Pidgeon Pagonis's skillfully narrated memoir takes listeners on their coming-of-age journey as they struggled to fit in with other girls. Pidgeon's voice is calm and has a slight Latin accent.… Once the secret is revealed, Pagonis finds their voice and passion to protect other intersex people from having their body autonomy and choice taken from them.” —AudioFile Magazine
“Pagonis's writing style is accessible and engaging, creating a casual and inviting atmosphere. Their anecdotes about their friends, family, and school years are heartbreaking yet endearing and inspirational. Additionally, listeners who know Chicago will enjoy Pagonis's Chicago accent and their descriptions of familiar landmarks, schools, and neighborhoods. Pagonis's memoir is an intimate look into their life being intersex, offering readers a glimpse into their triumphs, struggles, and journey toward self-acceptance. A raw, can't-stop-listening experience.” —Library Journal
“A sharp-eyed, candid reading experience.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[H]eart-wrenching…Pagonis’s campaign to speak up on behalf of intersex autonomy is galvanizing, and their journey toward found family is moving. This is an inspiring must-read.” —Publishers Weekly
“For many years now Pagonis’s activism as an advocate for the intersex community has been indispensable, helping shine a much-needed light on an identity that is so often misunderstood and ignored. Now they’re bringing that enlivening energy to the page with their luminous memoir about the fight for selfhood.” —Electric Literature
“A powerful, fierce, and vulnerable memoir that situates the fight for intersex rights against the backdrop of adolescence. Pagonis explores the nuance of bodies—of what it means to have a body as a house—and the ways that society and the medical industry have tried to flatten bodies into one-dimensional ideas. This book is a must-read, and as compelling as it is informative.” —Fatimah Asghar, author of When We Were Sisters
“A riveting memoir that illuminates one person’s beautiful struggle against a system that denied their truth since birth. Nobody Needs to Know is critical to understanding intersex issues, and it’s also a striking story of growing up and into yourself. Each page brims with a heart-wrenching honesty and irrepressible spirit that anyone can see themselves in. Pidgeon is changing the world and actively destigmatizing the existence of people who aren’t simply male or female. This story inspires an essential process that brings us closer to respecting and appreciating a reality that is not binary and yet is one we all share. Pidgeon is a wonderful human being, a conduit for harmony, and an example of what change and growth can achieve. Please read this book!” —Indya Moore, actor, model, and advocate
“A remarkable book by a remarkable person. I highly recommend it; anyone reading this will come away with an awareness and appreciation of the challenges and beauty of a group of people who are as common in our everyday lives as identical twins or redheads yet are mostly invisible or misunderstood.” —Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, principal of the Neurosequential Network
Pidgeon Pagonis's skillfully narrated memoir takes listeners on their coming-of-age journey as they struggled to fit in with other girls. Pidgeon's voice is calm and has a slight Latin accent. Along with typical disruptive changes during childhood, such as moving, parents separating, and new schools, there's also bladder surgery because of previous cancer when Pidgeon was too young to remember it. Socialized to be compliant and accommodating, with an eye to attracting boys, Pidgeon attends college, and while sitting in class, concludes that they, in fact, didn't have cancer but androgen insensitivity syndrome and were intersex. Once the secret is revealed, Pagonis finds their voice and passion to protect other intersex people from having their body autonomy and choice taken from them. L.J.C.A. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
2023-05-01
A prominent intersex activist reflects on how they overcame the lies, secrets, and silences that have surrounded their identity.
As a child, Chicago native Pagonis never felt at ease with the name their parents had given them—Jennifer—or with the trappings of girlhood. The author had always felt different because of the many surgeries they underwent to eliminate what their mother said was infantile ovarian cancer. Pagonis’ anxieties about femininity only worsened as they grew older and especially after they began having problems with urination, which led to more surgeries, including the enlargement of a small vagina. Doctors then prescribed the estrogen hormone Premarin, but by high school, Pagonis was still a “mostly flat-chested, frizzy-haired, mustachioed girl” with no hips who believed no boy would ever be attracted to them. Eventually, the author met a handsome but troubled boy, but he showed them the painful limits of their surgically altered body and taught them to hate sex. Learning about Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome in a college women’s studies class dramatically “ruptured” their sense of self. With shattering clarity, Pagonis suddenly understood that everyone—from their family to their doctors—had covered up the complex truth of their intersexuality and forced them to assume a “simpler” identity as female. “A neural meteor shower lit up the valleys of my brain as I processed all the things I had, until that moment, avoided realizing,” she writes. When medical records confirmed an AIS diagnosis, the author began the slow and difficult but ultimately successful work of not only reclaiming their unique, nonbinary identity, but also creating heightened visibility for intersex people and ending intersex surgeries at the hospital where they and other intersex children had been treated. The insights this courageous book offers into the struggles of a too often overlooked group will primarily appeal to readers seeking to broaden their understanding of queerness and nonbinary identities.
A sharp-eyed, candid reading experience.
