I Exist

A Manifesto of an Unreal Man

Facts are facts. The truth is another matter.

The fact is that I am a man. The truth is that I am not a man.

According to comedian Dave Chappelle, the fact is that I don’t even exist.

I can’t blame Chappelle for this confusion. I have, after all, been in hiding for half a century.

Now, at the age of 50, I am casting the illusion aside. Finally, I am coming out of the closet.

I am intersex.

Intersex?

Many people won’t understand what it means for me to be intersex. That’s okay. We all have a lot to learn about each other. Intersex is an old term, used by a small number of people.

What it means is that I was born with a physical body that was somewhere between male and female.

No one knows for sure how common an occurrence this is, but it happens.

I am, genetically, fully male. I have lived as a fully-functioning man for decades, and am the biological father of three great kids.

Yet, when I was born, and for a few years after that, part of my body was what some call “ambiguous”.

No, I’m not going to tell you exactly what that looks like. Get to know me personally, and in time I may share the details with you.

Until then, I will share that my body was toward the male side of the spectrum, though not completely so. My parents referred to it as a “defect” that was “corrected” when I was four years old.

My body still bears the scars, and as a consequence of the surgery, I must perform a painful procedure a few times per week. If I fail to do so, eventually I will die.

Still, I think my parents did the right thing. I was operated on in the mid 1970s, and I was physically small as a child. If my body hadn’t been operated on, I would have soon become a target for the worst kinds of violence. The boys in the community where I grew up were not the sort who were willing to peacefully tolerate differences.

Why Now?

Being intersex feels so thoroughly odd that it is easier for me to talk about why I have chosen this moment to come out of the closet than it is to describe what I actually am.

Gender theory is easier to talk about when it remains theoretical. When it comes to revealing my own experience, my sentences shorten. “Intersex” is the appropriate adjective for what I am, but there is no noun that cleanly fits my identity. It feels as if my vocabulary has returned to what I knew when I was four.

Here’s what happened to make this revelation possible:

I am in the process of divorcing. I turned 50 this year. It’s no longer my job to be producing children, and in a few years I will be done with my job of rearing my children. My teenagers don’t need a dad specifically so much as they need a parent who will stand with them.

I am becoming single again, but to be a man at my age is not the same thing as it was to be a man when I was young. The world has changed, and so have I.

Some things have not changed, of course. Though acceptance of LGBT+ identities has developed profoundly, many people still reject them, and do so with violent force.

Specifically, I discovered just a few days ago the release of a special presentation by Dave Chappelle, facilitated by Neflix. In this video, Chappelle denies the mere existence such as people like me. “Gender is a fact,” Chappelle states, “Every human being in this room, every human being on earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on earth. That is a fact.”

Chappelle’s statement goes on for quite some time, mocking gays and lesbians, denying the existence of anti-trans violence, insulting people with disabilities and other ethnicities. It’s his insistence on a simple binary between men and women as the “fact” of “gender”, though, that has pushed me to the point of discussing my personal biology in this public forum.

His statement forces me to choose either:

A) To stand up and declare my existence as a real person whose gender is founded upon a biological platform that isn’t simply male or female

or

B) To remain seated quietly in my living room chair, pretending to have nothing to say, allowing Chappelle’s lie to go unanswered

I have chosen to stand up and present my truth.

As a person born intersex, my gender is male. I identify as a man, a heterosexual man. My preferred pronouns have been “he” and “him”.

However, as a person born intersex, I am also something other than a man. I am something for which there is no name, for which there can be no name, because our culture has presumed that gender and sex are the same thing.

As long as I am silent about my biological identity, and its divergence from my gender identity, people like Dave Chappelle can go on making this mistake. If I remain silent, he and his supporters can look at me, see a person with a male social gender, and presume that my body is and has always been simply male. He can be wrong, without knowing how wrong he is.

So, I’m raising my hand. I’m standing up simply to say what I am. I am declaring that I exist.

Other people like me also exist. We’re not necessarily gay, and we’re not trans. We’re among the letters that come after LGBTQ. We’re the ambiguous “+”.

Among these other people is my identical twin brother, who was born in the same shape as me. We began life the same, even though we built different identities. That’s the difference between biology and identity.

Ask him about it, and he’ll confirm my story.

Chappelle’s Old Ideas

The tragic thing about Chappelle’s comments on Netflix is that they weren’t offered in the form of a joke. They were simply a direct repetition of age-old misperceptions from mainstream American culture.

Chappelle wasn’t actually being funny, and his comments weren’t even particularly clever. His rhetoric came straight from the locker rooms of middle schools in the 1980’s. When I heard Chappelle celebrating a fellow comedian who “punched the LGBTQ community right in the AIDS”, I was hearing the kind of language boys my age used to refer to people like Ryan White. Ryan White was a young boy with hemophilia who died of AIDS after being infected through a blood transfusion. This happened before he was old enough to articulate a sexual identity for himself. White was nonetheless attacked by adult leaders in his own community for being “gay”.

Chappelle’s comment about punching the “LGBTQ community right in the AIDS” came right after he had turned his anger against Jews, laughing at their exile as refugees after World War II. As both commentary and comedy, Chappelle’s work in his Netflix special was little more than an unoriginal repetition of the hateful rhetoric we’ve heard at Trump rallies over the last 4 years.

Netflix paid him over $20 million for the exclusive right to broadcast these messages of hate.

The only novel turn to Chappelle’s repetition of old hatreds was his argument that gays, lesbians, and transgender people should feel lucky to be hated by him, because they’re only having their feelings hurt, rather than being violently attacked.

Outside the Margins

“In our country, you can shoot and kill a n*****,” Chappelle said, sarcastically. “But you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings!”

Chappelle has a right to be angry. He is right to be furious about racist violence and white privilege.

Is he right, though, to be furious at gay people? It isn’t LGBTQ+ Americans doing the shooting and killing, after all.

Chappelle couldn’t be more wrong in equating LGBTQ+ rights with white privilege. The world doesn’t exist with black people in one corner and LGBTQ+ people in another. Often, these people are one and the same.

In fact, trans black women are particularly frequent targets of anti-trans violence. In one 9-day period in 2020, the bodies of 6 trans black women were found, murdered. The racially-skewed anti-trans violence continues in 2021.

“Chappelle is playing one targeted community against another,” writes Michael Crawford, a gay black man. “He’s living in a binary where all Blacks are straight and all gays are white and ignoring the existence of people like me who are both.”

Facts and Other Illusions

When Dave Chappelle declares the “fact” that, “every human being on earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on earth,” he is actually declaring two facts, one of which is an illusion.

Every human being had to gestate for some amount of time in the uterus of a person with a uterus. That is an objective fact.

What Dave Chappelle implied was that every human being with a uterus has the gender identity of a woman. This supposed fact is an illusion. Our identities are not the same thing as our bodies. They are illusions that we cast upon the stage of our physical selves. They are truths, but not objective facts.

Some people with a uterus can’t make babies or give birth. Most of these people still identify as women. Some people who can make babies and give birth don’t identify themselves as women.

Our bodies are objects. Our humanity is more than that. Our names are ours to pronounce. Our stories are ours to tell. They are not mere facts to be recorded, boxes to be checked, categories to be filled.

There is more to us than can be revealed by any digital algorithm attempting to predict what we will watch, what we will wear, what we will be on the basis of what we have been and done in the past.

A woman can be a woman if she never makes babies. A man can be a man without becoming a father. Our identities are about much more than the clothes we wear, the movies we watch, or who we choose to love.

Beyond Chappelle

Dave Chappelle’s rant is factually wrong. It’s misinformation, but I understand some parts of where it’s coming from. Issues of sex and gender identity are confusing. I have been a living, breathing example of that confusion for 50 years, and I am only now coming to terms with that.

Though I’m bothered by Chappelle’s unwarranted aggression, I’m not angry at him as an individual. Netflix, the corporation that profits from Chappelle’s hateful message, is something else.

Documents now show that many people at Netflix urged their company to stop production of the hate-filled special. Netflix executives responded by defending Chappelle’s ability to create profits by provoking outrage, much in the same way Donald Trump gained votes by behaving outrageously. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos acknowledged that Chappelle’s show was “mean-spirited, but our members enjoy it.”

No one can deny that there is a tradition of Americans feeling joyful as they attack gays, lesbians, and other non-conforming people, whether those mean-spirited attacks are verbal or physically violent. I believe the time has come, however, for us to evaluate violence according to something other than the enjoyment it brings its perpetrators.

The same kind of joy has been felt, after all, by people who verbally and physically assault black Americans. Rejecting LGBTQ+ Americans doesn’t make blacks safer. It makes the people who seek to attack all kinds of marginalized Americans bolder.

An Unreal Man

My intersex identity isn’t a choice. It’s not part of a fad inspired by liberal college professors. It’s how I was born.

Culturally, I am unreal. Nonetheless, here I am, in spite of what people like Chappelle insist are facts. I am an unreal man.

Real Men, we have been told, must dominate, must never be weak, must never give up, must win all the time, must never feel anything other than anger and pride.

Too many men would rather die than be discovered to be less than Real. Too many men lead false lives in fear. There are more of us than you know, from birth to death never stepping forward to be more than present, never declaring that they exist.

I have done my time as a Real Man. I have followed the rules of the Cult of Real Men for long enough.

I understand that there are people who are capable only of imagining the existence of a person like me as a cheap punchline to a joke in a comedy club.

Nonetheless, I exist.

My Netflix account no longer does.