My girlfriend maybe a man!

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-13-2004
My girlfriend maybe a man!
2
Wed, 10-13-2004 - 12:20pm
Help! What should I do?

I have been with my girlfriend for 2 years and I have fallen in love with her. However, I find myself constantly suspecting that she might have been born a boy originally. She and I have discussed this a little bit, but she seems somewhat sensitive about the gender issue when I pressed it. Here's what we discussed; she is capable of growing a full beard, which I help her tend to almost every other day. She has fine, curly chest hair and hair around her nipples, which she shaves everyday. She doesn't know where she was born, never seen her birth certificate and her parents are very unwilling to help us find out more about where she was born; they always brush off the subject, and they don't have any pictures of her until she's about six or seven years old. She has a very tiny clit and an abnormally shallow vagina. She has very little breast tissue, almost to the point where she just has nipples but no breast shape - to the point that she can't fit an A cup bra. She has a very irregular cycle, too. She sweats and smells like a "man", and she is 6 feet tall with large hands, and a very manly face shape. She has mentioned to me that she sometimes feels like she was meant to be a man, and she is very uncomfortable with many things that are "feminine". That worries me.

I have seen and heard about "gender reassignment" surgeries that are performed on infants when they are born with two gentials or intersexed gentials. And I heard that typically doctors and parents decide to make the infant female, because it's easier to create a clit and a vagina. Could this be what the case is for her? I know that as a teenager she was on estrogen, and she stopped taking it without telling her parents. I'm the first and only person in her life that she talks to about this issue and I don't know what I should do. I love her alot, and I will support her, but how can I feel like I really know the person she is when I clearly don't. I would feel like I can really get to know her better if there wasn't a big secret, mystery surrounding her past. She's a very attractive woman, but she tells me that she feels like she struggles to be a woman everyday. How can I, as her girlfriend, help her? What should I do, ladies?

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-19-2003
Wed, 10-13-2004 - 12:45pm

If your g/f has menstrual cycles then she is primarily female because she would have to have a uterus and ovaries.

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-03-2004
Wed, 10-13-2004 - 10:44pm
hey renae, this doesnt have to be a very big deal, if you don't let it. and it could be whatever that is a mystery to you, is pretty much a mystery to her as well.

i really don't think she's conflicted/confused, i think deep down she knows already her prefered gender, but if she's uhmming and ahhing, it could be she isn't ready to 'come out' to you and everyone else, for whatever the reasons. also if she had gender reassigment as a baby (when she didn't have a say), and it turns out they've assigned her the wrong 'sex' that she feels she is now, it can be a bit traumatic for everyone involved...

maybe you could ask her what she wants to be if she had a choice now: a boy or a girl?, and then whatevre her answer is, you can let that determine your next steps together?

i used to work under someone like that. she's in her late 40s now. she was born a hermaphrodite (with two sets of genitals) a tiny but very obvious penis where the clitoris was and also a vagina. When she was fourteen, the penis was surgically removed and reshaped into a clitoris. but in her case, she is straight, has always felt like a woman. she has been married to the same man for 15 years and her career occupies the space where a family of more than two can never be. and she's everything else i want to be when i grow up.