Episode 263: Jenn Levine

At sixteen years old, Jenn Levine sat in a room with her mother and was told by two doctors that she had an extra chromosome, and that because of that extra chromosome, she would never be able to have children. But that wasn't all: they also said that she shouldn't tell anyone about her "birth defect" because people wouldn't understand, and then closed out the conversation by saying "you'll probably never meet anybody else like you." What Jenn *wasn't* told that day was that she was intersex; that was something she wouldn't find out til over a decade later, when she herself undertook a years-long process of obtaining her hard copy medical records from that very appointment. Jenn describes the truly serpentine journey she went through to finally arrive at the point where she now definitively knows "I am not my diagnosis...I am an intersex woman." All this, plus Jenn kvells over the fact that she is living every Jewish woman's dream by being a bagel ambassador for Brooklyn's BagelFest!Follow Jenn everywhere at @jennlevine! Also, follow InterConnect on Instagram at @interconnect_support, and check out their website at interconnect.support to see all that they do! If you'd like to join the L.A. LGBT Center's Club Intersex group, you can register at https://socialnet.lalgbtcenter.org/member-registration/ (intersex-identified folks only, though - allies, check out InterConnect!). Lastly, Every Body, the intersex documentary that Jenn discusses in this episode, is streaming for free on Peacock, and is available for purchase elsewhere.