I would never present as a boy, I just ended up adopting an androgynous look, but I would always tell people that I genuinely feel like a boy. I was into girls but I never ever dared called myself a lesbian because I just didnât feel like one.
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The sexuality side of things came into things a bit more because everyone had a boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever they were interested in. My body, partly, but also my sexuality â which nobody even thinks about when it comes to being intersex â because I didnât know who to date, what to date, where to date. I felt like I was living a double life like Hannah Montana and I felt like it couldnât go on any longer because it would have ended up in catastrophe. But when you get into high school and everything is more divided by gender, and as you get into being an adult, instead of an adolescent, you have to be in control of your life, whereas I felt like I wasnât. Roshaante Anderson: I was very much happy with my feminine side and very much happy with my masculine side. How did it change when you got a bit older? But then every year that it was going on, I started feeling less like I wanted to be any gender and more like I just want to be me. We discussed how much I actually enjoyed being a female because I did. My dadâs head was all over the place with the whole thing, but my mum and I went down to the Tavistock and we discussed it with them.
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It was like I was growing up really and truly half and half. Not like your average tomboy who wants to go and play football â facial hair was growing, my voice was getting very deep, my body was shaping to be masculine â you name it! I couldnât walk around anywhere without everyone thinking I was a boy. We found out I was intersex when I was 11 years old because although my parents were raising me as a girl I was getting a lot of masculine traits. I was in to performing arts and sometimes I wasnât in school because I was going to the Royal Albert Hall five times a week or I was training as a dancer hip hop, lyrical, contemporary, krunk and jazz. I had more ambiguous female genitalia than male so it made more sense at the time. My dad wanted me to be a girl from birth and so that was basically what was chosen for me. Roshaante Anderson: My family were back and forth between Catford, Birmingham and Manchester. Can you tell us about your upbringing and also your gender expression when you were younger? Roshaante did not receive these surgeries but decided to transition medically to male for himself from the age of 16.Âīelow, he talks about dating as an intersex person, the brutal realities of gender confirmation surgery and why he gets naked on YouTube, despite the controversy that ensues. Often, when people are born intersex, doctors will assign them a gender (whichever they think they are closest to) and sometimes even perform mutilating genital surgeries in order to make the child âfitâ more closely to an assigned gender. This could be because of your hormonal balance, the appearance of your genitalia or your chromosome make up. But surgeries informed just part of his journey prior to transitioning, Roshaante lived as an intersex person who didnât really identify with either gender and before that, a girl â as this is what doctors, his parents and society told him that he was.ÂĪccording to some estimates, more people are intersex than transgender: it simply means that you donât fit into the strict biological categories that medical science deems âmaleâ or âfemaleâ. For better (endless compliments) or worse (abusive comments), he has also become known for getting naked on YouTube, revealing his top surgery and phalloplasty to the world. He is known for his honest and sometimes galling videos in which he tackles the topics that others are too afraid to take on the possibility of making a mistake when you change your body or the difficulties of self-acceptance when living with dysphoria. Roshaante Anderson is a 24-year-old, model, YouTuber and activist.