Shon Klose was born intersex. This is their story.

There are a lot of people out there who are experiencing trauma and mental health issues because of the way they’ve been treated in a pathologised kind of way around their natural born bodies.

When I was diagnosed I was wrong, my body was wrong, my body was not allowed to be my body. There’s a wrongness about you that has be adjusted and corrected and we’re not given the space to understand that our differences are normal.

Intersex people are often given medical intervention when they are babies, or small children, so I guess I urge people, surgeons and families to address their own phobias about difference, to get to the bottom of it, to unpack those thoughts.

Not to force, or make a choice for someone to have corrective surgery unless that person feels as though they are ready to do that, a decision they’ve made themselves because they have a clear understanding of all the choices.

Clinicians in the UK, like their colleagues in Australia, follow exactly the same protocols when they discover an infant or adolescent is intersex.

OII-UK would like to thank Alice Springs ABC, and their reporter Emma Sleath,  for this personal interview

http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2014/12/01/4140196.htm

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/local/alicesprings/201411/r1362753_19166752.mp3