THE OTHER SIDE -  FOUR LATER
Channel 4
FRIDAY JULY 21st, 1:10am
Journey Intersex

Del and Heidi are cousins: Del born Debbie and Heidi
born Travis. Del was born with the external features
of a female and lived his life as a woman until the
age of 37, but for the past five years has been trying
to carve out a way in which he can live as both
male and female: as  intersexed.  Heidi never knew she
was anything but a girl, kept from the true facts of
her birth by family members.

When Del was 12 years old, he remembered a cousin
being born and for one week, no one being able to say
whether the baby was a boy or girl.   This raised a
lot of questions for an abnormally developing Del, or
Debbie as s/he was then.  It took Del almost twenty
years to track down Heidi.  They met at a picnic in
Heidi’s home town of Seattle, in the summer of 1997,
and realising she knew nothing but the lies she had been told, Del felt
compelled to reveal to her the mystery surrounding her birth.

The Other Side picks up the lives of the cousins at
their first meeting since the revelations four years earlier. In the
interim, Heidi hasn't moved on from Del's bombshell and has distanced
herself from the family who she says lied to her all her life.  In
Journey Intersex, Del meets Heidi to try and help her
learn she is not a freak through sharing his own
experiences; and to try and access the hidden facts
behind Heidi's medical history. They travel to LA
where Heidi tries to find her old doctors and
confronts her estranged mother with the issue for the
first time.  Her father is dead, so Heidi turns to her
mother for answers which both find painful to explore.

In the film, Del reveals that he is one of the
thousands of people in Britain who are not exactly male nor
female. He has an intersex condition, which is the contemporary term for
hermaphrodite. At puberty he only ever grew one
breast, realised he had an enlarged clitoris and
developed an excessive amount of facial hair. Recently he has been told that
his ovaries contain testicular tissue. In 1995
he decided to enhance his masculinity, began taking testosterone and began
to be perceived as male by the outside world.  Heidi talks about the many
operations she had as a child - surgeries she now realises were the result
of her intersex condition and not ovarian cancer as she had been told by her
family and doctors.

They meet Howard Devore, a psychologist, therapist and intersex activist who
is intersex himself. Howard is able to cast a lot of
light on a very emotional journey.  Heidi’s story is
revealed to be far more common than she realised. But
the cousins ultimately find that they themselves hold
more of the answers than science or their family can
yet offer.

For further information, contact Cara Lavan on 0966
299 609 or at [log in to unmask]




Stephen

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Stephen Whittle                         Tel: 0161 247 6444 (work)
Senior Lecturer in Law                  Tel: 0161 432 1915 (home)
The School of Law                       Fax: 0161 247 6309 (work)
Manchester Metro University             Fax: 0161 432 8454 (home)
Hathersage Rd
Manchester M13 0JA
United Kingdom

work email: [log in to unmask]
home email: [log in to unmask]
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Celebrating and affirming insurgent intellectual cultural practice
.... an invitation to enter a space of changing thought, the open
mind that is the heartbeat of cultural revolution (b.hooks, 1994)
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