Hysterical laughter burst from my lips the first time I ran across this photo of my grandfather with his older brother. I was, after all, named for him.

In spite of the banana curls and dress, my grandfather grew up to be a burly steelworker with a wife and four children.

His father was one of the last blacksmiths to shoe horses in the Chicago area.

But it was his grandmother that held my interest and put an end to several years of genealogical research.

Anne Kirkpatrick was born in 1838 in Kirkgunzeon, in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland. In an ancient genealogy book regarding her sept of the Kirkpatricks, it simply says, “Thought to be faie.”

Now faie is a Middle English word, also found in the old French, meaning enchanted.

My family has extra genetic material, a second satellite attached to one of our autosomes. It’s a variation so rare that LabCorp has only seen a handful of cases. Geneticists don’t really know what it does. But we have an unusually high incidence of twins, rare cancers, and endocrine disorders.

And then there’s me. With the satellite and my mosaicism, my karyotype may well be unique in all of humanity. But, ultimately, my intersex condition is from God’s hand and is somehow for my good. It certainly keeps me running back to the cross.