Nobody needs to know A memoir

Intersex activist Pagonis sheds light on the cost of dehumanizing intersex bodies in their heart-wrenching debut. Raised as a girl, Pagonis's childhood memories of softball and sleepovers were pocked with scarring surgeries, secret hormone prescriptions, and demoralizing doctor visits. "I'd learned early on... that my body wasn't my own," they recall. "It belonged to the people who could 'fix' it, to the people who wanted to study it, to the people who would use it." What, precisely, needed to be "fixed" remained concealed by Pagonis's doctors until Pagonis was in college, when they learned they had androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which people with X and Y chromosomes are resistant to "male" hormones. From that realization emerged new possibilities: Pagonis found a community of intersex friends and allies, and explored an authentic identity that was neither feminine nor masculine. Haunted by childhood medical interventions made without their knowledge or understanding, Pagonis was also driven to raise awareness of the harm caused by performing irreversible surgeries on intersex infants. The author's campaign to speak up on behalf of intersex autonomy is galvanizing, and their journey toward found family is moving. This is an inspiring must-read. Agent: Katherine Latshaw, Folio Literary. (Aug.)

A prominent intersex activist reflects on how they overcame the lies, secrets, and silences that have surrounded their identity. As a child, Chicago native Pagonis never felt at ease with the name their parents had given them--Jennifer--or with the trappings of girlhood. The author had always felt different because of the many surgeries they underwent to eliminate what their mother said was infantile ovarian cancer. Pagonis' anxieties about femininity only worsened as they grew older and especially after they began having problems with urination, which led to more surgeries, including the enlargement of a small vagina. Doctors then prescribed the estrogen hormone Premarin, but by high school, Pagonis was still a "mostly flat-chested, frizzy-haired, mustachioed girl" with no hips who believed no boy would ever be attracted to them. Eventually, the author met a handsome but troubled boy, but he showed them the painful limits of their surgically altered body and taught them to hate sex. Learning about Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome in a college women's studies class dramatically "ruptured" their sense of self. With shattering clarity, Pagonis suddenly understood that everyone--from their family to their doctors--had covered up the complex truth of their intersexuality and forced them to assume a "simpler" identity as female. "A neural meteor shower lit up the valleys of my brain as I processed all the things I had, until that moment, avoided realizing," she writes. When medical records confirmed an AIS diagnosis, the author began the slow and difficult but ultimately successful work of not only reclaiming their unique, nonbinary identity, but also creating heightened visibility for intersex people and ending intersex surgeries at the hospital where they and other intersex children had been treated. The insights this courageous book offers into the struggles of a too often overlooked group will primarily appeal to readers seeking to broaden their understanding of queerness and nonbinary identities. A sharp-eyed, candid reading experience. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.