Mighty Hermaphrodite
A memoir by Hida Viloria

“When I was about nine years old my mother said to me, ‘When you were born they didn't know if you were a boy or a girl." 

Mighty Hermaphrodite is a memoir of sexual coming-of-age by Hida Viloria, who was born with ambiguous genitalia but, through a combination of luck, circumstance and parental concern, escaped infant surgery and subsequent hormone treatment and was allowed to grow up in the body she was born in. It spans the author's life from ages twenty-six through thirty-three.

At twenty-six, Viloria discovers she is “intersex” from an article in a San Francisco newspaper, and is forced to face the question, Am I a boy or a girl? She soon decides to stop doing things she’s been doing all her life that women are supposed to do, like wearing makeup and women’s clothes. To her surprise, instead of being perceived as a lesbian, she is suddenly perceived to be male.

When she finally meets other intersex people, one year later, she is shocked and saddened to learn that most people like her have been brutally scarred, physically and psychologically, by infant surgeries and hormone treatments meant to "correct’" their bodies. She realizes that she must tell doctors, and the world, that she is happy she was allowed to keep her unique body parts.

The memoir follows Viloria's journey as she goes from being a feminine female in the world, to being a young man, almost overnight (without the help of any drugs or surgery.) Life, she discovers, is totally different when she is no longer a "pretty girl," and she revels in exploring this new world as much as possible.

Good friends of over a decade do not recognize her. Gay men hit on her constantly, even at the local nude beach. And when she travels to Costa Rica, she has such a hard time being believed when she identifies herself as female, even in a two piece bathing suit, that she resorts to telling people she is a seventeen year old boy named "Juan."

We journey through romantic and sexual experiences in all of the author’s incarnations: as a feminine woman, a masculine woman, a young man, and, finally, as an androgynous, "out" intersex woman. We witness tender, sometimes turbulent love affairs with women and sexual encounters with both women and men, some of whom see her as a woman, some a man, and some who are unsure. (One male partner, for example, asks her if she has a penis.)

Gender surfing has its highs and lows, and Viloria both kicks-ass and wipes out as she tries desperately to decide which wave to ride: male or female. Her life, like her gender, also swings from extremes: from stripper to star student; from being offered a spot in the fire department to tragically losing it; from fledgling rock star to unlikely law school student; and, most importantly, from feeling alienated and confused about her identity to becoming a confident, outspoken, intersex activist.

Viloria takes us on a voyage where male and female are not opposite, but entwined. After years of trying to choose between one or the other based on others’ reactions, she finally accepts that the world will always see her in different ways. She realizes that it is up to her to accept herself for what she is, a well-hung woman, and to create this identity for herself and the world.

Mighty Hermaphrodite is the intimate account of Viloria's search for love and identity. It is ultimately a story about one person's journey to embrace being intersex in a world eager to constrain others like her by pretending they do not exist. By answering "both" to the question, "Are you a boy a or a girl?" she blazes a trail for people to celebrate the middle space between masculine and feminine, male and female.