Sarah Graham: lesbian, intersex and proud
When my mother talks about her dead twin she says it’s as if she can still feel him pressed against her arm, as he was during the time they shared in their mother’s womb. When she told me how a doctor had left her sibling to die I was horrified. Her twin, Paul, was born intersex. The year was 1942. The medical protocol at the time, the legacy of which is still with us today, was brutal: because of his intersex variation – he was born with genitals which looked atypicalhe was wrapped in a blanket, left alone in a room for 24 hours, where he starved and cried to death.
The twins were six weeks premature, so keeping them both alive in a private house in rural Wiltshire without an incubator made the survival of one or both infants doubtful and difficult. In fact, my mother recalls, it took three months before they could say she would live.