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It must have been 4 years ago, sometime that winter after I had moved back out on my own and come back to college. I was watching a BBC documentary about Intersexed individuals. I had seen it before, sometime back in ’01. Back then, I didn’t know who I was, just a sophomore living off campus at a major university who happened to prefer watching TLC for background noise.

That’s why everything fell apart. In ’01, I recognized the problems these people were talking about. I had started digging into my own medical records and was barred at every turn. “No, you don’t need to see those first 5 years. Sure, they the first 5 are about as tall as the last 15, but you don’t need to worry. It’s just medical words, nothing you haven’t been told.” Which, in case you didn’t know, if slang for “Of course we are lying to you, and you’ll damn well like it and shut up.”

I pushed harder that summer, and got the truth. Everyone who knows me knows how many sugeries I went through. Everyone I grew up with knew I wore my scars like battle wounds, proud of each one. No one around me knew the truth. I can still count on a single hand the people outside my family who know that I was born so messed up they just picked to assign me as female.

So, watching this first documtary in ’01 made me push harder and got me the truth. It cost me several more years; dropping out of school, getting my brain back together for the newer me, and then pushing my way back into achedmeia. Completely worth it.

So, winter of, I guess it must have been ’05, I watched the special again. I caught the line that haunts me, still. David Reimer said something to the extent of “If it takes someone walking out into a field and killing them self to make people, doctors, notice, then I will.”

I was stunned. I was in tears.

When I was handed a copy of Colapinto’s As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as A Girl, I put the book on a shelf and refused to read it. “I know how this ends.” I was assured that, in ’02 or ’03, David was still alive and happily living as a man. I shrugged, and repeated “I still know how this has to end.”

When he said that, in a documtary about his, and others, lives, I knew.

I crossed my fingers, I hoped and nearly prayed I was wrong. But it ended with a ‘In Memoriam’ screen listing that he had killed himself May 4th 2004.

I wept.

I left an instant message to my parents saying, to the effect “Fuck you and the entire medical establishment.” and turned off my computers. I put on some headphones, and slept on the sofa. Truth is, every year on the 4th of May, I still do about the same thing. Not from some strange ritual, but because it seems the best time to evaluate my situation as well.

I know, it sounds morbid to suggest the thought as “Would my death further help those who continue to go through this?” but there it is. Growing up, between genders, I had the opposite thought of “Would my death finally make them all think of me as the person I am, not the gender they want me to be?” But, I was convinced they would leave a female name on my tombstone and figured that if they were going to spit on my memory that way, I was better off here doing my damdest to set the rest of the world straight (in a very queer way).
And I still am.

I don’t know how many people are going to think about it today. I don’t know how many people even know.

Most people, if you mention John/Joan just stare at you. A few, those who are well read or studied psychology, will miss the connection with the date.

And the very few, they know why this is a date to be saddened.

It’ll have been 5 years since David Reimer killed himself. For those who do not know, he was the temporarily female child in the John/Joan case. Yes, temporarily. I know, that detail always got left out, and I’ve heard psychology courses are still teaching Dr. Money’s theory as if it were working-as-intended.

NEWSFLASH: Dr. Money was wrong!

I never met the guy, personally, so calling him a jackass and a pompos fool would be a bit presumptuous. But, I am. And he was. His insistance that everything was fine led to countless numbers of intersexed children being assigned genders. David changed his name back when he was 14 I think. That would have been ’79. Hey, guess who else was born around that year. Gee, I wonder, Money, if you had been man enough to retract your false data and publish an errata and further study, what would have happened to kids like me? We might, just maybe, have been given the chance we should should have had.

Instead, we here at the labs will raise a stein, shotglass, mug, or the entire bottle of 151, to David. For being.

There’s a point in life where you realize everyone younger than you just doesn’t have the experience you do. Everyone thinks they’ve hit that point already, but we keep rehashing it every so often. I think it really sinks in when you can also realize that they’ve had more experience as well. Simultaneously, we get defined by the things we’ve done and the dreams we have, both the ones we’ve reached and the ones we’ve failed to. You don’t always get to pick the things you are judged on. Take Sabrina and I. Both still in college way longer than we should have been.

Why does this come up? Because that’s what other people see. Some look at it, see the reasons we are still there, and push degrees/jobs/futures as a reason to move up. Others look at us and write us off as perpetual slackers. We don’t get to pick which one they choose to see.

Got asked by a professor, again, when I’m graduating. I wanted to joke that I’ll get my degree posthumously. Who knows how long I’ll be here, and who knows how long I’ll be able to keep standing and fighting. I do it, because it’s fun. They don’t get that. They want to see a career, published papers, big things. I, frankly, don’t always care about those. I’m not, really, able to look that far ahead. Sabrina tells me she was, once. The way she said ‘once’ tells me she’s not so sure about now, though. It’s, painful, to sit back and have other people able to look further into your own future then you even can.

Which eventually drifted, in the complex web of thoughts my brain calls ‘awake’, to the thought of dating again. I keep hearing about other people’s S-Os. Or the people who tell me much after the fact that they thought about asking me out. I’m not dating. Not for lack of love for my fellow humans. . . wait, there is that. But mostly because the first six months would be spent catching another person up to that ‘this is where my life is at this moment’ point that, frankly, it would ruin the relationship about 5 minutes in. It’s a why-bother situation.

Somewhere, there is a person who would not walk away in disgust after a six month debrief on my life. Whenever they are, I hope they aren’t a solipsist like me.

Yup, the Laboratory is back online. Muri woke me up to tell me, then she hit me again for stealing her computer 6 months ago. The themes will have to suck till she gets a new computer.

What’s taken so long? Well, blogger sucks. Sorry, I just don’t care for it. Free is good, but there are things I’d rather not say on a google owned archive. So, now we are back online, Sabrina has joined the crew. You don’t remember her, but she’s used my pseudonym on blogger to post some rants about her coworkers in some digital projects. She may do that again, but now she’ll have to leave out the project names since she’ll be tied to us. Win some, lose some I guess.

It’s also taken a long time to get moving, because we have all been trying to pick up enough CSS and stuff to know how the server works. None of us wanted to trust some ‘pay us 15$ a month for a .com and a blog’ site. So, Muri’s been working on creating some graphics, I’ve been learning CSS with Bri, and Bri has been staying employeed. Colleges like that. So, the graphics have been rendering off and on for a few weeks here and there. Yes, we’re crazy enough to try for metal and photons in the same picture. We’ll wait, you’ll have to as well.

Sabrina also told me she will be keeping her public blog for school here. Some CS/Art thing, I guess. Means she can’t use a pseudonym, but that’s her problem. Means we might get public attention.

*waves to the public*