‘I like having some level of ambiguity’

Darren Kraushar, 30 is an intersex trans man, who works as a mathematics lecturer at the University of Utah. He shares his experience of growing up in the Charedi community in Hendon, North London, and how his life has changed since he left.

“As a child, I always figured that they’d misidentified my sex at birth. I was born with a genetic mutation that’s generally referred to as NR51A, which causes a range of different disorders in sex development (DSD). I think I was initially misdiagnosed with partial androgen sensitivity, and assigned female, when actually I had partial gonadal dysgenesis (abnormally developed testicles).

That meant my birth certificate said ‘female’ and I was brought up as a girl – when I felt I was a boy. My name was Naomi. In the Charedi community, boys and girls are brought up completely separately – they’re more or less a different species. As a child, I didn’t have boy playmates, but I wished I had, and whenever I got a chance to hang out with boys, I did. Sometimes I got in trouble for crossing the invisible line. I didn’t know exactly what it meant to be a boy, but I knew that ‘boys don’t cry’, so I tried not to cry.

In some ways, you get a better deal in life in the community if you’re raised female – I had a better education and I wasn’t made to focus all my energy on studying the Talmud. I was able to take a bunch of GCSEs and then A levels, which I wouldn’t have been able to do as a boy. But on the other hand, I felt offended by that because I was aware I was only allowed to do those things because everyone thought I was a girl. The community doesn’t believe it’s worth imposing so many restrictions on girls because they’re not obligated to study Torah.

My feelings about it all were complicated, and nobody was ever willing to help me process them. The only thing that mattered to my loved ones was the fact they knew I couldn’t have children. They worried about whether I’d be able to get married or participate in traditional, heteronormative intercourse. To be honest, I’d have been difficult to marry off anyway, because I was headstrong and intelligent and didn’t automatically respect men just because they studied a bunch of Talmud. I always got on better with people who were significantly less religious than my parents, people who had slightly more worldly knowledge.

‘Very few people in the community would be willing to go into a marriage with someone who is infertile, unless they’d already had children’

At about 18 or 19 I did have an awkward exchange with a very nice and understanding matchmaker.  But it wasn’t until a few months ago, when I was 30, and had long left the community, that I finally heard back from him with an actual match! It amuses me to think it took over 10 years for him to find me someone. Very few people in the community would be willing to go into a marriage with someone who is infertile, unless they’d already had children.

At 14, I started going through male puberty. That’s when other people became aware that something was up with Naomi – especially my parents. I wasn’t able to talk to them, or anyone, about this. Despite presenting as female, I had normal male hormones. It meant my voice broke and I started developing facial hair, while everybody else around me at my girls’ school was talking about getting their period and wearing their first bras. I felt like an alien. Small children would stare and point out my moustache, and classmates asked me if I was growing a beard. I think adults assumed I had a hormone problem like PCOS. I sometimes wondered this myself.

My feelings were ambivalent. On the one hand, I didn’t have an issue with my body on a personal level, but on the other, on a societal level, it was causing me a lot of difficulty in life. I busied myself shaving my legs and shaving my face, trying to fit in better.

My medical nightmare

Although I didn’t want to go, my mother dragged me to the GP because I wasn’t growing breasts or starting my periods. The GP’s attitude was, ‘Some people go through puberty slower.’ I’m not sure how they he explained away the broken voice. Eventually, my mother bullied the GP into getting me a referral to the Royal Free Hospital. That was bad – the beginning of my medical nightmare. Thanks to the fierce, almost obsessive modesty in that community, being repeatedly stripped and examined by strangers was really unfamiliar and traumatic to me. Worse, I had this constant feeling of ‘they’re trying to figure out what kind of freak I am’.

My parents made it worse by imposing their Charedi cultural sensitivities onto the doctors. They weren’t allowed to be blunt and frank and talk about what normal male or female reproductive systems looked like to me. My parents thought I wouldn’t know what a penis looked like, or what a prostate was. So, all I really got out of it was the fear that, once they’d discovered what kind of freak I was, then they were going to cut me up so that I was less of a freak.

That’s pretty much exactly what happened. After being shunted from clinic to clinic, I ended up at UCLH, where everyone with a DSD ends up. I felt helpless and threw a tantrum when they tried to do a blood test. The doctors thought I had a needle phobia and got a psychologist to talk to me, but the needle wasn’t the problem – it was what I feared they’d do to me when they got the test results. So I took a needle from the supply and pricked my finger to make a point.

But I was powerless to stop the process. First the doctors put me on puberty blockers to stop me going through male puberty, then started me on oestrogen. And, at 15, they gave me an orchiectomy – they removed my testicles, castrated me, so I no longer made male hormones. By that point I was passive, just crying all the time. The party line was there was a cancer risk, but preemptive surgery of currently healthy organs is not usually the response to that. I don’t know how serious the risk was, or how necessary immediate surgery was. But I do know that I didn’t really feel like I had a choice. I think there was also an element of discomfort with my gender, with someone who had the ‘wrong kind of body’ – a social aspect to why surgery was the default option.

I have two very strong memories of expressing the question: why can’t you just let me grow into a man? One of the doctors essentially said, well, because you don’t have all the features normally associated with being a man. And my father said something to the effect of, do you want us to be known as the family with a girl who turned into a boy?