Born both : an intersex life

Summary: "Hida Viloria was raised as a girl but discovered at a young age that her body looked different. A candid, provocative, and eye-opening memoir of life, love, and gender identity as an intact intersex person, and a call to action for justice for intersex people. Hida Viloria was raised as a girl but discovered early on that her body was different. Unlike most people who are born intersex in the first world - meaning they have genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, and/or chromosomal patterns that do not fit standard definitions of male or female - Hida had the freedom to explore the person she was born to be because her parents did not agree to have her sex characteristics surgically altered at birth. It wasn't until s/he was 26 and encountered the term "intersex" in a San Francisco newspaper that she finally had a name for her difference. She began to explore what it means to live in the space between genders - to be both and neither. As she began to reach out to others like her, Hida discovered that most intersex people had been scarred, both physically and psychologically, by infant surgeries and hormone treatments meant to "correct" their bodies. Eager to help end this practice, Hida came out as intersex. By answering the question "Are you a boy or a girl?" with "I'm both," Hida's helped blaze a trail for people to celebrate the middle space where male and female are not separate and opposite but entwined. A powerful account of Hida's search for authentic identity and love in a world that insists on categorizing people into either/or."--