Transcription
The year was 1994. Eyebrows were thin. Uh, Friends was the hottest new TV show, and Bill Clinton had a wandering eye. And somewhere in Ostrobothnia, uh, the cries of a healthy baby girl echoed in a hospital hallway. And that girl would, unbeknownst to herself, eventually find out that she, um, wasn't like the other girls. Ultimate pick me. So, we're talking about me.
Hello, I'm Sarah, and I feel like an ASMRtist. Why do I feel like I'm going to start tapping? Um, anyway. So, uh, the first feelings that I remember of feeling like an outsider, they take me back to, I think it was secondary school, right? Is that the grades after? Wait, it's different in every country. Uh, junior high, I guess, is what the, um, American equivalent to that is. Grades 7 to 9. Anyway, I remember when the girls were starting to get their periods and they would talk about it to each other and like bond over it. And bleeding monthly sounded horrible and painful to me. But at the same time, you know, I was looking forward to it, which I guess most girls are, you know, to be able to bond with their, uh, fellow females. And, um, at the same time, the girls were developing chests and I wasn't. Um, and I remember the boys in my class class were like constantly saying that I was the flattest girl in the school. And, uh, that was not nice. So I started wearing a padded bra and stuffing it with socks. And then sometimes someone would ask me, "Hey Sarah, are you wearing a padded bra and stuffing it with socks?" And I'd be like, "I also started buying pads, um, and bringing them to school just in case someone needed one. I could, you know, be the pad plug, uh, and at the same time make it look like I too had my my period, which I didn't." Um, anyway, time passed.
I was 16 and I still had no signs of puberty. So my mom decided to take me to the doctor's. And so at the doctor's, they gave me an ultrasound. And as the doctor was giving me the ultrasound, he kind of looked like he didn't really know what he was looking at. He said he can't seem to find ovaries or much of anything else, um, which of course felt alarming. Um, but he couldn't really tell me anything on the spot. Um, they sent me back home, um, and we didn't hear anything for a couple of months, but they had me, uh, come back regularly to get my blood tested. After some time, I got called in and my doctor told me I was a male fetus and I was supposed to be born a boy. But because of a genetical mutation, I was born halfway female. I'm trying to think of something to compare it to. Um, imagine walking up to the gym and the front looks like a regular gym that you would very much like to enter, uh, but when you go inside, there's a singular dumbbell, um, a treadmill, but no power outlets to plug it into, and then a random hot dog stand in the center. The doctor also told me that where my ovaries were supposed to be, or they were not, um, cuz I didn't have ovaries, uh, they found three bad tumors that had to be removed immediately. And it was very obvious at this point that I could never get pregnant. Oh, and also there were some undeveloped testicles inside of me too. Fun.
Just imagine for a second being 16, you know, at such a fragile age, and being told that you're not a girl or a boy. Basically, that f-ed with me. Oh my God. All of a sudden, all the feelings that I had felt of like female insecurity, feeling like the odd one out, feeling different, not fitting in, they were real. All of a sudden, they were validated. I was weird. I was a freak of nature. I was a blip. And also being told that I could never conceive, uh, the regular way was gut-wrenching because becoming a mother had always been like one of the biggest dreams of my life. A lot of people people around me are building families, having kids. I'm surrounded by babies, and I freaking love babies. I become best friends with every baby I encounter. I freaking love children. I would be such a great mom. And of course, there are other avenues to having children, but time will only tell what that's going to look like for me. But now that so much time has passed and I've kind of gotten used to the idea, I honestly wouldn't mind being the hot evil stepmom. So, I know your dad said he really wants to spend time with you this weekend, but how about I give you this 20 and you say that you just really, really want to go spend time with Mommy?
All right. So I had been raised as female up until the point of diagnosis for obvious reasons. So I was put on estrogen to, uh, um, start my puberty that hadn't started yet. And that did help a little bit, um, but most of what it really did was just made me grow super tall for some reason, like taller than most guys. I'm 6 foot and living as a tall girl, that's a whole other topic that I think deserves its own video. So stay tuned for that. So my sex chromosomes are 46XY, which is what guys typically have. So imagine if I died right now and they found my jaw in some field, like 500 years from now, and they would examine it, they'd be like, "Oh, this was a male in his 30s." Quick edit, just want to clarify, I'm not in my 30s yet. I am 29 years old, so still very much in my early 20s. Okay, great. Let's move on. Thanks. Also, another funny thing related to that is that when I did my DNA test video, which I posted a couple years back, when I first sent my sample to the lab, they sent me a message saying, "Oh, there seems to be an error. Like on your profile, you stated that you're female, but like the sample that you sent, uh, to us is like of a male." So I had to do some explaining there, but yeah, fun times.
Hearing I was intersex at age 16 was obviously a lot of information to handle, and I didn't really have anyone to talk to about it. Um, and I just felt like super alone and overwhelmed with the information that I had just gotten. So what did I do? I went to online chat rooms, which is a great place to go share your personal medical information as an underage person. I would go on there with my own face and my own name and talk about my experience and have my little circus freak moment amongst the common folk, if you will. So years later, I become accidentally kind of famous in Finland for a language video that I made here on YouTube. A lot of you probably know it because you're watching this video, and that's might be how you found me. If not, the head shaving video or whatever else dumb I've done here on YouTube. Anyway, um, I gained some notoriety in Finland and someone had taken screenshots, uh, of those chat rooms of me, you know, talking about those things with my face, and they sent them to a tabloid that then harassed me and was like, "Oh, we're going to publish the story." And luckily, I was able to dodge that because of a, um, uh, because of the help of a lawyer that I got. I was not ready whatsoever for this information about me to be out in the public. I was desperately just trying to be viewed as normal, just as everyone else. But, um, it was apparent that some rumors had started to go around. Then one time I remember doing a TV interview where the interviewer looked me dead in the face and asked if I was really born a man in front of a whole production crew. I was gutted. It was so irrevocably, irrevocably, it was so irrevocably, it was so man, irrevocably, clearly very traumatic to me. No, it was so irrevocably traumatic to me. At the time, I just remember stuttering something and then later asking them to like edit that whole part out, and they did. But just knowing that people are really talking about this gave me a lot of anxiety. I just had this huge anxiety attack and I just held a lot of resentment towards the interviewer for a long time, cuz I felt like they could have been more respectful.
So what about gender identity? Well, I was raised as a girl. I've always thought of myself as a woman, um, always presented as one, although the slight, uh, feeling of disconnection that I have towards 46XX chromosome women, um, but I wish to continue to be addressed as she her. But oh my God, you have no idea how good it feels to finally talk about this. Cuz I always knew that I was going to share this at some point when I'm ready. And I don't know what held me back before. I felt like I was thinking like, "Oh, people are going to think of me differently. People are going to think I'm weird." But come on, girl, people already think you're weird, and that has nothing to do with your chromosomes. And also, like, apart from the diagnosis, I'm just like so much more as a human, uh, than this, you know? I am a radio host, I'm a songwriter, I'm a daughter, sister, friend, a driven, passionate, and empathetic person. And I'm just as deserving of love as anyone else. Damn. Listen, every year since like 2019, every time October rolls around with intersex awareness month, I've been like, "Should I? Should I not?" And it's crazy to think that here I finally am. I felt so lonely because of my diagnosis for so long, always desperately trying to find videos of people with it, you know, talking about it, normalizing it to reduce, you know, the stigma around it. And if I can make even just one person feel less lonely by sharing my story and being like, "Hey, it's normal. Like, we're out here. We out here." Then honestly, that makes me happy and my job here is done. So thanks for watching. And I'm sorry for not posting for so long. I've been going through a bit of a shift career-wise and otherwise as well, um, but I do have a couple of other videos planned, so I'm going to be dropping them sooner than you think. So stay tuned. I will be back. In the meantime, you can follow me on TikTok and Instagram. My username is Sarah Forsberg, and, uh, I'll see you later. Much love.