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.)