“I’d rather be a verb than a noun,” says award-winning poet Thea Hillman. “I try not to identify if I can help it. Things that are more true than not about me: I’m a queer, intersex writer, and culturally Jewish activist. I go by she.”
A frequent presenter and spoken word performer addressing intersex issues, Hillman has also chaired the board of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA). The premier resource for information about reproductive anomalies and disorders of sex development, the ISNA is dedicated to ending unwanted genital surgeries for those born with anatomy atypical to males or females. ISNA urges that all children be designated as boys or girls without surgical intervention.
Hillman’s first book, Depending on the Light, was a collection of short fiction and poem-stories about sex, family, queerness, language and social change. Her latest, For Lack of a Better Word, is a “very personal, intense book” about family, sex and relationships—centered around growing up intersex. It’s due out later this spring.
Since the mid ‘90s, Hillman has produced spoken word performances. She recalls that the early events, “Morphed into community-building and strengthening events. I brought together really talented people to talk about things that weren’t getting enough exposure anywhere, including on stage: intersex, trans and genderqueer issues, [particularly] from older and younger people and from people of color.”
Although trans issues have gained visibility, Hilman insists, “There are still trans stories that aren’t being told, especially from transwomen and poor and incarcerated trans people.”
Hillman says that while both intersex and trans people face sex and gender oppression, “What is generally true and unique to people dealing with intersex issues is that the bodies they were born with put them at risk of…medical intervention…[that they] had no say in…either because they were too young to consent or were never even told what was being done to them.”
Meanwhile, most trans folks choose the types of medical interventions they want. “This means,” Hillman contends, “their results will be better and they will most likely be happier with their choices.”
It’s also important, Hillman argues, to understand that many intersex people don’t identify with, nor consider themselves part of, the LGBT community. “While some intersex people consider their sex, or their gender or their sexual orientation to be queer, many do not. Many intersex people don’t identify as intersex, either, because they don’t know how to name their experience…or because they identify with the condition behind the intersexuality.”
Hillman (http://theahillman.com) says being intersex has affected everything about the way she sees and experiences the world, including her gender and writing style. “My being intersex definitely has shaped my gender, [and] just like I hate to identify or commit to fixed identities, I hate to write in just one genre. I love intertextuality. [I] weave various tones and stories into one.”
She describes Depending on as “a bunch of different genres held together by one narrative voice,” while For Lack vacillates between styles. “Some of it is more poetic, other parts more prose, other parts more narrative story-telling.”
“It’s not that I’m intersex so I’m a mix of male or female, or that I can’t decide between male and female so I can’t decide between poetry or fiction, I [just] don’t want to commit to one reality or one voice. It feels so much truer to me to say, and to show, that many potentially oppositional things are true at once. That seems to be the truth about my experience of intersex: I’m both normal and not, whole and not. Living on the outside and the inside affords me multiple perspectives. And I want to tell all of them.”
Catch Thea Hillman performing June 20 at the San Francisco LGBT Center.
Blind Curves, the first Blind Eye mystery co-authored by trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall, is available now through powells.com. Contact jake@trans-nation.org or visit Anderson-minshall.com for more information.
