By Jim Costich
Another Fathers’ Day is creeping up on me. It’s my fourteenth one. Long ago and far away, I stood in the doorway of an Early Intervention program classroom, staring into the eyes of a disabled toddler who was strapped to a frame that stood him up at a table where he was squeezing Play-Doh and beaming. Surely it was some sort of divine directive that brought me to this place, and I demanded that God tell me if this was the child S/He had sent me to adopt.
Later, his foster mother told me that, on the way home, he asked if I had come to be his father. Spooky. No one had even told him he was being adopted. I became, or maybe always had been, his father.
Occasionally, people ask him, or me, if I’m his real father. Within months, the two of us had decided to answer this question with a snappy, “No, I have such a good imagination that you can see him, too,” or “Oh, he’s real, all right, pinch him and see what happens.”
No one could invalidate us if we were laughing. Real father, real. Real. That’s the question that used to hunt and haunt me. “What are you, REALLY?” If I have no biological connection, am I a REAL father? Is an intersex man or woman REAL, seeing as they aren’t exactly male or female, and are sort of both? There are women who aren’t female and men who aren’t male. REALLY.
Like most Intersex people, I’m sterile. I never had to grieve that being gay would preclude me from having my “own” children. Does that mean that if we have a biological connection to them, we OWN our children? It was never my expectation, because I’ve known all my life that sexual reproduction isn’t in my repertoire. I’ve listened to male and female people question if they are REAL men or women when they discover they are sterile and medicine can’t alter the function of their organs. Not knowing what I am, I’ve had the surreal experience of them asking me if I think they are real. How ironic that they would ask me, the UNREAL male/female, to tell them if they are REAL.
But that is exactly how it goes when you’re intersex. When you talk about it with people, they invariably end up re-evaluating just what makes them male/female, men/ women, and ask intersex people to help them figure it out. I’ve been abused by those who can’t stand the idea that there are intersex people. When I was just a child, I was once told by a doctor, “There are only males and females in our society. There is nothing else, and you are nothing.” Others told me I’m not a “real” man or woman. “What are you REALLY?” As if I could somehow make my body grow differently so that it fit their idea of what I should have and not have. Nonetheless, I am solid, alive, and intersex.
Every time I hear “DADDY,” it is really called, and I really answer.
I’m not sure at what age I learned that parenthood could be achieved through adoption. I’m not sure at what age I was told, overheard, or deduced that if they figured out WHAT I WAS, they would never let me be a parent. What I was. An unfinished male? An overdone female? “Pseudo-hermaphrodite,” not even a REAL hermaphrodite, a pseudo-hermaphrodite? That was one of the cryptic words I’d heard bandied about in hushed tones under a smothering blanket of shame in a gender clinic where I was studied, but not helped to grow up. My body could not grow up. I was 14 and still looked like I was 10. At last, my dad found an endocrinologist who would help. All I needed was a couple shots every month, and I would grow up like the other boys grew into men. At the time, I didn’t know what my body contained. I do now. It was a surprise. Not quite male or female. Sort of both. Sort of neither. In between wasn’t nothing, it was something! It has a word, intersex! I am something after all!
At some point, I accepted that parenthood was never going to be part of my life. Imagine my amazement when I stood in the judge’ s chambers, being legally declared a father. Tony was only 3 when I told him that I would be his father forever. Even if I died, I would still love him, and he would not be fatherless. He’s grown up now, and still calls me every few days. I know plenty of “real” fathers and sons who have never been and will never be that close. Is there any value in having a “real” father who’s also a stranger? Years after I first wrote this, one of my nieces came to me needing a father. My brother rejected all his kids but one. Again, I’m a dad, and now a grandfather.
When my son was 7, I found a partner whose daughter went to school with my son. In the first years of our relationship, my partner’s daughter whispered to me that no matter what other people said, in her mind she had two daddies. But did that mean other people would see us as a REAL family? To her, I am real. She reminds me often and never forgets me on Father’s Day. Now all my kids are 25 years old.
Over the years a fascinating pattern has developed with people who have seen me with my kids. It happened one year: a man walked up to me in church, threw open his arms, hugged me, slapped me on the back and said, “Happy Mother’s Day, Jim!” It was clearly spontaneous. Even as he let go his face registered, “Why the hell did I just do that?”
I grinned and said, “Thanks!” He looked relieved that I was happy. Am I happy? Is it a good thing for people to see a mother and a father when they look at a man who can’t REALLY be either of those things? REAL? Is that what I am? Yes, I’m real.
Jim Costich is a talented writer, singer and parent by choice, as well as a proud intersex gay man. Jim’s primary focus is on community–building within the LGBTQIA+ community and its allies, and he seeks empowerment through solidarity with other oppressed minorities.
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Dana Zzyym is a Colorado-based nonbinary intersex activist. With the assistance of Lambda Legal Defense, they successfully sued the U.S. State Department for a gender-neutral passport in Zzyym vs. Kerry. They enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1978, and served four tours in six years (three in Beirut, one in the Persian Gulf).
Thea Hillman is an activist and author of the Lambda Award-winning book Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word and Depending on the Light. For recent work, check out her short stories about 
A.J. Odasso is the author of two poetry collections from Flipped Eye Publishing: Lost Books (2010), which was a finalist for the 2010 London New Poetry Award and for the 2011 People’s Book Prize; and The Dishonesty of Dreams (2014), which had the honor of launching at the Grolier Poetry Book Store and Porter Square Books. A.J.’s third collection, an expanded version of their BU MFA thesis, was shortlisted for the 2017 Sexton Prize under the title Things Being What They Are and will be published in Summer 2019 under a new title, The Sting of It, by