s Ph.D. work in educating Christians about our being born in the image of God, too, has been a huge part of my activist journey.
My next biggest achievement has been teaching How to add the “I” for Intersex with Responsibility to the LGBTQ+ Rainbow, for the last two PFLAG National Conventions. My first year to do this was in 2017, with Judi Herring, M.D., and again in 2019, when I presented with my husband, James Bunce.
Back in 2015, I did my first public talk about my life with Judi Herring, M.D. In this presentation, I am only 9 months into reclaiming my emotional and physical health with the proper hormones and eating similarly to the Ketogenic/Paleo Diet. Eating differently has helped my body create energy better and to heal from significant health problems. Prior to 2015, I was a sickly child, chronically ill or injured teen, and as an adult, I ended up wheelchair-bound. At one time, I was even sleeping sixteen hours a day and was even diagnosed with a sleep disorder similar to narcolepsy and cataplexy. So healing myself, and honoring my true gender, has been a huge awakening. Like emerging from a “coma.”
My Mentoring and Educating People
For several years now, I have successfully mentored and educated many people. My services have included helping to educate those seeking their Ph.D. or Masters. As well as educating people who wanted my wisdom and insight into real-lived intersex matters to improve their counseling services, and have even helped several writers with their character development. For several years, I have also volunteered as the intersex advocate for Jeffrey Goldhagen, M.D. of Partnership of Childs Health, Jax Youth Equality. I am also very proud that I have captured the attention of several doctors, like Kristi Overstreet, Ph.D., that are helping me to get my message out to the world. She also helped me to get Colorado’s first intersex birth certificate. I have sadly also been used and exploited a few times when I was persuaded to educate and was not given adequate credit or financial compensation. Yet, I have always tried to justify all my work as doing it for the greater good. In history, marginalized people like me have also been used and exploited. After learning such hard lessons, I now never work without some form of compensation.
I have also, thankfully, met many amazing friends now too. Like Tiger Devore, Ph.d., an intersex-born sex psychologist and one of the first intersex activists in the United States. As well as being mentored by Hida Viloria, another pioneer of intersex activism in the United States. I also have thankfully finally gotten to meet Temple Grandin, Ph.D, and Autism Advocate and Educator Stephen Shore, Ph.D.. Both Temple and Stephen have personally helped my family immensely regarding our autism spectrum issues.
I am very proud of what I do to make this a better world. If you would like me to come to talk to your group or class, let’s arrange it. Book Mx. Anunnaki Ray To Come Speak To see what other people are saying about my educational workshops and talks, please see my testimonies here.
To learn more about how intersex people’s human rights are violated: United Nations’ Intersex Fact Sheet.
The photo above was taken in August 2015
Below is my first talk with Dr. Judi Herring, M.D.
It was September 6th, 2015, and it took much courage and bravery to tell my story to the public for the first time. I was only nine months into reclaiming and transitioning into, my true gender in this first video. I see too many little intersex infants and children harmed. It is my hope I can help change this world with my message and my story:
Listen with Care: Build Bridges of Understanding (September 2015).
To understand Intersex and Gender better, this one is important to watch too:
Dr. Judi Herring M.D.’s TEDx Talk:
GENDER BOUND: LESSONS FROM THE WORLD BETWEEN
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As a speaker and a survivor, you can book me to come to educate:
Book Mx. Anunnaki Ray To Come Speak
If you would like to remain connected, Here is my Public Facebook Page:
Mx. ANUNNAKI RAY Gender/INTERSEX Activist
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Please be sure to also visit my Photographic Stories.
I am a Sea Horse Dad!
My promise to this world:
My New Year Resolution for 2017 and Poem: I Will Sing My Song
Educational Resources:
Intersex Educational Videos, the Blogs of Other Intersex People, and Articles
List of: World Wide Advocacy and Support for Intersex and Transgender People
Photo April 2016
Above Photos November 2016
As a speaker and a survivor, you can book me to come educate:
Book Mx. Anunnaki Ray To Come Speak
If you would like to give a donation, to help support my life mission,
please visit this page:
Donations Towards My Mission
These Ten Human Rights organizations and many more all say it is time to stop irreversible, medically unnecessary cosmetic intersex surgeries on nonconsenting children and to give the self-determination of gender identity to every intersex child.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING!
~.V.~
Mx. Anunnaki Ray Marquez 
I’m deadass gonna cry, that’s so cool, the first person in a state to get an intersex birth certificate. I’m trans and pan but I had no idea of this issue or that intersex people were underrepresented to this extent until I found your page. Thank you
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I thank you Quinn for finding me, discovering this problem with this world, and now becoming a messenger. None of us assigned wrong at birth are alone. Now, you have made me cry. Tears of hope.
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Anunnaki, I am so honored to know you and to see the truth you are now able to live out so beautifully, CONGRATULATIONS!!! It’s been so many years since I’ve seen you and I’m glad to reconnect. You were always such a beautiful soul. I loved our talks about life and people and the medical world. Your insights were always so refreshing to hear, and your comments profound. As I watched your TED talk I couldn’t stop smiling. Your love for humanity continues. Your family intact through it all, INCREDIBLE! That in and of itself should tell the world who Anunnaki truly is.
Thank you thank you thank you!!
Love and Hugs, Kellie BK Colorado
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Kellie, I am glad we reconnected. Let’s talk soon! Thank you for being proud of me. I survived what most never could have, and am now sadly struggling getting better from COVID19! What a life! Much love back to you!
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Wow! I discovered you while searching for more information on the 8 genders mentioned in the Talmud. Thank you for all the effort you put into this website and the research which has to be in depth. What an awesome resource! I’m a 68 year old MFA candidate in Creative Writing – Poetry at the University of Kentucky. In the Poetry program, our thesis project must be a cohesive collection of 45 poems. I am writing feminist revisionist mythology. I’m adding classes in Gender and Women’s Studies to my schedule because they will mesh with my thesis project and the work I wish to create after I graduate in 2022. You mention how myth is problematic. Indeed it is! Myths, traditional stories, religious scriptures and folk songs have been used to suppress and oppress for millennia. I challenge these myths in my work.
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I thank you for the time it took to make this message. I greatly appreciate your learning about us intersex people and how modern days erased our existence with a male/man, female/woman, binary construct. Together we change this world, and each visitor that I reach like I have you, makes this world a better place.
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