Shana Knizhnik is an American lawyer and author from Philadelphia. She is best known for her New York Times bestselling book, Notorious R.B.G.: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, co-written with MSNBC reporter Irin Carmon.
It takes an extraordinary amount of effort to live one’s life in perpetual denial, in a constant state of pretending, but it takes even more effort to counteract a lifetime’s worth of outward pressure and expectations, as well as inner turmoil and self-repression. It wasn’t until after college that I finally began dating women and was thus publicly “out” as queer. Still, I wasn’t ready to be fully out as intersex, aside from romantic partners and a few close friends. I had shed one aspect of the facade I’d created, but part of me was still holding on to the privilege of being able to pass as “normal,” that ever-elusive concept that has evaded me my entire life…
I’m really good at pretending. I’ve had almost an entire lifetime of practice. It’s easy to pretend when everyone makes assumptions about you and you simply fail to correct them.
I was assigned female at birth, raised as a girl, and I now identify as a woman. By most definitions, this makes me “cisgender,” or “cis.” What makes my experience different than most cis women, however, is that when I was 17 years old, I found out that I had XY chromosomes — the set of chromosomes typical for males.
My parents had broken the news to me at age 11 that I would never have a monthly period, that I would not be able to have biological children, and that I would have to take hormonal supplements to go through puberty (and would need to continue to take them for the rest of my life). However, the reason why was never fully explained. There was some vague explanation about cancerous ovaries that had to be removed when I was a baby, but it didn’t fully add up. My parents also told me, as the doctors had told them, that I “didn’t have to tell anyone” about any of this. Certainly the very basic notions of a “normal” life I had previously envisioned were severely affected by my knowledge of these truths, but as my adolescent years went by, what became my more compulsive struggle was not the symptoms themselves, but rather the shroud of secrecy and shame that surrounded anything to do with them. Read more via Teen Vogue