The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [131]
Q: Well, they put DES in pregnancy vitamins …
I know. That’s one of the issues we have to deal with now, when we ask people, “Did your mother take DES?” and they ask their mothers and they say, “No, they just gave me lots of vitamins.” But that’s what they called them; that’s how they marketed them to women. “Oh, these are just vitamins.” Some of them were more honest in saying, “This is to prevent miscarriage.” But some women were given DES who hadn’t even miscarried, in vitamins and so forth.
I was born and, supposedly … my father hates talking about this, but when I blasted them for the DES thing years ago he just sat stone-faced, no response, while my mother broke down and cried and wailed. But about twenty-five years ago—I was twenty-five at the time—he made a comment that during my circumcision, during my bris, they had noticed that there was something different with me.
Q: No more details than that?”
No. And they may not have had any more details because it is still the common procedure of pediatric urologists, which is the group that usually deals with this, to hush this up and to oftentimes not even speak to the parents and to make whatever corrections need to be made.
Q: But your parents were not aware that you had any surgery or procedure afterbirth?’
No. But I have scars, and have had urogenital problems my whole life. DES causes a host of problems, so I don’t know what they saw. And you’re talking about a bunch of older Jewish guys looking at a penis, so what do they know? They don’t look closely, they’re not doing an exam, so I don’t know. And there are many like me who just don’t know. There are scars, there are whispers, and that’s all you have. There are no records. They still don’t keep very good records. In some cases, they’ve burned the records. So, there’s a real problem.
My first physical problems manifested when I was twelve, in 1964. When I began bleeding on urination, and the hematuria [bleeding from the penis] progressed. It started off microscopically—obviously I didn’t know that—but it became a gross hematuria. I urinated blood.
Q: All the time, not periodically ?
All the time. And eventually, I got caught and my parents had to deal with it.
Q: You must have been scared to death?”
I thought I was menstruating, actually.
Q: Because by that point you were already aware of the gender issue?”
Yes, and I was twelve, and that’s what girls start doing. So I thought, in my confused mind, that I was menstruating. It turns out it probably was because I have a partial uterus, so it is biologically reasonable to think that at times I cramped and bloated and menstruated. Talk about bizarre—but this is intersexuality, so who knows? But a lot of this was during urination, and how many times do you urinate a day? Four or five times? You can imagine the fear. There was the anxiety and anticipation of pain that was worse than the pain.
Q: So this was also a painful urination?’
Extremely painful. It turned out, the diagnosis was urethral meatal stenosis, which means that the opening of the tip of the urethra was scarred down, closed down. It could have been scarred because of surgery that had been performed much earlier or it could have been some sort of overgrowth of tissue in that area due to DES. This has been recorded [in the data]. And I let this go on because I was scared to death about it. I had started cross-dressing when I was about eleven or so. I first felt like a girl, or like I should have been a girl, when I was about seven, but when I was eleven I started praying that my breasts would start growing and wearing my mother’s clothes, which finally fit me. I was her height, five-six or -seven, and I was just getting to the height where I could wear her clothes. And I would do that, and then forget to put them back exactly the same way, intentionally so that someone would notice. And they finally noticed and said, “You never do that again, or we’ll have you institutionalized at Creedmore.