By Pastor Jarys Maragopoulos

Content notes: Childhood and medical trauma. References to the subject of child sexual abuse.

Everyone has a different relationship to “normal.” Mine was grievously transformative. To unpack the meaning that the concept of normal played in my life, I would like to tell you two stories. The first is my own story as an intersex person, grounded in the recent history of the medicalization of Intersex people. The second story is from ancient Sumer, followed by analysis that shall hopefully tie the two together. Before the end, there shall be both a look into my spirituality and a cause. But, as endings rely on beginnings, I ask for your patience before I get to the point:

As roughly one point seven percent of children are estimated to do, I was born with ambiguous indicators of sex and, where the doctors found ambiguity, they recommended a transition to femininity. My parents refuted this choice, despite the difficulty of endowing a masculine form through surgery, based on a single indicator that they favored. After four invasive procedures before I was the age of five, I was expected to manifest the success of these alterations. I struggled to do so at times and struggled to cope with being unable to do so at others. Never was I told that I had been anything but a boy; though “Partial Androgen Insensitivity syndrome” was a term I learned as a teenager. When I did not find myself growing into a man, I thought that made me a failure as a person, and a disappointment after all the invested effort. I had no idea I could be anything else, so I came to see myself as sub-human.

As both this narrative and the next will touch upon, Humanity is a territory whose borders are often drawn too exclusively. While many biological markers are used to define humans, four of them have been used in Western Society to identify humans as either male or female: hormones, genitals, gonads, and chromosomes. So assumed are these two gendered states to be the defining division of humanity that our birth certificates require the designation of one or the other. What then, for children born to be or revealed in puberty to be of disagreeing markers? What about children whose individual markers do not align with a binary development? Such children have been born throughout humanity’s written and oral record, and the biology of other species does not suggest this diversity to be as new as language. And what of those children born of the modern era, benefiting from the advancements of scientific medicine? 

The Victorian classification of such deviations as (warning: these contain a word many consider a slur) Male Psuedo-Hermaphrodites, Female Psuedo-Hermaphrodites, and the romantically named True Hermaphrodites, summarized medical understanding until one Doctor John Money made his career of the study, even establishing the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1965. Money theorized that gender was entirely socially taught and, therefore, could be socially controlled. To maintain that control, Money developed procedures to surgically reform ambiguously-sexed infants into societally recognizable boys and girls, with particular emphasis on the participation in heterosexual intercourse and procreation, if possible. With the child’s body speaking one message, it was for the child’s social environment to strengthen that message. Gender nonconforming behavior was to be disciplined and the child’s assigned gender affirmed by those around them, but always rooted in surgeries conducted early enough not to give the child lingering doubts. These ongoing procedures are rooted in the traditionally Euro-centric certainty that humans can be only either male or female, despite the evidence to the contrary that these same procedures were designed to “correct”.

Which, you would be deft to point out, amounts to a vast and disconnected conspiracy to deny the reality of children like me and the dissent we offer to the concept of “normal”. No secret smoke-filled room required, just earnest professionals doing the work for which they had been trained, assured that the premises on which they were to differentiate healthy and dis-ordered bodies were entirely scientifically derived and without bias. No less organized than the racism that causes medical professionals to underestimate the pain felt by black bodies, no more sinister than the sexism that sorts men into doctors and women into nurses. Everything was done with the belief that it was good for me, including the concealment, which is why I did not find out that a term for my experience was “Intersex” and that I was not alone in it until I was twenty-two years old.

Money understood, to some extent it seems, that he was guarding the borders of normalcy. He taught medicine how to (sometimes literally) measure who was in and who was out, and how to bring those found far afield closer to the norm. It would not be Money’s only entanglement upon that border, for he tried to bring inside a very different group of people found outside its walls when he wrote in support of the legitimacy of pedophillic desire in the now defunct Journal of Pedophillia. Having introduced the terms sexual orientation and gender identity to the world, he made no accounting for consensual relationships in associating his study of queer lives with pedophillia, an association the LGBTQI community has fought to keep from being foisted upon them for decades. While no real argument for Money’s predilections can be made from scant evidence, his opinions cast a terrible light on his procedures. It is undeniable that his work engaged with the sexualization of children’s bodies, in the judging and adapting of sexual function and form. Money also began the practice of collecting photos of naked intersexual children, anonymized with black bars over their eyes, for the stated purpose of study and for the education of the professionals learning his procedures. Whether this objectifying practice was born of malign motivations or not, the traumatizing effect on many of the subjects is a matter of record. I am fortunate no such attempt was made to record my body, but I was still emotionally affected by the medical attention that I endured. 

The point of such attention, as it is often asserted in defence of these practices, is to prevent the child from experiencing shame. If that is the case, then the procedures are fundamentally hypocritical. When the child’s caretakers change the child to match the expectations of society, they are not refuting the shame society would bestow on one who is different, but embodying that shame. From my experience, I sensed the secrecy of my procedures as a child, the difficult conversations they engendered, and this taught me to be ashamed of my body. Like many Intersex people who faced medicalization, my earliest memories of being touched in erogenous areas were formed when I underwent hands-on inspection by groups of impersonal doctors, discussing among themselves whether my development was acceptably normal.  I learned to associate my discomfort in these situations with that part of my body, towards which I developed judgment and eventually disgust. When I was told as a child that I had to change to be like everyone else, I came to wonder why I was not acceptable in the first place, and felt alienated. I was left in possession of a body post-procedure that did not match my parent’s expectations but, being unable to explain to adults what I was never taught, as a child I came to believe that the source of the frustration lay in who I was. When I grew up to be a trans adult, eschewing the gender assigned to me, I was faced with a society whose frustration with my identity was voiced in the hateful wording I had once used against myself. In my case and in the case of other intersex people with whom I have spoken, Money’s procedures brought about the very thing they are designed to forestall: rejection and shame.

I felt these things throughout puberty and up to the day I understood who I was. When I felt unacceptable and despised myself as a child, I likened myself to Gollum from my father’s stories: mutated and loathsome. Reading voraciously, I discovered Frankenstein, and I felt a kinship with the creature formed from experiments he barely understood, subhuman and wretched. It was not until I began reading Terry Pratchett as I entered high school, with his use of Golem characters to demonstrate a fantastical construct gaining self-identity, that I found characters who reminded me of my own artificiality free from feelings of self-disgust. I suffered an enduring depression and pervasive anxiousness in high school and beyond, sensitive to rejection, afraid that showing too much enthusiasm for people would give them an opportunity to see how abominable I was. I was unable to meaningfully date or to be intimate with anyone until after I discovered I was intersex, so deeply were my misconceptions of my origin tied to how I felt about my body and myself.

I did not resolve these misconceptions by pure happenstance, but felt a splinter in my mind, a sense that something was wrong which I carried into college and my early adulthood. Feeling that something in my origins held unclaimed meaning, I asked my mother to re-send to me a letter she wrote when I turned eighteen, giving her account of my birth. It represented, at the time, the most information I had about what occurred, but when she re-sent it to me just before I turned 23, she thankfully updated some of the medical language.  This revamped document guided my research, during which I discovered the term “Intersex.” 

Reading the Wikipedia article felt like a lightbulb had illuminated within me, for I finally found context for what had happened to me in the legacy of sexual assignment medicalization that Dr. Money had standardized. I also saw my first hints that I was not alone, that Intersex people had sought community before me, that others like me were out there still. That day represented the turning point in my self-image. Whereas before I had accepted abusive and cruel treatment from peers, thinking it was my due, I began a positive journey toward self-regard in which I could stand up to such treatment and begin to see myself as a person. I sought a therapist, who arranged an Intersex Support Group. I was hungry for more information on people like me and their mark on society, so I also searched for our place in stories.

 Looking through the annals of TVtropes dot com, I was surprised by how prevalent Intersex characters were in fiction (often called hermaphroditic, which is as I said a sensitive term), but I was also disheartened by how often they were depicted as malevolent freaks. While the site led me to positive stories now beloved, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, I discovered that Intersex characters were mainly seen by audiences in the West as murderers who could frustrate forensic investigators due to their medical oddity, or often in the East as literal monsters. Sadayko or Samara, the ghost from the horror story The Ring, is an Intersex youth who seeks vengeance upon the world for parental rejection, a particular theme I found prevalent in many narratives with Intersex antagonists. However, the oldest story featuring Intersex people I found was not from modern fiction, but from myth, and this myth is featured in the Intersex articles on both TVtropes and Wikipedia.

This is a Sumerian story of Enki, the god of wisdom and teachers, husband to Ninhursag, goddess of nature and creation. The couple worked together, day in and day out, forming all people out of clay and assigning them destinies or places in society. After a long day of Promethean ceramics, this couple gets to drinking beer and challenge each other to a contest (the Sumerians were big on beer). Whomever of the two could create a person in a form so problematic that the other could not find a “Good Destiny” for them, would win. They set to work producing various sorts of infirmities and handicaps from the Sumerian perspective, including a woman who cannot conceive (who is given the role of Priestess) and a person “without maleness or femaleness”, the latter created by Enki. In the end, Ninhursag cannot devise destinies for Enki’s creations, but instead of simply taking the win, Enki states that the gods do not make people to not have a good destiny, and he proceeds to assign a place in society for each of his people. The place for the person who is not male or female, Enki states, is to “stand before the king” as a courtier and helper. This language of dignity stuck with me, especially when I met other Intersex people in support groups who also repeated this very myth with a sense of self-dignity. Later research into Sumerian culture has shown me that the King in this language may have once referred to a high priest, or someone acting as the focal point for the ritual magic conducted by the state. At the time I took the most meaning from the idea of standing before power instead of kneeling. 

As the Sumerians would have it, this is not the only time that Enki creates Intersex people or beings. There is a myth where Inanna (later called Ishtar) descends into the Underworld for want of conquest and is held hostage there by her sister, Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld. Of all the gods, only Enki sends help by creating two beings also described as “without maleness or femaleness”, to whom he gives the water and plant of Life to revive Inanna. He also teaches them how to get into Ereshkigal’s good graces by showing her compassion as she continuously and painfully birthed the dead into her kingdom. These beings, called Galatura and Kurgara, do as they are taught, showing Ereshkigal compassion. She repays their kindness by offering them anything they want, to which they ask for the body of Inanna. 

In these narratives I saw a common theme of social value and acceptance for Intersex people. Destinies being the Sumerian idea of social cohesion, Enki’s refusal to leave the Intersex and other differently bodied humans outside the bounds of society and humanity cut deep into the alienation I felt. If a civilization five thousand years past knew of people like me, and had a myth to explain our inclusion, then I saw that there could be another way. Sumer was not and is not the only such culture; intersex, trans, and non-binary people are accepted in many societies throughout history and around the globe to this very day. Ancient Rome and early Christianity published legal documents that make allowances for such people, while beyond Europe Indiginous people continue to refute the gender binary as a colonial incursion. Narratives of Intersex people’s natural validity are far older and told far wider than Western society’s unNarrative that we cannot and should not exist.

These myths led me to work with Enki as an eidelon of teaching and a symbol of Intersex acceptance. Enki’s bestowment of magical power and the teaching of compassion to these beings suggests to me that the Sumerians were in some manner of agreement with other cultures who see Intersex people as spiritual, unifying, and worthy. In accordance with the Descent Myth, the temple of Inanna developed two orders of priests that were often described in gender-bending terms: the Gala Lamentation priests who attuned to the emotions of the gods to gain their favor, and their counterparts named for Kurgara, who performed mock battles for Inanna’s’ glory. These orders, particularly the Gala, spread to the temples of other gods and were associated with queerness and queer sexuality. Perhaps a trans, intersex, gay, or bisexual person born in Sumer would have been seen as a natural candidate for these priesthoods, as an alternative to the expectation to continue the family line. 

These spiritual themes around gender-nonconforming identities motivated me to seek and establish theology that does not require participants to fit into a gender binary, in a community that values compassion and the temerity to stand up to injustice. To accomplish this, I helped to form the First Church of the Morningstar, where pagans, occultists, and dabolitors of many Traditions come together to practice without dogma or abuse. Once organized, the congregation elected me to join the volunteer pastoral team, where I represent the non-Satanic members. In Church events, I lead reconstructed Sumerian rites and rituals, invoke Enki and other faces of divinity with which I am engaged, and help to facilitate community support.

In fact, I first read a version of this statement, in the form of a sermon, at a Morningstar service in Two Thousand and Nineteen. At the time, this was the most public venue in which I had spoken about being Intersex, and I had some anxieties over the value of what I was imparting to my audience. However, I am so glad that I spoke despite my fears, for afterwards a congregant came forward to share proudly that he too is Intersex. This congregant (whose permission I have to repeat these details) had also endured gender assignment surgery as a child and had been negatively affected, feeling alone in this experience. But, as he asked that I state here, hearing my account was the first time he had heard another person speaking so openly about their intersexuality and medicalization, and he thanked me for abating the feelings of loneliness the latter so often leaves behind. After my earlier misgivings, his disclosure banished all my doubts. I felt assured that there was a need for advocacy and spiritual workings drawn from my Intersex experiences, and the First Church of the Morningstar became the home for these efforts.

Practically, when speaking of my efforts, this often involves the relating of personal meaning through mythic symbolism. It is important to me to keep in mind my subjective connections to these spiritual experiences without letting that limit my sharing of them. This is what Pagans have been known to call Unconfirmed Personal Gnosis, where a believer shares their subjective engagement with a spiritual entity or idea without writing dogma or expecting agreement. One way I do this is by giving an “Enkian” take on a thematic topic. My practice originates in my conscious choice to use the Enki and Ninhursag contest myth as a model for self-acceptance. I do not require Enki to have an objective reality for his stories to help me psychologically and emotionally, and in fact this subjectabist attitude has allowed me to develop an analysis on Ancient myths to comfort Modern hearts. When I do so, I join a cherished tradition of other artists, mythic storytellers, theologians, and magicians to whom we owe humanity’s bounty of narrative. 

When we struggle with normalcy, alienation, and conformity, Enki’s myths illustrate that these things are relative and artificial. When the Sumerians told the story of how Enki brought about the organization of the world as they knew it, their conclusion had Enki bless the lands of Sumer. But then he then goes as far afield as the Sumerians understood, to the lands of Africa and further East towards the Indus Valley, and blesses those lands and their people as well, using the same language he used for Sumer. To the Sumerians, divine blessing and civilisation was not theirs alone, but to be shared across all boundaries and borders. What does a god like Enki care for such divisions? In fact, he is shown to care a great deal, in valuing diversity, as we can see from the following “myth within a myth”:

In the oldest written myth from which we inherit the Tower of Babel trope, the Sumerian incantation of Nuddimund describes a mythical time in which humans had no rival in nature and all people spoke one language to exult Enlil, Enki’s brother and ruler of the Gods for a time in Mesopotamian theology. Enlil, through his priests, has amassed all of Sumer’s knowledge (tablets of Me) in one ziggurat, an artificial mountain on which stands the most holy of temples, language and literature consolidated around one place of power. Enki, in response to this ambition, makes multiple the languages of humanity, stymying further attempts to consolidate humanity into conforming to one worship and one understanding. This incantation of Nuddimund was given to Sumerian messengers to read before their missives, in acknowledgement of humanity’s decentralized diversity of beliefs and customs. It is poignant that this incantation is presented to us inside a larger narrative in which two cities compete for the seat of divine power.

Here we see Enki in his trickster role, lauded for his wisdom but acting contrary to the story’s implied value. The myth explains to the Sumerians why the world is the way it is, populated by different cultures and languages, but also sets that normal state of affairs apart from a nostalgic past, in which conformity is seen as glorious, ambitious, and the will of the chief god. Enki’s challenge to his brother represents part of an ongoing theme in Sumerian myth, a humanistic triumph of dissent over obedience, which sheds light on the larger narrative of competing cultural centers in which the incantation is set. This is one of multiple myths in which Enki stands up for those who are left outside the circles of power, inviting them in despite the wishes of his rulers. An ethos to be imitated, I think, that does not require homogenization.

 And isn’t that the point? I have shared the childhood narrative that is my own, a brief history of sex assignment surgery, my exploration into the stories and myths of Intersex people, and the ways I have used the stories I found to empower myself and my community. I tell you this because I believe that there is value in each person and their story, as these narratives have taught me to see value in my own story, which I once felt was anathema and unworthy. I tell you this because I believe that, like left-handedness, homosexuality, and transgender people, Intersex people are not dis-ordered but apart of humanity’s boundless diversity. What I have learned leads me to the conclusion that the narrative that drove my medical treatment is fundamentally flawed. Its stated purpose was to protect me from shame, but instead it imparted to me an alienating shame from which myths and fiction have offered me freedom. Furthermore, I am compelled to speak out and change the story for the next generation of Intersex children. I believe that these non-consensual and often harmful surgeries will not end until enough dissent has amassed to challenge their logic and necessity in the public eye, and I will not stop writing until that is so. May Enki bless these words, and may humanity receive them.