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HERMAPHRODITE

ne sunny fall afternoon nearly 20 years ago, Sadie and Heather got out of school and went to Sadie's house to play. They were in Sadie's room when one of them suggested they play a little game of show and tell: You show me yours and I'll show you mine. Ten year old Heather pulled her pants down around her ankles. Sadie, who had just turned 11, took her jeans all the way off. They exchanged nervous glances and then simultaneously took off their panties. Sadie looked at Heather, Heather at Sadie. Silence.

Heather quickly pulled up her pants and zipped them. She was on the verge of tears. Without looking at Sadie again, and without saying a word, Heather left the room and never came back. Sadie didn't bother putting her jeans back on. She walked over to her bed, laid face down and cried into her pillow.

"This is like Cracker Jacks. There's a surprise every time I unzip my pants."

"They were not the same," explains Sadie, now 29. "There was no doubt in either of our minds as to who was really fucked."

While she was familiar with her own genitals and their appearance, Sadie had already suspected that she wasn't normal down there. That may be why she agreed to--even possibly suggested--the "show me" game. She needed to know for sure.

While Heather never spoke to Sadie again, she talked about her often. It wasn't long before all the other little girls wanted to play the same game with Sadie. Unfortunately, they reacted quite differently. They were cruel, like only children can be. They made fun of her, saying things like, "That's wrong" and "gross" and "sick."

Sadie knew she was different, but she didn't know what--other than the obvious physical differences--was wrong. It seemed to be completely out of her control, but she wasn't sure. She was depressed and felt guilty. Eventually she decided to tell her mom, which was not an easy decision.

As a child she was not close to her parents. They were practicing Jehovah's Witnesses, something Sadie believes contributes, even today, to their distant behavior. For as long as she can remember, she felt like an outcast at home. Her parents' attitude affected how her siblings treated her as well. She claims that at one point a member of her family tried to cut off her genitals with a knife. The memory isdistant and hazy. Sadie doesn't want to remember it. But suddenly she was being treated even worse when she left the house. She had nowhere else to go but to her mother.

"It's like being in the 5th grade and springing a boner--I can't control it. Imagine if you were just drilling me and all of a sudden I got wood."

Instead of answers or support, Sadie's mom took her to the family doctor, who told her she would "grow out of it." But no one would tell her what "it" was. She was never given an explanation, or even an excuse. The word hermaphrodite never came up.

"I always had this image of everything else growing," Sadie said. "Except that. Like the rest of my body would just grow into it." But she didn't grow into it. Or out of it.

When she reached puberty, instead of everything else growing, "it" began to grow. Again, Mom was approached. Again Sadie was taken to the family doctor. Again they claimed that she would grow out of it. The doctor told her it was a slight hormonal problem and she was given a prescription for birth control pills.

Sadie wasn't satisfied with the doctor's diagnosis. When she told her parents that she thought there was a more serious problem, they made it clear that the doctor's explanation was to stand as unquestionable fact and not to be discussed further.

The pills helped. They kept the growth of Sadie's genitals under control. Still, there were times when she was so frightened of growing a penis that she would steal her mother's estrogen. Her mom was going through menopause, while teenage Sadie was just trying to remain what she thought she was all along: a girl.

She got her period. Cramps. Bloating. All of the joys associated with womanhood. Her periods were erratic, depending on whether or not she was taking hormones. Sometimes when she wasn't taking them, she would menstruate twice a month; other times she wouldn't get it for months. As any girl will tell you, not getting her period can be pretty frightening. Since Sadie wasn't sexually active, she was scared for different reasons.

"I'm like the waste product of some kind of cosmic experiment."

After her innocent childhood experiences with show and tell turned into ugly displays of name calling and social alienation, it was a long time before anyone besides a doctor saw Sadie naked. During a visit to her doctor at age 14, he said to her, "There is something wrong with you. It needs to be fixed."

Apparently he forgot how fragile a teenage girl's self-esteem can be at that age. He also forgot, just as all the medical professionals before him had forgotten, to explain what was "wrong."

Her parents, still unwilling to give the problem a label, agreed with the doctor and took Sadie in for surgery soon after.

"The doctor tried to fix it from the inside," Sadie recalls. "They went in there and didn't even do anything."

Whatever was done during the operation--even today she is unclear of the intent or results--left her external genitals untouched. The only difference she noticed was in her self-image.

"My childhood was hell," Sadie recalls. "I really thought that there was something horribly wrong with me. At least if I'd had a big dick, I would have had something to associate with the way I felt inside. A reason for it."

She says the worst part about it all was that she had no one to talk to. And since her genitals were so ambiguous, she didn't know how to relate them to what she felt. She remains bitter that no one would ever talk to her about it. Her family is one thing, but her doctor?

"Your average family doctor," Sadie explained, "who's known you since you were two, isn't going to talk about it if his life depends on it."

That could be because few doctors have ever had to deal with something like this. Sadie has what she calls a genital anomaly. She is what most people would consider a hermaphrodite. hermaphrodite photos

There are different types of hermaphrodites, all of which are born with ambiguous genitalia. True hermaphrodites must possess a degree of both the internal male and female sex organs. Pseudohermaphrodites, on the other hand, have a degree of both external parts, but only one set of internal organs. The classical concept of a hermaphrodite--a person born with a fully- formed and functioning penis and vagina--does not exist. As a fetus, our genitals, male or female, form from the same embryonic tissue. Around the sixth week after conception, the embryonic tissue will begin to form a penis, vagina, or something in between. It cannot form both, since there is only one set of tissue.

Sadie appears to be a pseudohermaphrodite with androgenital syndrome. Her clitoris is enlarged, but lacks a urethral tube. Instead, the openings of the urethra and vagina are combined. People with androgenital syndrome are internally female, menstruate, and can have children. Those who wish to control it use adrenal hormone therapy.

One in 2,000 newborns is intersexual, and there are between 350 and 450 known true hermaphrodites alive today. Doctors and specialists are usually brought in to help the parents decide which gender will be best for their newborn. The female is the more popular choice, since it is easier to transform a penis, or ambiguous genitalia, into a vagina. "Not making the decision," according to Dr. Fred Berlin, a physician at Johns Hopkins (the leading center for medical treatment of hermaphrodites), "may be dooming the child to a very difficult existence."

Until recently, Sadie has always kept to herself. "It's not something I ran around telling everybody. I didn't particularly feel the need to be beaten or molested in the schoolyard," Sadie explains. "It really fucked up my whole sexuality. I wouldn't let anyone touch me, because every now and again I'd spring a little two inch chubbie."

Sadie didn't want to go back to her doctor. She couldn't talk to her family. When she felt that her birth control pills weren't enough, she went to Tijuana for her hormones. It was the only way for her to keep it under control. The hormones would shrink her growing member, enhance the growth of her breasts and keep her on a regular, less painful, menstrual cycle. And, although she wasn't sure if she would grow facial hair without them or not, they certainly helped repress that fear. But she was still not comfortable with her body.

"Understandably, I am a little confused as to my real identity. I look at that thing, and I wonder, because it fluctuates so much and because there are some days when I just look like a girl, and there are some days when I'm just like, 'What the hell is that?' Then I wonder if I wasn't born with something extra and they just had it snipped." Sadie's sensation is external, which makes her think it was trying to evolve into a little penis.

When she masturbates, she yanks on her genitals like a guy jerking off, and she even stands up to pee--two actions that have been attributed to men. "I keep waiting for my parents to just call me up and admit that I was born a boy, and they cut my dick off because I was only halfway there," Sadie says. "I tried to ask my mom on the phone, and we just, we, uh.... I don't have that kind of relationship with my family. I do not have an open family at all. It's just one of those things." Just like when she was growing up, Sadie's mom quickly and quietly avoided the issue.

The day came when Sadie finally felt comfortable and horny enough to bring people home with her. Sadie would try and hide in the dark with her genitals, and she even got away with it sometimes. It wasn't very noticeable if it was soft, except for maybe feeling a little strange.

"It's just kind of like, 'Surprise! Aunt Sadie has something in her pants for you!'" The situation remained the same--when it came to finding out what was in Sadie's pants, they would have to wait until she took them off, because she was not about to tell them. "I've been with a very limited number of people, and it is really scary because I don't know if it's gonna do something. It's like being in the 5th grade and springing a boner--I can't control it. Imagine if you were just drilling me and all of a sudden I got wood.

"I start getting real paranoid, like people are gonna judge me, and then part of me wants to attack first." Sometimes the reactions she received gave her a reason to be paranoid. hermaphrodite photos

Sadie was lonely one night and decided to bring a friend home. They fucked. He didn't notice. He woke up and, as the morning light was shining through the windows, he went to grab Sadie.

"What the fuck? Get that shit cut!" he screamed at her as he quickly grabbed his clothes from the floor and left the room. That was the last time Sadie had sex.

"God, if it's that dark, put the lights on baby, because you never know what you're getting into. Literally," Sadie said.

The only trace of masculinity she appears to have is in her pants. As one of her friends put it, "Sadie is, in my eyes, extremely feminine--in the way she dresses, speaks, and moves." That seems to be the general consensus with people who know her.

While working at 1-800 POSTCARDS, none of her coworkers suspected a thing. Sadie would sit at her desk every day, taking orders, helping customers and talking and flirting. She and Michele Brown would talk about their lives and the problems they were having. But Brown, along with most of the other employees, did not find out until recently, when they saw these photos. They had worked with her for three months prior, and some people simply would not believe it. After finding out, Brown said, "Everything we talked about makes so much sense now--it puts everything into perspective." Brown knew that Sadie had had a difficult life, but she never knew exactly why. It didn't take long before everyone in the office knew. Some people expressed surprise because they see Sadie as being very sure of herself and comfortable with who she is.

Her short skirts and feminine behavior helped to hide what was underneath. No one thought twice about it. It's one of those things that, when you find out, you don't believe. Her former manager, Mary Raphaelle says, "When she told me she was a hermaphrodite I thought she was kidding. Now that I know and have seen her body, I still perceive her as totally female."

Sadie is aware that people see her differently than the way she feels inside. "People think I am a happy-go-lucky club girl. Cool and sweet and just hanging out. I am so not that. I am something entirely different. I am super-freak. I care about things that don't apply to anything in this life," she says.

She is so un-comfortable in this world that Sadie has made her own world to live in. Sadie has always been a writer, which has helped her to create dialogue and stories in her mind. She becomes so attached to the characters she creates that she feels almost delusional at times. It is a safe place for her to be. It is the only place where Sadie is accepted. Anything she may or may not be is a non-issue. But, however comforting that world may be, she is sometimes forced to step back into the real one.

"I'm still like a girl, but it's not your mother's vagina."

When Sadie left her family in California for the East Coast, she started to open up more about what she was. At the very least, she could finally admit that there was a male side to her--the part that she relates to more. Sometimes she is even intrigued by her own genitals. "It doesn't get boring. It's always interesting. Because life outside is quite unpredictable. This is like Cracker Jacks. There's a surprise every time I unzip my pants."

Sex with men is sometimes painful for her, which explains why she has been with more women. "You also have to keep in mind that you're talking to someone who hasn't had any kind of sex in about a year and a half," she says. But when she is with women, she can put her genitals in them and fuck them like a guy would. "It's quite enjoyable," Sadie says. Of course, she can also get blow jobs. Not only is it more pleasurable for her to be with girls, Sadie is simply more attracted to them. That has its own set of problems.

While men usually become curious and want to experiment with and poke at her genitals, women have reacted cruelly. "Women are the ones I respond to more sexually, so it is more likely to do something that it shouldn't. Women are the ones who will hurt your feelings, though." More than once she has brought a woman home and, upon seeing Sadie's genitals, they have left. They told Sadie they had wanted to be with a girl, not whatever Sadie is. "Women have a fucking stroke--they freak. The result is that I'm just one of those people who will go through life not having any kind of sex other than the sex I have with myself."

One of the few sexual relationships she has had with men gave her something else that was unexpected: a child. She was always told that she couldn't have children, which made this quite a shock--for everyone. When Sadie was four months pregnant, she went to her family doctor. He told Sadie that she could not be pregnant. Her prenatal care was nonexistent as a result. Her pregnancy was not physically easy either. "My uterus was ripped, because it never fully developed. One of my ovaries kept popping out eggs, but the uterus didn't stretch enough, so it tore." Because of these complications, Sadie delivered a baby girl by C-section in the emergency room.

While pregnant, Sadie thought about the possibility of having a child with ambiguous genitalia. People would pat her stomach and say to the growing fetus, "Hi herme." "I wanted to kill," Sadie says. She was fully prepared, if she had an intersex child, to get it cut. "I always thought there was something wrong with me because of it and all I wanted was to look normal." She didn't want to put her daughter through the same thing. "She's normal. I don't check her out. I believe in respecting her privacy."

Sadie never told her daughter about her own genitals and is not planning to. Sadie says, "In no circumstances in her life will she ever need to know that information--not even when she's 30." Her daughter has what Sadie had always wanted: a normal childhood. Sadie refuses to take that away from her. "The information has nothing to do with her life, so I keep her out of it." Sadie, after some thought, and realizing the fact that her daughter may one day need to know, says, "It's just not age appropriate. She is eight years old. One day, when she's pregnant and I think there's a possibility of her having a child with ambiguous genitalia, I will tell her; to prepare her. Or, if I think her father might tell her, I'd tell her first. So far he hasn't." Sadie hopes that he never does.

Sadie needed money, so she decided to get a job as a cyber performer. When applying for the job, she treated her future employers like she treated her former lovers. "I didn't tell them up front."

When Sadie went for her interview, they sent her into the other room to take off her clothes. When she came back out, they were silent. Instead of running away like Heather did, they offered Sadie a job.

"The thing about the internet is that people are always surfing, looking for something they haven't seen before. Maybe a guy doesn't want to look at a she-male, but he wants to see something different. So this is like a safe difference. I'm still like a girl, but it's not your mother's vagina. They just want to see something a little bit different and I definitely fill that need."

They explained that she would be spending her days in a room in front of a camera and two screens. One monitor was for Sadie to watch herself, so she could make sure a pose was flattering and the other was for her to communicate with her clients. The users would log on and type in their requests to Sadie, while racking up charges on their credit card bills. She would perform for them and type back to them. They even had the option of calling in for some visual phone sex.

She started on a Friday morning. Men who were into the barely legal thing were logging in to her because she looked like a 14 year old girl. Sadie danced for them and they got off. It was easy money. Two weeks later, following their regular schedule, the Friday-morning-before-work guys logged in, looking for 14 year old Sadie. What they got was something entirely different.

Even Sadie was surprised when she saw how big her genitals were that Friday morning. She was more curious than shocked and began to pull on it. She wanted to see if it would get bigger. Her clients were not pleased.

"What are you?" the men typed in. Although some men enjoy this, these men expected barely legal and that is all they wanted. They spent their money to type in degrading remarks to Sadie. hermaphrodite photos

She said that instead of feeling uncomfortable with herself, she wanted to show off her anomaly. "There's a part of me that loves to, if given the right opportunity and the right circumstances, just shock the hell out of somebody." Sadie became so angry that she tugged on it to make it look more extreme. She wanted to terrorize them. "There were times when I felt like an animal--I'd get really angry and that was my revenge." There were even times she would get mad if her genitals wouldn't do anything. She wanted it to grow. She wanted it to be more extreme.

The day of our photo shoot, she felt the same way. "I really hope it does something," she kept saying. She was putting so much pressure on herself to get a hard-on that we knew it would not happen. Few can function under pressure. Since she had just finished her period, she claimed that, unfortunately for us, her genitals were at their smallest.

This was a huge contrast from the way she felt when she was growing up. But it is understandable that she would go back and forth between the two mindsets, since they both had the same purpose: to find a place to fit in. "I don't even fit into the standard notions of sexuality, or the ideology--none of it applies to me." Her whole life was spent not knowing who or what she was and simply wanting something to associate with, be it male, female or full-blown freak.

She relates very much to the confusion that transgendered people feel and even respects them, because they took that step and chose a gender. "Nobody knows, until they attempt to do that, the strength or trauma involved in choosing a team. Whereas I'm gonna walk my whole life being neither one nor the other, at least internally. I really feel a strong kindred to them because they want so desperately to be something they weren't born as, whereas I just want to be either one. I wish there was something hanging right there in the middle, like, grow a dick or let the thing shrink up to something normal, or let me grow breasts and not be so wiry. Let my body assume more feminine features. Or just be more.... Pick a team, baby. That's what it's about. Pick a team."

As much as Sadie says she wants to "pick a team," she would feel just as out of place with normal genitals, because then she would have to make up her mind, and she would no longer be a freak. "I've been liberated from either side. I'm not well-hung. I'm not even hung. I'm exempt from all the rules. I can really relax. And maybe one day I'll meet another circus freak just like me." But it's not that simple. She examined her genitals, and became even more confused. hermaphrodite photos

"I'm like the waste product of some kind of cosmic experiment. I do have little nuts. They're kind of hard to figure out, because they don't drop, but you can feel them. I guess that's not normal." No, I don't think most people would consider that normal. The only way Sadie will know whether or not she is a true hermaphrodite is to get internal tests by doctors who will actually share the results with her. It is sad that Sadie will have to find out what she is from a complete stranger, rather than her family.

At 29, Sadie still hasn't "grown out of it." "I always knew beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no matter how developed a woman's, or a hermaphrodite's genitals are, this isn't normal. When you look at it, it looks like something has been done to it. It looks like they slit it down the middle and took something out of the inside, because it looks like shriveled up skin that used to have something inside of it. I'm still like a girl, but it's not your mother's vagina. It doesn't look like a normal pussy, what the fuck is it?" The more she checks herself out, the more she wants to know. hermaphrodite photos

Sadie even hired a private investigator once to find out about the origin of her genitals. She has tried to get her medical records, but the doctor who delivered her is now dead. It is common to not be able to obtain these records. "Some (intersex adults) have been told that their records are not on file, though the hospital has not discarded other records from that era. They--and I--wonder why the records are missing." She could always try her mother. After all, Sadie does have a right to know what she is, if nothing else. "Yeah," she says, "I've been trying to figure out a way to ask her."

"I wouldn't let anyone touch me, because every now and again I'd spring a little two inch chubbie."

Katrina Del Mar, voted Best Band Photographer by the New York Press, is busy seeding the earth with necessary nonverbal information. For visual stimulation see her website at http://www.bway.net/~katrina Send $1 plus SASE for Katrina's catalog to Plushtoy Productions POB 1241 Cooper Station NYC 10276

research: Angela Valdez, Janine Stromberg

Hermaphrodite

From the Tape

POP You are so disgusted by men, yet you say that's who you relate to more. How does that work?

S I relate to the underbelly of humanity! Yep, things are lookin' good for me, baby. This is why I have no sex. I fit in nowhere. I fit in nowhere. It's time for Pat! I should be my own Saturday Night Live sketch!

POP But people look at you and they think they know what you are.

S I don't fit in at all anywhere. That's why this is a perfect job--or was, I no longer do this--but at the time it was the perfect job for me, because these men would, some men would deliberately attack women, or everything was focused on the female, and I didn't fit that category because it didn't apply to me! Therefore, I could get dressed and go home and it ceased to exist. I gotta look at this. I gotta think of better stuff to talk about. I feel like I'm failing. I'm not being interesting.

POP Oh, please. You've lived with this, so it's familiar to you. Nobody else knows....

S Like the question, "Did you ever want to chop it off?" Yeah. I'm wondering if I've always been sexually confused.

POP I'm sure.

S And I think things like, "Did you ever want to cut it off and get a boob job and be totally a girl? And then there were times when I didn't care about my body and I wanted it to get even bigger. And I'm really upset when it doesn't do anything that it usually does, you know? And it's like, which I mean, when you're online and you're dealing with people who are logging in, or any kind of job in the sex industry, that are abusive, or obsessive, or just straight up stupid. Because I don't fit either place, it doesn't affect me at all. So, it really doesn't bother me.

POP Do you think the world would be a better place if everyone had a little of both parts?

S Oh, fuck yeah. We'd bridge that huge gender gap. Real love would come back into the picture. It wouldn't be cats and dogs anymore. Everyone would understand--I spoke in really

contemptuous terms about the people that consistently use pornography, specifically targeting men, even though women do use pornography. But I also express sympathy and understanding for a lot of people who are just lonely or just curious. I do relate in a lot of ways to men's sexuality being visual or reactionary. You know, curiosity, "Can you put this up your ass?" You know, "Can you do this or that?" As far as exploring boundaries, or getting away with anything possible.

POP Yet at the same time you very much relate to the female thing as far as the intellectual--

S Of course. Is it all physical? What about your mind? So I'm the missing link. I am the missing link!

POP If everyone was more like Sadie--

S If everybody grew a cock. And if all men had cute little hooties. No. I think all women need to develop some kind of masculinity just to make them stronger, better able to deal with men on their level, and you know, all men need to get some more X chromosomes, whatever. Take a little estrogen. You know, the world would be a better place. If everybody were a hermaphrodite, the world would be a better place.