For J. Ben Morton, Donald Trump’s Day One executive order declaring there are only two immutable sexes — male and female — came as a head-spinning shock.
“It felt like someone had walked up behind me and walloped me over the head with a phone book,” Morton said.
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Eight years ago, the Tennessee native and writer, then 32, endured another slow-rolling temblor when his ancestry saliva sample was flagged. The company wanted to schedule a phone call.
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“I replied within minutes, puzzled as to why in the world this ancestry company wanted to talk to me about my obvious northwestern European heritage. I’m as white as it gets,” Morton wrote in an essay for the Huffington Post.
“I answered my phone on the first ring.”
“’Based on your answers, we’ve identified a mismatch in your DNA,’” a company representative told Morton after a long interrogation about his health history and the provenance of his saliva.
“A mismatch?” he asked.
“‘Well,’ she said, searching for the best customer-friendly language, ‘you completed your profile as “male.” But your DNA appears to be female.'”
“Holding the phone to my ear, I laughed nervously, stalling for time while my brain searched its depths for any remaining knowledge on DNA,” Morton wrote.
“I was taught that boys had XY chromosomes, male genitalia, and high testosterone and that girls had XX chromosomes, female genitalia, and relatively low testosterone. I didn’t know that various combinations of chromosomes, hormones, external genitalia, and internal reproductive structures existed.”
“I never learned that sex exists on a spectrum,” he shared.
Morton spent months “trying to grasp how I could have female DNA” before meeting with a geneticist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
“How do you feel about the word ‘intersex’?” she asked.
“Intersex,” the geneticist told Morton, “is an umbrella term used to describe a wide range of natural variations that can affect things like genitals, hormones, and chromosomes. Sometimes these characteristics are visible at birth, sometimes they appear during puberty, but often they are never physically noticeable.”
An estimated 5.6 million people in the U.S. may have intersex traits, “making them as common as red hair globally.”
Morton was diagnosed with a “disorder of sexual development.”
“‘Specifically, your variation is called XX testicular DSD,’” the geneticist told him.
In Morton’s case, that meant “the translocation of an SRY gene.” Some development of male sex organs had occurred, “but my internal functioning was more blurred, including irregular hormone production and likely infertility.”
“Grappling with my health prior to these tests, I’d often felt like something was wrong with me — that parts of me were broken compared with other guys my age.” Morton wrote. “I couldn’t build muscle as quickly, I was usually tired, and my brain seemed to operate differently. Now I had a reason why I didn’t fit the typical mold.”
The diagnosis, Morton wrote, “allowed me to receive treatments that provide me with greater energy and quality of life. But more than that, my diagnosis has played a major role in my politics, as I empathize more with people who don’t fit typical molds.”
“I’m on the easy-to-ignore end of the sex and gender spectrums, but many others have more urgent needs that require them to fight daily for health care necessities and acknowledgment of their existence. And even those who aren’t intersex or transgender should be bothered by the president’s order because, at a minimum, it allows government interference in private matters — not to mention that it’s just plain cruel.”
“If sex is strictly defined at birth with no room for changes, men like myself could face challenges in legal recognition, and it opens doors for the government and private companies to discriminate,” he said.
“DNA proof or not, intersex and trans people are real, and we should believe them,” Morton wrote. “An executive order effectively declaring the nonexistence of intersex and trans individuals will never make us cease to exist. It just puts our lives at risk.”
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