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Kia ora, my name's Georgia Andrews. I am the chairperson of Intersex Awareness New Zealand and project manage intersex youth Aotearoa. Both roles are based here in Wellington. I was diagnosed with an intersex variation when I was 16 years old. Uh, intersex is an umbrella term to describe people born with variations of sex characteristics, which don't clearly fit the binary definition of a male or female body. [00:00:30] When I was diagnosed, I was told by my doctors not to tell anybody and my family were told to keep it a secret. I realized much later in my journey that doctors had actually kept my intersex test results from me and had known longer than I had that I was intersex. So I lived many years in shame with the idea in my head from doctors that if I told anyone about my diagnosis that I would become a [00:01:00] radical flag waving activist and would be ousted by the local community. I was also told that If I moved back into the local area, I would become depressed, and so this is when I was at boarding school. So I thought that I would never be able to return to a life with my family. That was a very hard concept to hold, but the most difficult thing was I was told I would never meet anyone else like me. That I was the only person in the world like me who was intersex. [00:01:30] So I was lost, I felt alienated, and I thought, what am I going to do to change this? I was holding anger and I couldn't carry that anger anymore. I reached out to international intersex networks and it took four years before I connected with my first intersex partner. person here in Aotearoa and that was through Connections in America. So it's, that was back in 2000, starting my journey in [00:02:00] 2009. We moved for 10 and look at things that have shifted and things that have stayed the same. There is still a huge amount of shame and secrecy around. And not only intersex bodies, but the identities of those people that don't sit in a heteronormative framework of male and female straight identity. For me, as a lesbian woman, I also hold a narrative of [00:02:30] being intersex and lesbian, and that holds many challenges. An exciting thing in 2019 is the development that has happened across international intersex networks, specifically in terms of the outreach that our young people have to community. In 2009, if I was to search intersex online, I'd be lucky if I got four or five search results. Now you'll get 20, 000 search results, so things are shifting. But on the negative [00:03:00] side of things, internationally there is still shame associated with diagnosis, and families are told, even in 2019 with young infants, that they should not share their intersex story, that they are the only people, and there's no community to support them. I.. I feel very privileged to be intersex because I have been able to connect with family all around the world, my intersex family. I have intersex friends, very close friends, in every continent of the world, which is [00:03:30] amazing. It's allowed me to travel, it has built.. me into a career where I am able to support young people who are going through trials and tribulations, but showing them that there are positive ways forward when they're told that there sometimes aren't. And that's really fulfilling to see that people don't have to wait to be connected to community. They can be proud of their identities as an intersex person or as a member of the [00:04:00] LGBTQIA plus community. I also think that It's really exciting to see the level of rainbow representation, particularly here at Parliament. I was part of a hostropu for the ILGA World Conference. We had people here from well over a hundred different countries who were astounded to see not only rainbow flags flying outside Parliament, but MPs here [00:04:30] proudly saying that they were members of the rainbow community. I think, you know, it's easy to take for granted the privileged position we are here, we hold here in Aotearoa, where our MPs are able to support us in that way. They are a real inspiration for our youth, and I think that our youth movement is the way forward. We have youth who are inspired to take authority over their decision making process, youth who are willing to stand up and be [00:05:00] heard. We are able to embrace that diversity as a country and it's something to be honoured.
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