By Jay Besemer
Aaron Apps’ Intersex: A Memoir operates in a space that is both complex and difficult to name. There is no adjective that serves experiences or texts steeped in both horror and beauty, abjection and awe. This small book confounds description. Perhaps because it is a memoir, and because the book concerns life in a body others make problematic, it’s hard not to see the book itself as a body, too. These are bodies whose in-between-ness I value and share, but upon which I feel profound hesitation at imposing my own determinations. I know the violence of that. I know the look people get, the trying-to-figure-out-what-it-is look, so for the purposes of this review I will engage with Intersex as it comes at me, not as I decide it must be.
The book is split into sections, called “Narrative Lines.” The first Narrative Line is “barbeque catharsis,” which instantly pulls readers in by an experience most of us can relate to: the absolute bodily need to find a public bathroom immediately. Empathy soars to eleven. But there’s a twist that not everyone has experienced; the bathroom used, chosen by accident because it was closest, is not the “right” one for Apps’ presenting gender. His explosive defecation, impossible to fully clean up after, takes place in forbidden territory, in the presence of a shopping mother and her small daughter. Suddenly the stakes are terribly high, and a different kind of imperative comes into play. Apps hides in desperation, afraid of the reactions of the mother and child, until he thinks the coast is clear. But it isn’t. He’s caught by the woman on his way out: “our eyes catch each other like a vulgar clap in the mirror. Her eyebrows grimace” (9). There’s nothing like a grimace, void of compassion, to convey the agenda of shame.
What is being said here? What is being shown, and why? Although the deeply personal is also the deeply political, that is never the whole story. Further down this Narrative Line, Apps engages in a gorgeous meditation on the blurring of somatic boundaries in love and ingestion; in processes of growth and change; in the distinction between author and text. Grappling with the socially-overdetermined, gendered body, Apps confronts the further overdetermination of genital configuration as core “source” of gender in individual bodies, specifically his own. Preparing to render his unrenderable experiences into legible, ordered text, he sounds an anxious note: “And I begin this body with a series of faceless, unforgiving images that glimmer forward their inexplicable genitals” (13).
The images he shares here and elsewhere in the text are historical images, reproductions from medical texts showing intersex people made monstrous in medical literature and (mal)practice. The pictures come from an earlier point in our current era, in which the qualification for human status was more overtly reduced to the possession of legible, reproductively functional genitals. The images evoke the institutional, systemic refusal of the individual’s right to decide what gender to call themselves. They foreground medical torture, medicalized sexual abuse, genital mutilation and forced use of “normalizing” sex hormones. This is the history Apps’ memoir clicks into; in some respects this is the history of Apps’ own body. On page 32 he makes this clear:
This single slight twist in the genitals from then on untwisting into all of the specific, fleshy meanderings I comport into and out of. I pop out twisted and they’re told what to do about it. They do it because they’re told. They do the words that sound right, they don’t think about what implications are sticking to them. The words sound like they have authority, so the implications slough off…
This is a history of medical authority exacted on parents, who then exercise their own authority over the bodies and minds of children. The experiences Apps presents in the middle of the book are horrifying: betrayal by parents who think they’re doing right by placing him in the power of a pediatric endocrinologist who callously justifies his intent to sexually abuse the child as a diagnostic necessity; these same parents violently administer hormone injections. It’s difficult to manage my own anger while reading these passages, but it’s not directed at Apps. He is right to show this. There’s no self-pity or histrionic tone here, for those who want to dismiss or diminish this narrative; the language is concise and minimalist, giving the impression of great discipline and restraint. We’re left to wonder what was left out, and consider why.
There’s a running thread in the book, too, weaving the Narrative Lines together, in which Apps wonders about the relationship between his male trajectory and the violence he himself has done. Is it a legacy of masculinity with a possible origin-point in the male-dominated, male-enacted medical industry that so determined his early life? If so, what’s to be done?
When I was a child I was pushed down a masculine sludge stream. I aligned with it: I did random violent things to the many fragile organisms I collected from the brackish water behind our home. I made it my business to take them out of the water and observe them stupidly as they died gradual deaths exposed to the unforgiving air like so many tenuous bubbles floating as a living mass until the moment they all pop. I popped them prematurely with a needle. I, a dumb little needle monster manipulating them; I, a violence done, doing violence; I, a boy boying it, it a thing (38).
The model of masculinity given him early on is one of powerful personhood enacting its will upon powerless thing. But in the intervening moments of text, in other Narrative Lines, there is a movement toward the animal, a recognition of the self-evident animal (or animal self) in non-humans that is the opposite of objectification.
In “defining the crevice” Apps describes an unusual experience of mutuality, shared with an alligator that had ventured onto the property outside his home. “And there the gator entered me. And I entered the gator. And I wanted to do it again. Harder” (24). A stereotypically male description, perhaps, but further down the page it continues: “All of the muscles down into the peristaltic pulsing of my lava lamp guts stilled for a moment as we both became animal, as we both flooded outward, mixed, and coagulated together.” There are many ways to process such moments of unusual perception in encountering an Other that illuminates the Self. In this case, the two become one; presupposed opposites unite and blend until they are indistinguishable. There’s a truth here, too—though sexually dimorphic, upon casual inspection, crocodilians are difficult to distinguish genitally. Glance between a gator’s legs and you’re none the wiser about its nature, though perhaps somewhat more enlightened about your own—if you live.
And ultimately perhaps that’s the key message of Intersex: A Memoir, if “message” is understood expansively. Apps’ othering by those around him and society at large made it difficult for him not to other himself from himself, it seems. But throughout the pages of the book, in a process not unlike his encounter with the gator, he has met and come into himself, finding himself on the other side of one phase of that process. The brutality of Apps’ childhood actions is transformed through the book into a different type of healing violence—a surgery upon the image of the intersex person, a magical act of reclamation of the body from the medical grasp and into self-determination, self definition and recognition. That is where the book ends. Apps embraces the animal self of his humanity, excises the “doctor” from his flesh, and returns to the love-impulse of the beginning:
“I say we in a way that is two I animals doubling.
I say love” (62).
Intersex: A Memoir
By Aaron Apps
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2015
ISBN 978-1-939460-04-2