Imagine knowing that every aspect of your physiology, from your height to your cup size, was chosen off a menu — not by nature but by doctors and family members.

From the second I was born, decisions were made by medical professionals about which of two gender categories my body should fit into. For me, surgery to remove my gonads as an infant was the first stop on the track to female — but the train didn’t stop there. My family was consulted about how 5 feet 8 inches seemed like an optimal height, and informed on how hormone levels and sequences could be measured to achieve just that. The ideal breast size for my frame was also discussed; I can still remember the male doctor nodding approvingly. I was also given a dilator before even hitting my teens, so my vagina would be ready for penetrative sex.

“Disconcerting” would be one — euphemistic — way to put it.

I was born intersex, with XY chromosomes but Complete Androgen Insensitivity. If you’re not sure what that means, I don’t blame you. By some estimates, almost 2 percent of the world’s population is intersex like me but is still living in the shadows because of societal stigma and shame. Stigma knows no borders, and neither did my body, apparently: I didn’t respond to androgen hormones in the womb, and thus stopped developing at a certain point — a point between what we consider to be the binary sexes, hence “intersex.” I was ultimately born with female anatomy on the outside but with internal testes instead of ovaries. As a result, doctors, alongside my parents, decided when I was still a baby that I would be raised as a girl. This decision has shaped the course of my entire life but was made without my consent.

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I woke up Sunday morning to the news that the Trump administration is planning changes to federal civil rights laws that would define sex “as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals a person is born with,” and that any confusion would be clarified through genetic testing. Most people have interpreted this effort as a blow to transgender rights — and it is. But amid all this, the fate of intersex people seems to have been forgotten.