NOBODY NEEDS TO KNOW

A prominent intersex activist reflects on how they overcame the lies, secrets, and silences that have surrounded their identity.

As a child, Chicago native Pagonis never felt at ease with the name their parents had given them—Jennifer—or with the trappings of girlhood. The author had always felt different because of the many surgeries they underwent to eliminate what their mother said was infantile ovarian cancer. Pagonis’ anxieties about femininity only worsened as they grew older and especially after they began having problems with urination, which led to more surgeries, including the enlargement of a small vagina. Doctors then prescribed the estrogen hormone Premarin, but by high school, Pagonis was still a “mostly flat-chested, frizzy-haired, mustachioed girl” with no hips who believed no boy would ever be attracted to them. Eventually, the author met a handsome but troubled boy, but he showed them the painful limits of their surgically altered body and taught them to hate sex. Learning about Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome in a college women’s studies class dramatically “ruptured” their sense of self. With shattering clarity, Pagonis suddenly understood that everyone—from their family to their doctors—had covered up the complex truth of their intersexuality and forced them to assume a “simpler” identity as female. “A neural meteor shower lit up the valleys of my brain as I processed all the things I had, until that moment, avoided realizing,” she writes. When medical records confirmed an AIS diagnosis, the author began the slow and difficult but ultimately successful work of not only reclaiming their unique, nonbinary identity, but also creating heightened visibility for intersex people and ending intersex surgeries at the hospital where they and other intersex children had been treated. The insights this courageous book offers into the struggles of a too often overlooked group will primarily appeal to readers seeking to broaden their understanding of queerness and nonbinary identities.

A sharp-eyed, candid reading experience.