Yesterday my lawyer, Yme Drost, and I worked on finalizing the formal complaint against the VUMC hospital's gender team for their failure to properly diagnose my intersex condition, insistence on having me conform to either a male or female role, refusal to listen to or answer my questions and concerns and their violating as a result of this of my fundamental human rights including the right to decide about my own body, the right to determine my own identity and the right to be not discriminated against for any reason.
Yesterday (May 4th) we commemorated the deaths of the Second World War here in the Netherlands ('Dodenherdenking'). Today, May 5th, we celebrate the end of the German occupation of the Netherlands, on May 5th, 1945. This last date ended a period of about five years during which the Nazi occupants set the rules and took whatever they wanted, stripping the country bare.
It is somehow very befitting that the complaint against the VUMC gets filed around this date. Without trying to evoke Godwin's Law, a number of apt comparisons can be made. The Dutch medical system in a sense also occupied my body and that of those like me, determining what I could and could not do. I was denied the right to self-determination and any complaints I had about my treatment were ignored. I too had to start a kind of underground movement by choosing to self-medicate, self-inform and choose anything but formal routes to finally achieve victory, loosening the choke hold the Dutch medical system had on my life.
Similarly, I now have to rebuild after the long war. Meanwhile the war rages on in other territories, for other people's bodies, whether already born or not yet. This is the war for self-determination about our bodies, the call for the end of the occupation in which millions are forced to adhere to the inhuman rules of the so-called medical profession. While the happiness of us intersex people is claimed to be their goal, the used methods are beyond barbaric and give us a similar amount of choice as the victims of medical experiments by Nazi physicians were given.
Sixty-seven years after the liberation of the Netherlands, ten years after the Dutch government finally admitted to homosexuals also having been a target of Nazi exterminations, now on the verge of finally liberating our bodies. With so many victims of this war which took on serious shape in the 1960s, it is time that it finally ends.
Regardless of who or what you are, you and you alone decide about your identity, your body and how you present yourself. This is the ultimate freedom which supposedly was taken care of by international treaties like the United Nations' declaration of human rights, the European declaration of human rights and national declarations embodied in laws, such as article 1 of the Dutch fundamental laws upon which the country was founded.
No one, whether a politician, physician, psychologist or anyone else, has the right to decide about another person's identity whether mentally or physically. No one had the right to decide what kind of surgery I should get, or what kind of psychological therapy. No one had the right to judge me and ignore my questions as a result. Not the Dutch hospitals, not the Dutch politicians I contacted, not the Dutch Minister of Health. No one.
My mission is still to win this war. Now that I have won the last series of battles, claimed the right to independence and pushed the enemy forces back there's no time to rest, no time to question my motives. This struggle by any definition can be called a war for justice, for freedom and for an end to the horrors inflicted upon countless individuals in the name of righteousness.
I know that there are many more like-minded people in this war and I hope that they too will be joining me. There is no room for negotiating, no room for understanding. The old regime is beyond salvation, beyond redemption. The only solution here is to replace the old with the new.
While I'm not advocating public lynchings of Dutch politicians, physicians and the like, I do think that those responsible for the horrors inflicted upon us intersex individuals and others can not be trusted to ever perform a role in which they decide about other people's bodies. They should be sacked, judged in a court of law and sentenced according to UN and other relevant laws and regulations.
The line must be drawn here.
Maya
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