Monthly Archives: June 2012

Ian Richardson – God’s Triangle

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Today’s interview is with Ian Richardson, the author of God’s Triangle. Thank you so much for agreeing to do an interview, Ian.

How long have you been writing?

I have always loved writing. My first “professional” writing was in my early teenage years when I would earn a dollar a time writing to magazines with Letters to the Editor. When I turned 16, I had to leave school to help my father, who was dying, with his rural newspaper in Australia. He let me write some of the news items and that was the real beginning to my career.

What do you like the most and least about the craft?

I like everything about writing.

What genre do you generally write?

Having worked for more than 25 years as a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London, I have learned to turn my hand to anything. In recent years I have concentrated on screenwriting. God’s Triangle is my first book.

Tell me about God’s Triangle. How did it start? At what point did family history become a book?

The story of God’s Triangle began in 1997 during a visit to Australia to see my mother. We were sifting through old family photographs and I spotted a tallish woman I had never seen before. My mother evasively dismissed her as “just Aunty Florrie Cox”. She added: “The family didn’t talk about Florrie”. She couldn’t tell me why, except that Florrie had been a missionary in India and that her marriage to another missionary had failed because of an affair her husband had with a third missionary.

My curiosity was excited, but initially my enquiries were simply to fill in a gap in the Cox family history. As more and more information was revealed over the years, I felt it would make an excellent feature film. An Australian movie producer agreed. It was then that I came up with the name God’s Triangle because the three main characters were committed Christians.

My wife and assistant researcher, Rosemary, felt I needed to assemble a detailed historical record of what had been discovered. From that emerged the book.

Your aunt had an unusual medical condition. How did you discover what it was? What did you think when you first became aware of it? Did you do any research?

When Rosemary and I began the research, we had no idea what we might find. All we had for several years was the assertion by the son of my great aunt’s ex-husband that the marriage had broken down “because your aunt never told my father she couldn’t have babies”.

The first real clue to Florrie Cox’s condition was revealed when I won an 18-month battle with the Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia, to gain access to the divorce records which had been marked “closed for all time”. A medical specialist in London read the file and was able to identify her precise condition.

How much did your aunt know? Does her condition play a pivotal role in her marriage problems?

My aunt never knew what was wrong with her, except in the most general terms. She grew up in a very religious Protestant family in an age when sex was a totally taboo subject.

It was also a time when unmarried couples were not allowed on “dates” without a chaperone to ensure that they didn’t exchange anything more than a hug or a chaste kiss or two.

The first Florrie knew that something was wrong was on her honeymoon when she and her husband, the Reverend Frank E. Paice, discovered they were unable to have intercourse. The marriage never recovered from that.

Florrie went to her grave in 1950 thinking she was some form of freak, getting little support from her embarrassed family or from the equally-embarrassed Baptist Church in Australia. Her actual condition was not given a name until after she died.

What will the reader learn about intersex from your book?

A lot, I would hope. Above all, understanding and tolerance. Sympathy, too, but not pity.

The promotion of God’s Triangle for the general public has deliberately avoided revealing that Florrie Cox had a very rare intersex condition. There are two chief reasons: it is a true-life detective story and it would be unfair for the general reader to know about Florrie’s condition at the outset. More importantly, I wished to avoid her being pre-judged. I wanted to lead readers along that same path that I took so that they would develop the same understanding that I had.

Without wishing to appear pompous, I feel that God’s Triangle – both the book and ultimately the film – will result in intersex in all its variations being viewed as just a part of mainstream society, rather than a condition to be regarded with suspicion.

I spent a year in Asia on a missions trip, but I’m sure it was much different from missions during the time covered in your book. Tell us a little about that if you would.

Yes, things have certainly changed since my great aunt was a missionary. Back then, they believed they had a God-given right to attempt to convert the entire non-Christian world to Christianity, regardless of the consequences for themselves or their converts. They were well-intentioned but very misguided, in my view.

My view is that “doing good” should not be tied to a conviction that the recipients should respond by “taking Jesus into their hearts”. Most Christian aid workers these days are what I call “Christians by example”, rather than evangelists. They help those who need help, but expect nothing in return but a few words of thanks and the satisfaction of knowing they have contributed to the betterment of global society.

How can someone purchase your book in the US?

God’s Triangle can be purchased online through http://godstriangle.com/. The British price converts to about $US17.50 at the current exchange rate. Delivery to US addresses usually takes less than two weeks.

The ebook is also available on Kindle through Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0085XM9IK

What are you currently working on?

Making sure God’s Triangle is a success and that the film version gets made as soon as possible.

What do you do for fun and relaxation when not writing?

Family things, swimming, trying to put the world right and gossiping with my journalist mates.

Which authors do you like to read?

I love Bill Bryson.

Do you have any tips for aspiring authors?

Yes. Keep at it, but don’t be precious about your work. No matter how wonderful your writing is, a good editor will always improve it.

Is there anything else you’d like us to know about you?

I have told my producer in Australia that I will refuse to die until I see the film version of God’s Triangle on the screen!

Thank you!

An Intersex Primer

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Hermaphroditus–that mythological creature both male and female–the double-sexed child of the Olympian gods Hermes and Aphrodite–does it survive today?

Human sexual development is a complex process involving differentiation into male and female, from fetus to adult. The process can be misdirected genetically, or break down along the way, resulting in a reproductive system that remains unfinished. Intersex is a blanket term for the various conditions resulting in these differences.

Actually, DSD–Disorder of Sexual Development–is the term some prefer, intersex/intersexed being somewhat politically incorrect, and hermaphrodite so often misunderstood.

Although the markers of sex–genetics, gonads, genitals, etc.–aren’t all on the male side or the female side, in intersex the choice of gender isn’t an issue as often as one might think.

Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) leaves the body unable to process male hormones. An XY conception becomes a female child with testes in her abdomen and no ovaries or uterus. The testes don’t produce sperm, but some of the testosterone is converted into estrogen, which gives the child a feminine puberty.

Swyer Syndrome or Pure Gonadal Dysgenesis is a condition in which the testes don’t form; the result is an XY female with a uterus but no ovaries.

Turner Syndrome results from the loss of the second sex chromosome. Turner babies are female, but their ovaries are only streaks of tissue. Because the sex chromosomes help determine height, Turner Syndrome women are short-statured, averaging something like four-foot-eight as adults.

Klinefelter’s(XXY) and Kallman’s are two intersex conditions affecting men. They don’t ordinarily result in genital ambiguity. Because of the extra sex chromosome, the average adult height in Klinefelter’s is greater than in XY.

None of these intersex conditions result in the mythological hermaphrodite, at least not in the sense of having both sex organs. When intersex affects the genitals, they turn out somewhere between male and female. The Quigley Scale describes the range of intersex genital shapes.

Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome(PAIS) results in ambiguous genitals, and breast development at puberty. The severity varies depending on which genetic mutation is responsible.

Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia can result in masculine genital development in an XX baby, sometimes enough so that the child is raised male. Although CAH can be fatal if not treated, most CAH girls can bear children. One possible complication in CAH children being raised as boys is a feminizing puberty.

A 5-Alpha Reductase deficiency in an XY baby results in feminine genitals, but masculine development at puberty. 5-Alpha children, although sometimes castrated by their doctors and raised as girls, can be fertile males.

Mixed Gonadal Dysgenesis is a partial form of Turner Syndrome. Some cells have a Y chromosome; some don’t. The distribution of the cells during fetal development determines how the gonads develop and how tall the child will grow.

The medical definition of hermaphroditism is having both testicular and ovarian tissue. In Mixed Gonadal Dysgenesis, the child may be born with one testis and one streak ovary. Or they may have two ovatestes. Streak ovaries are non-functional and mixed gonadal tissue often results in cancer.

When a child is born with ambiguous genitals, parents and physicians must decide whether the child should be raised as a girl or a boy. Most experts recommend that a gender be chosen for the baby, but cosmetic surgeries be put off until the child can participate in treatment decisions. Until then, it’s important for parents to preserve their child’s options.

With or without surgical intervention, some children reject the gender assigned them. Determining when a gender change is appropriate may be difficult. Children aren’t always willing to verbalize their feelings and may not be aware of their options.