A Woman Denied...

2011

01

IN THE MATERNITY ward of Verwood Hospital in Pretoria on November 30th, a new baby was born. The year was 1968. The name of the newborn baby, as officially recorded in the birth chart, was Raymond. For reasons best understood by the parents, the baby was named in honour of the mother’s former employer, and old Englishman who lived on Avondale Street in Sydenham, Johannesburg. The new baby was born to mother Evelyn and father Simon, who was for one reason or other, nicknamed Bushie. During the baby’s birth Evelyn was still staying in Mamelodi with her parents, Reuben and Selina. Although they stayed in Pretoria, they still kept a house in a little quiet village called Ga-Rafiri, in Lebowa. Evelyn and Simon were legally married. Legally meant in a Christian fashion, as well.

Evelyn’s younger sister Gladys, the last born in her family, had claimed the coveted spot of God-mother to the new baby. It was only proper that she was the relative in charge when Evelyn began to experience labour pains. Ambulances during that period were not available to cater for the township, so Aunt Gladys organized transport to take her sister to the hospital. It was for that reason, and perhaps her role as Godmother as well, that etched the events of that memorable day in mind. Thus she was able to preserve information of the events that took place that day and relay it at a later stage to her charge.

The events of that November day were recorded as recollected by loving Aunt Gladys. Naturally, you wouldn’t expect me to even know anything that happened during that important day of my life. I lay no claim, therefore, to recollection of such.

Father at the time of my birth stayed in a hostel in Soweto, from where he commuted to the Johannesburg City center for work everyday. According to the information that had been relayed to me, it was a very hot, humid November. It had just stopped raining. The air-conditioner at Pretoria’s Verwood hospital was not installed in the natives’ maternity wards, and the windows were opened to neutralize the stale, new life air with the humid one coming from outside.

Aunt Gladys said that at my bed, a few people had inquisitively crowded over my tiny form while I lay cradled, protected by my mother’s arms. Their eyes were feasting on a new tender life that had been delivered to add to the family of two sister siblings.

My records showed that I was a healthy 3.10kg new life. All the other statistics entered on my Road To Health chart, issued by the City of Pretoria, indicated that I was defects free, with the exception of one factor that had been deliberately left out.

According to Aunt Gladys, the mood in the maternity ward was tense.

Besides mother, father and Aunt Gladys in the ward, there was a nurse who went by the name of Frances. Frances was an experienced mid-wife assistant of about fifty years. The other two people in the ward, Aunt Gladys had said, were her parents – my maternal grandparents – who were in their mid-fifties. Reuben and Selina were strict disciplinarians who hated disorganization and praised order.

Aunt Gladys explained that the air in the ward was tense because father had upset the jovial mood of my grandparents simply by being his usual self: rude and loud. I cannot say with certainty whether he had always been like that or not; nor whether his behavior was spurred by my new arrival which made him nervous. Although he was expecting the new baby, the prospect of a new addition to the family naturally disquieted him.

But father was drunk.

He was drunk – soaked out. The condition that father had welcomed me in this world was, sadly, the condition that I’ve come to know him in since that November day in 1968. Auntie Gladys had once told me that since she knew father, he’d been sober for as many days as she could count on the fingers of her one hand. Auntie Gladys had also let me in on a little secret. This tit-bit had threatened to develop cracks in my parents’ marriage.

My parents had always debated that their next baby would be a boy even long before I was conceived. It had to be a man, as father preferred to refer to it. Which was not with fault – my parents had, already, two young children, both girls. So their desire was understandable. Doris, the elder sister, was ten years old, and Rebecca just turned four. So as soon as mother fell pregnant, father did all he could to root for the baby to be a boy.

He pressed his wishes hard that the baby be a man like him. I didn’t know how he did it, but he was adamant, and certain that his third child should be a boy.

While mother saw no justification to fight over the gender of an as yet undeveloped baby, father approached the subject with a hostile difference. He made it his duty – his religion, in fact, to see that the new baby boy would enhance his sole male gender in the house. Father had his way of putting it with stinging, crude language. He’d tell mother that he’d not have his house filled with useless girls. Auntie Gladys recounted to me that father said these girls that mother was delivering would be about as useless as their mother. And of course he wouldn’t expect these women to cook his food while they were on their periods. Such a disgusting thing.

It was disrespectful to his person. He was a man.

Father fancied himself a prophet. He prophesied that these girls would fill his house with children of men they wouldn’t marry.

They’d neglect their duties, leave their house, their home, and take care of the bastards’ houses. Oh, how he hated women!

However, he had a good, lasting solution. What his house needed, father always told mother, was a man. A strong man, like himself, who would take care of things. A strong man who would give his house an image. Whatever it meant.

Well, Auntie Gladys couldn’t say which things the man in father’s house would take care of. She reckoned he meant fixing broken chairs, weeding the garden, painting doors and generally being a nuisance and grumble in a baritone demanding yet another serving from the last of the chicken.

And Auntie Gladys had always told me that father had his way.

No one was quite as assertive as father. Whatever he wished for, he’d get it. By hook or punch to the head!

To the matter at hand, Aunt Gladys recounted that as I was lying in my mother’s arms, quiet and godly, father, with that decisive certainty, asked Nurse Frances:

‘Well, it’s a man, isn’t he?’

The thick aromatic silence was broken by the spasmodic wailing of my co-babies in the ward. Their parents were chatting excitedly, contemplating about the peace and joy that the addition in their families would bring. It came to the attention of my godmother at that time that when father asked Nurse Frances that question, it was very difficult – in fact near impossible, for the mid-wife to answer. By all accounts it was a simple question, one that every proud father was entitled to know without even hesitation of an instant. It was a question so innocuous that every nurse would jump to announce the answer after successful delivery. But that day of my birth, the exception was Nurse Frances.

‘It’s… it’s a…’

Nurse Frances was stammering. Sweat streaked down her face as she struggled to find the correct word. Just by the act of the baby’s birth the confident, experienced nurse was reduced to a nervous wreck. Nurse Frances mopped excessive sweat off her white-capped face with the half- sleeve of her blue maternity overall. Aunt Gladys enacted her experiences. She looked from father to mother, and then slowly at me. My auntie told me that she had never in her life seen the gender of a baby wreck the jovial mood of a successful delivery. She’d never seen it confuse the parties involved, ignite tensions and cause strife like mine did.

Gender to her was simply gender; it had no hidden clefts.

Irrespective of a favorite gender, a baby would always be cause for celebration.

However, in that hot hospital ward, the tension was nearing breaking point. It seemed that in the light of the revelation of my gender, father’s madness could not be contained. Mother then saw that this was the opportunity to clear the medicinal-heavy air.

‘Why don’t you take a peep yourself…’

It was mother’s attempt at relieving the cramped atmosphere in the ward. Father looked at my grandfather slowly, and there was a hint of respect that battled to surface in his drunken nod. His father-in-law kept quiet, as he wisely did sometimes. Perhaps he was fearing that father would explode as he was unpredictable.

Father seemed to push heavily through the aromatic dabbed air of the ward. Not that he was reluctant. He must’ve guessed that something was amiss. Aunt Gladys said that he was feeling it.

When he reached the bed, he put his hat on the sheets and gazed at mother. Mother, perhaps studiously, perhaps in an exaggerated gesture, removed the warm shawl that covered my tiny body, and put it aside on the bed.

Father’s labored breathing intensified. He stood next to me, saying not his thoughts, his wishes.

Then mother proceeded to remove the small soft woolen napkin that had covered my abdomen. And after she had exposed me, she closed her eyes shut, tensing unfairly the tiny muscles of her eyelids.

I lay there, naked, the hot air of the hospital ward caressing my new body. No one said a thing.

Father was said to move an inch closer to the bed. From where he stood he consumed my fresh, lower tiny body with his red eyes.

Close up, he seemed to open his bloodshot eyes wider and wider to inform his curiosity. His eyes went over me, goggled, searched, penetrated my abdomen as he sought to see that which would decide who I was, and in what category of being I fell into. After feasting his eyes on me, Aunt Gladys explained that his turn to stammer like Nurse Frances came. The assembled company watched as sweat built up in tiny unhealthy beads on his puckered forehead as he looked at my nakedness. Father gawked at my nakedness, frozen suddenly in the hot ward, trying to make sense of it all. He was bending over me, perhaps feeling without warning dizzy to the stomach as the shock enveloped him. His hands were resting on the thin mattress. When he spoke, his voice turned out coarse, rattling his dry liquor-abused throat.

‘It’s a… it’s…’ his voice trailed and he stopped without finishing.

His red eyes, which had suddenly become enlarged and scared like a caged mouse’s, darted quickly to mother, and in the same spirit to my grandparents. He felt afraid that they would question what kind of an in-law they had on their hands.

Father’s red eyes came to rest on me again. Not on my face, but on my nakedness. His hot breath spewed forth in drunken confused intensity this time, traveling at break-neck speed, and stroked my cheeks, and my new tender nostrils. Mother, feeling that the poisonous fumes were not welcome to me, nudged father gently away so I could breath easy. Father straightened and took a step or two backwards.

Aunt Gladys explained that what happened next was time for bewildered looks, for explanations, for finger-pointing, for witch-hunting, and for generally feeling guilty. It was time to hunt the real sorcerer. No excuses were welcome. Because my parents had a problem – a monster of a problem on their hands. Father mustered his courage and looked at me again. Sure the baby he was looking at was sound and healthy. But the monster of the problem was this: his baby had a small, neat vagina – which was all fine and lovely for a little new-born baby girl. But what caused all the brouhaha and murderous confusion was that right there, on the urogenital ridge, protruded a tiny job of a penis.

Auntie Gladys related to me that the tiny baby penis sat slumping over to one side, resting idly on its tiny scrotum. The two testes formed a rather crafty impression in their sacks. Everything was clear and unambiguous – it was not a case of a deformed vagina, or a deformed penis. These two organs were not bound together in an abnormal growth of intersex – each one could be clearly distinguished. Each one of them existed on their own.

No one around knew how to explain this… this phenomenon.

The doctor who was in charge of my delivery had left the building

– conveniently – leaving the stressing job to Nurse Frances to explain to my parents. Mother, the woman who had successfully delivered me into this world, was the most anxious of all those present. As her sister Aunt Gladys knew her, she had a strong will.

She had immediately, simply and quietly accepted that it was by the dictates of nature beyond mere mortal’s control that such double gender happened. However, this was all lost to father. In his mind reigned one thing only: disappointment.

His chances at a boy had been shattered.

‘What… What have you done to my little boy!’ father was said to lament in this fashion to mother.

Mother was by makeup a quiet woman who disliked talking back.

Helpfully, Nurse Frances was wise to step in at the right time, before all hell broke loose.

‘Mr Tau…’ she stepped forward, unsure if she could handle the problem professionally. In all her years as a hospital mid-wife, she had never had such a frightening episode through her wards.

This was the first, and God help her, the last until she retired.

‘Mr Tau,’ she continued, ‘What we have here is a kind of an unusual deformity… a rare…’

‘I want to talk to a doctor! I want to talk to a doctor about my son!’ father curtly interrupted Nurse Frances. ‘He must tell me what this means!’

Father, I was told, was on the way to his usual histrionics. The attention he received spurred him on. A moment or two later, he’d snap.

‘You’ve got a lovely baby… girl, Mr Tau…’ Nurse Frances continued to attempt to explain. ‘The appearance of the penis on the ridge was probably exacerbated by the excessive amount of suprapubic fat…’

Aunt Gladys said that she and both my parents knew that this was peppering talk, an attempt at window-dressing a deformity. They could see, and they knew that the penis was the real thing. Worse, they knew and were frustrated by the fact that at that condition I could be neither a boy nor a girl. I was caught in mid-air, a thing that defied, in father’s opinion, classification. I was genderless.

Father right then believed that as I was a genderless thing, I should also be loveless… unworthy of being loved; I should be incapable of receiving the energetic warmth a parent is supposed to give to a baby.

A nameless thing. To paraphrase father’s thoughts frankly, something that deserved no life.

Nurse Frances, seeing the look in my parents’ eyes, attempted to revert to a more serious, credible explanation.

‘I want to know what this is!’ father kept on repeating this. His internal clock was ticking rapidly.

‘It’s a phenomenon we call masculination of the female,’ Nurse Frances explained in much more sober terms. ‘It’s caused by the XX chromosomes. I am not sure if you would understand the technical terms, but be assured now that the condition can, and shall be completely rectified.’

‘It’s got to be a son… a man!’ father’s cry reverberated across the maternity ward. Then in a frightening about-turn he exclaimed,

‘This is not my baby!’

As he uttered that father gestured with his hands, pushing the imaginary, filthy genderless baby away from his person. While father was concerned with his ruined chances of a boy, mother, battling to keep the hurt, fright and disappointment under the surface, was more concerned about rectifying the situation. She wanted to know what category of gender the baby she was holding would be. Understandably, no mother would want to be kept hanging with a baby that had an indecisive gender.

Mother did not want to be anguished over my gender. A mother, all over the world, wants what falls within the normal, acceptable bracket. She more than anyone else wants to be proud of the gender of her baby. She does not want anything to go wrong, and she constantly dreads that something could inevitably go wrong, for she had agonized for these whole nine months praying to have a healthy baby like every other mother. In the old days when the technology was in its infancy, and barely accessible, a mother had to wait, uncertain, for the duration of the pregnancy before she could know what gender she had carried. Rightly, it'd be the first thing she’d ask the nurse when the baby was presented to her.

Is it a boy, or a girl?

Likewise, friends, neighbors and relatives would be concerned about the gender of the baby. They have to be informed because of two-pronged reason. The first is partly because they had to know what type of gifts, if any, they could buy for the baby. The second is to welcome the baby and relate to it in proper acceptable norms based on cultural and societal upbringing. That was so because in most cultures a baby belongs to the community, and the roles of grown-ups fall under assuming altruistic responsibilities.

‘What am I going to tell everybody? What should I say?’ mother sadly asked, more to herself than to Nurse Frances. And then directly she said,

‘How is this problem rectified, Nurse Frances?’

‘You see, Mrs Tau,’ Nurse Frances replied. ‘One in a million births experience this hermaphroditic condition. There’s a procedure we follow in cases of this nature. You’d have to bring the baby back here for doctors to do a thorough investigation before they can carry on with any treatment by surgical correction.’

‘What do you mean by treatment,’ mother asked in bewilderment, looking Nurse Frances in the eyes. She continued, ‘What would the doctors do to make my baby normal?’

My grandparents still sat at the same spot on the bench that they had occupied since I was brought to the ward. They sat in stony silence, not even moving a muscle, except muttering endless disbelieves. It was a new experience to them.

‘The reason surgical correction is required, Mrs Tau, is the simple fact that you have to know the gender of your baby,’ Nurse Frances was said to explain to mother. ‘You have to accept it and relate to it in the way that particular gender would require. You have to be able to name the baby appropriately, register the birth, and more importantly, raise and clothe it in the best way permissible for its gender.’

Father had retreated to his chair. He sat holding his head in his hands.

‘It should be a man!’ father threw in his wish again. Nurse Frances disregarded him and continued.

‘In your baby’s case, Mrs Tau, surgical correction of external genitalia is imperative, as you see. It is normally performed between the ages of two and three years–’

‘Will we have to wait that long? Why wait?’ mother questioned in disbelief.

‘That’s the normal procedure, Mrs Tau. Before that, in between, you’ll have to make a compromise on the baby’s name. The most important thing during that pre-surgical period is to be careful not to raise the baby as any one of the two genders, but simply as a baby that you love, until things could be attended to…’

This explanation did not go well with father, so he grumbled his dissatisfaction. All this seemed like a sinister plot to deny him of the boy he wanted so much.

Nurse Frances carried on.

‘I advice you to have a private discussion at home as parents of a new-born baby, and decide what gender you most want for the infant. But bear in mind that rectifying the problem and giving you the gender you choose can only be done once the doctors have completed the investigation. It will be only if the doctors are satisfied that the gender you choose for the baby won’t adversely affect it in later life. It must therefore be in the interest of the baby’

At this stage, mother’s caring anguish, pregnant with the desire for an answer, cut in, forcing Nurse Frances to stop.

‘How, Nurse Frances… how would the doctors know that my baby would be best knowledgeable in the specific gender that they might decide to keep?’

‘I understand your concern, Mrs Tau. I am a mother myself,’

Nurse Frances assured her. ‘Let me make it simple by saying that if you want to rear the baby as a girl, the therapy would involve taking blood samples to determine the pattern of chromosomes.

Concurrently, further surgery would be carried out by means of a biopsy taken from the gonads to determine the presence of ovaries. If these are satisfactory for a girl, it’d then again depend on the development of the sexual organs themselves. In theory, an organ that displays the weakest developing pattern would be the one removed.’

Father silently prayed that I would not have the ovaries and that my male sexual system could be the stronger of the two. He wished that my female sexuality would fail. Mother sighed. She was tired. Aunt Gladys would later tell me that mother understood the implications of the phenomenon that Nurse Frances explained very well. She was not going to go on wrangling about the gender of a newborn baby. It was only love that she wanted to give the baby. Though painful, she accepted what happened, the force of nature, unpalatable as it was. Therefore she was prepared to raise me the best way a mother raised a baby, with endless love and sober care, irrespective of gender.

Adversely, father was the dissenting voice. He