Many reports have been coming out today that a woman claiming to be Michael Phelps’ girlfriend was born a boy. She was NOT born a boy and is not a boy now. According to her claims, she was born with a condition called “intersex.” Intersex is actually the opposite of being a specific or particular sex. Intersex generally means that the sex organs are ambiguous. In the case of Taylor Lianne Chandler, the woman in question, she was born with both a uterus and a penis. Being that she had a uterus, which is a pretty significant female reproductive organ, and a female gender identity, saying she was born as a boy is false, and also misleading.
Chandler has since had her male appendage removed, and her sex organs surgically corrected to match her gender identity, which she maintains is, was and always has been, female. Since she has both a uterus and a female gender identity and has since birth, she is a woman, and has never been a boy.
Having an extra male part when one is otherwise female no more makes a woman a man than a person having a tailbone makes them a monkey. The penis Chandler was born with was a genetic mistake, and was removed because it was the wrong part for her. Now, had she been born intersex with a male gender identity, then she would would have been born a boy, because it is one’s gender identity that makes them male or female, and not their external and/or internal reproductive organs. The Merriam Webster definition of “gender” is: “the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex.” Nowhere in this definition of gender is a person’s genital region mentioned.
The headlines today about Michael Phelps’ girlfriend being born a boy reveal a deep ignorance on the part of the people writing such sensationalistic and incorrect drivel. Chandler maintains that she has never been a man, never dressed as a man or lived as a man, and that she is not, in fact, a man.
Before writing about an intersex person it would behoove the journalists undertaking the endeavor to learn something about science and how sex organs form in the womb. All embryos have the potential to grow into male or female starting at about the 6th week of pregnancy, and all embryos contain only the female chromosome up until the fifth or sixth week of pregnancy. Gender is not determined by whether or not a person comes out with the right or wrong genitals. Gender is determined by how a person identifies. In this case, something went awry in the formation of the female’s genitals but that does not make her a boy at the moment of birth.
Michael Phelps girlfriend was NOT born a boy. She was born intersex, and journalists need to learn the difference so they can stop sounding so ill-informed.