Saying she doesn't want other kids to suffer the way she did, supermodel Hanne Gaby Odiele has announced that she was born intersex — and she wants to "break the stigma" that can lead to intersex children having surgery to align them with the male or female gender. In them, she tells intersex children to "embrace your uniqueness. Odiele was born with androgen insensitivity syndrome — a condition in which a person is born with both X and Y chromosomes, but the person's body does not respond to male hormones, according to a description by the National Institutes of Health.
Discussing her surgeries in an interview with USA Today , Odiele says she underwent a procedure when she was 10 to remove undescended testes and then had vaginal reconstructive surgery eight years later. According to the NIH, undescended testes "have a small chance of becoming cancerous later in life if they are not surgically removed.
Odiele, 29, has been among the world's elite models for the past 10 years, appearing on the cover of Vogue and walking in fashion shows for Marc Jacobs, Chanel and Prada, among others. Along the way, she has also won fans for her enigmatic style that draws on street fashion. Last summer , the Belgian model married her longtime boyfriend, John Swiatek. It caused me way too much pain. Saying that being intersex is roughly "as common as being born with red hair," the supermodel discussed being intersex in an Instagram video , leading many viewers to praise her for her bravery.
Some of them had never heard of Odiele, or of being intersex. But one comment came from another person who was born with AIS. Here's what that person had to say:.
In another video , Odiele addresses the parents of intersex kids:. In that video, Odiele also speaks to intersex children, telling them, "You can be whoever you want, whatever you want. Just be you. As for how common it is for babies to be born intersex, estimates generally range from 1 in every 1, to 1 in every 2, As the American Psychological Association notes, intersex children are sometimes misdiagnosed — "and government agencies do not collect statistics about intersex individuals. In a recent publication about intersex children, the group also acknowledged that there's a wide range of opinions on performing surgery to alter children's genitals to make them less ambiguous.
