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- [00:00]
Jackie Blankenship
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio.
- [00:16]
Dani Shapiro
I'm Dani Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My guest today is Jackie Blankenship, podcast host, marathon runner, beauty pageant queen, Mrs. America, and intersex LGBTQ advocate. Jackie's is a story of the deepest kind of secret kept from her. A secret inside her own body, her own being. For a long time, she knows only the little that she's told. And so the secret grows alongside her until, at long last, she's able to know herself deeply and to find the kind of profound freedom that can only be ours when we embody our truth.
- [01:12]
Jackie Blankenship
I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yeah, it really exists, the Kalamazoo. I was born in 85, and it's funny that I'm now at an age where I can look back and say, it was a different time, but it really was, you know, without the computer at our fingertips, without the constant entertainment that we now see, there's always something to watch, something to scroll, something to do. But when I was growing up, I really grew up in that iconic moment of just enough freedom to be outside. I lived outside with my little sister. We played and rode bikes from a really young age around. Around our neighborhood. And I was a girl's girl that liked to get dirty. I would wear dresses and aprons over my clothes because I wanted to make sure I was always in a dress. So my mom would sew aprons. She was like. She liked to sew as a hobby. And she'd sew me these apron full of pockets just so with the sole purpose of knowing I was going to tie them around my waist so I could wear them over my jeans and my Michigan State sweatshirt to go ride bikes with the neighborhood kids. But I wanted to look like I was wearing a dress. I was just hyper feminine from a super young age. It was me and my sister and my mom and my dad. My dad worked full time out of the house, and my mom was very much your stereotypical 90s mom. She worked a lot of odd jobs. She cleaned houses and did things out of the home to earn extra money, but for the most part, it was us three girls. And then on top of that, my mom has six sisters. Sisters. And so it was really just all ladies, all the time. And my dad was surrounded by hyper feminists.
- [02:51]
Anny Riter
And did your aunts live in Michigan as well or nearby? What was the fabric of the family
- [02:57]
Jackie Blankenship
like, my mom is very, very close with all her sisters, and they grew up in East Lansing. And my dad also actually grew up in East Lansing. Now his family all kind of passed away when he was a little bit younger. Unfortunately, you know, his parents were older and he only had one brother and one sister who have both passed. Well, my mom has six sisters, all still with us, and they get together all the time. I mean, the seven of them having glasses of wine and beer and chatting. They're loud. Everyone knows the Johnston ladies, and it's a thing. And so I was always surrounded by big, large groups of boisterous, loud, laughing women. And that's a lot of my early memories are sitting in, you know, someone's living room. Maybe it'd be my aunt's or my cousin. And just loud, laughing, you know, ladies having lady time, real time.
- [03:50]
Anny Riter
I love the image of you as like this sort of, you know, tomboy in jeans and a sweatshirt and an apron tied around your waist. Wow.
- [03:59]
Jackie Blankenship
I wanted to be good at sports and I wanted to be fast and I wanted to be able to do all the things. But then I also wanted to be like, dressed up all the time. So having so many sisters. It turns out three of my aunts have what's called complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. But it was very much hush hush in the 60s when they were diagnosed and they were told never to tell anybody. So they didn't talk about it even amongst each other much. It was something that they really kept to themselves. It was personal and it was very scary how it was presented to them. So my mom had very, very little information about what it was and what it meant and really didn't think much of it until my grandma called her and said, you know, I'm a carrier of this thing in our family. And it was always this thing. And she said, you might want to get Jackie checked. And my mom didn't. What do you even mean, get her checked? She's a baby. She's a little girl. And she said, you just take her and get like a blood test done and that's how they'll check. And my mom, you know, had told me even then she didn't understand. She didn't know biology. She didn't go education past high school, really. And even then, you know, chromosomes in the 70s and 60s were something we're still learning about. They didn't have the information that they do now. And so she's like, I didn't even understand how they were going to figure that out from A blood test. I didn't really get it. So she took me in and told them, you know, I think she needs to be tested for this. So they did a karyotype test, and back then it would have been 1989. They sent it away, and it took months to come back. And when it came back, it revealed that I had XY chromosomes, which we typically see in males. And it was a bit of a shock to my mom and my dad.
- [05:42]
Anny Riter
Curious, where was your mom in the birth order with her sisters?
- [05:46]
Jackie Blankenship
She's the sixth daughter of seven, so
- [05:49]
Anny Riter
she's close to the youngest.
- [05:50]
Jackie Blankenship
Close to the youngest, yeah.
- [05:52]
Anny Riter
It's just so interesting, you know, this podcast is so much about the layers and layers of secrets, and it sounds like your mom grew up in this family where this was also a secret in the sense that her sisters were told. You don't speak of this. You know, none of us speak of this. So she didn't even know about this until your grandmother called her, essentially.
- [06:13]
Jackie Blankenship
Yeah, she. So she knew that something was different about three of her sisters. They didn't have their period, but she didn't have the language to know what it was called. She didn't have any of that information and was and was, you know, taught and told not to talk about it. And they were diagnosed in a much different time. I was diagnosed at 4. They were diagnosed at, like, 16 to 19 years old. They all three came forward and said that they had never had their period. And, you know, back in the 60s, it was. They believed, you know, if you were going through what we now know as Amenaria, you were model esque, you were stunning, you were athletic. So that's what they thought was their reasoning. They were thin, tall, you know, pretty clan of women. And they thought, oh, us. Us Johnston girls. That's what they thought. And my grandma was like, that's not right. I don't think that's right. And she said, well, because I'm so. They thought it's because they were so athletic and so thin and fit. Well, they went to the doctor, and that's when they were diagnosed, and all three found out together.
- [07:16]
Anny Riter
That's really. That's extraordinary. And then it's interesting because your mom. How do I say this? Like, parents don't always do the right thing. That could be a tagline for family secrets. And there could have been a universe in which your grandmother went to your mom when you were born, might have just crossed her fingers and decided not to say anything.
- [07:37]
Jackie Blankenship
Yeah. And so my mom was well aware three of her sisters were infertile, and that that was really what she knew about it. So when she became aware that, oh, that actually could be genetic and that you could pass that on as well, that's when she said, oh, I could pass on this thing. She might admit it now, but back then she didn't really understand all the ins and outs of what it all meant. She thought she did, but I really don't think she grasped it because I know how long it's taken me to fully grasp.
- [08:13]
Dani Shapiro
Certainly is incredibly complex to grasp. A girl born with cais also has internal testes along with XY chromosomes, but develops externally as female. We're in the late 80s, early 90s, so this is pre Internet research, isn't possible. And even if it were, so much is unknown now.
- [08:38]
Jackie Blankenship
You know, we'll have people who go to a fertility center will say, and they'll pick their embryos, and they think they know what gender they're picking ahead of time because they're basing that off those chromosomes. But you gotta think back, you know, in 1985 when I was born, that none of that existed. That wasn't a thing you could do. I mean, chromosomal research was relatively new, assigning it to gender really, than the last 20 years. And so when we say it's a different time, it was a really different time with our understanding of sex, gender and biology. And basically what we know now is it's when the embryo is essentially male, if you want to assign a gender to an embryo is male. And when the SR Y gene kicks in, which is what males have, that trigger their testosterone development, my body, it clicks on and my androgen receptors are like, nope, we can't accept that. So it's like, I'm insensitive to all testosterone or androgen. So when the androgen and the testosterone washed over me to develop my. My body, it said, I can't use that. And it turned it into a usable source, which for me was estrogen. And so I develop on a female pathway, they say, because all embryos actually start in the womb as females. And then once the hormones wash over you, it dictates which pathway you continue growing on throughout the rest of your development in the womb. So internally, I didn't have cervix, uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, none of that. I just had testes that were in my abdomen. Now, the testes were never going to drop. I was never going to suddenly become male. But they were there, producing male levels of testosterone. But the way My body operates as a person with CAIS is it aromatizes that into estrogen. So I continued to develop female without any medical intervention.
- [10:23]
Anny Riter
It's amazing. Our bodies are amazing and what we've come to be able to understand about them, totally. So another thing that was very much true of its time is that once they had a medical answer diagnosis, the doctors told your parents to just keep the extent of it quiet. And, you know, and that's where I started thinking, oh, this is all on a need to know basis. You know, what does Jackie need to know? Maybe Jackie doesn't really need to know anything. Maybe Jackie only needs to know that she's eventually going to need surgery for something, this thing, you know, as you said, but is not clear on what that is.
- [11:02]
Jackie Blankenship
I like to say that one of my earliest memories, like a core memory, was sitting in the living room watching Full House on our giant tube TV with my sister. I must have been 8 or 9 years old when my parents came in and they sent my sister out of the room and said, we just need to talk to Jackie for a minute. So my mind is racing. What did I do? Did I secretly go ride my bike by the drugstore? They tell me not to go near. What did I do? And they said they just need to talk to me. I didn't do anything wrong. And it was to explain to me that I was like my aunts, because I knew my aunts couldn't have babies. And that was because one was in the process of adopting children from China. And we were all very big part of that process, helping fundraise. And she actually went to China. So it was very much talked about in her family. And everyone was very, very excited to meet this baby that we. That they were adopting. So it was something at the time that was really top of mind for me. At 9, I was gonna have a cousin. This was my first experience being the older cousin. So what was presented to me at around nine years old was that you will be like your aunt and you will not be able to have children. So you won't have a period someday when you're older, and you won't be able to have kids of your own. And when you're older, once you go through puberty, you'll have to have a surgery. And when I asked why, they said that's just how your body works. And we all kind of left it at that.
- [12:29]
Anny Riter
Why do you think that they chose to share that much with you at age 9? Was it because you were gonna be entering an age Maybe not that long from now where some of your friends might start to be getting their periods, you know, at 11 or 12, I mean, do you have any idea what their thinking was of?
- [12:50]
Jackie Blankenship
I might have even been, you know, now that you asked that, can I trigger those memories? I might have been 10. And I think it was because they were sending home the video list that they were going to be playing for the class in fourth and fifth grade of reproductive health. And I think it made my mom realize I can't send her into that not knowing that she will not be having that same puberty that they were learning about. So her way of telling me the truth, which she did, her and my dad, they did. They told me I'll never have a period. They told me that I wouldn't grow body hair like, you know, my peers would. They gave me the outcome. They gave me what was going to happen. I. They didn't have the language, I don't believe, to tell me why or what actually was going on. They didn't have the language to know it was testes because the doctors only called them gonads.
- [13:46]
Anny Riter
That interests me so much to the, you know, the sort of obfuscating language that doctors use. Again, even your parents were kind of on a need to know basis.
- [13:54]
Jackie Blankenship
It felt like that. And I think they thought they knew everything. And they. And you know, there was one conversation we did have probably 10 years ago now where my mom said, we did tell you everything. We had a talk and told you everything. And she was referring to that conversation when I was like about 10 years old. And I think in her mind, I think she truly believes that she did. And I think she did tell me everything that she understood. In a way, she understood it. I think now with the knowledge we have and what we know about biology and the real science, I think that it would be explained differently. And I also think understanding that like my intelligence level, like my Booksmart at 10, isn't what it is now at fort. Even if you would have explained it as scientifically as I know it now, I probably wouldn't have understood it right well.
- [14:45]
Anny Riter
And there's also this sort of wisdom about telling children things is to tell them not so much like on a need to know basis, but to tell them the bare minimum facts and then let them ask questions if they want to know more. But you wouldn't even have known what questions to ask.
- [15:03]
Jackie Blankenship
Bingo. I remember the conversation was short because I felt very uncomfortable and I couldn't place why I felt so uncomfortable.
- [15:13]
Anny Riter
Did they seem uncomfortable they seemed sad.
- [15:18]
Jackie Blankenship
And I remember thinking, why do they seem so sad? Like, what's wrong? One of the things I remember saying, well, I'll just be like, my aunt. And I loved my aunt. I love my aunt very much. And we were very close with her. She babysat us all the time. We did sleepovers at her house. And she was our fun aunt. She was the youngest sister. And I remember thinking, if I'm gonna be like her, that that's a good thing, right, mom? Because it's my favorite aunt. And I remember her and my dad feeling sad because I clearly didn't understand. And they kept asking me if I had any questions, and I was like, no, no. And then that was that. And I remember worrying about having some surgery, but it never came up. I mean, for years that surgery never came up. No one talked about it. I didn't ask, is this the year? Like, it never. It never came up.
- [16:14]
Anny Riter
Did they also ask you not to talk about it with your aunt or with anyone?
- [16:20]
Jackie Blankenship
I was specifically told not to tell my friends or people from school and that this is one of those things they told me that was private and that there are some things that are personal and that people don't need to know and that you not to tell anybody. And you know, when you're told that as a kiddo, a lot, what happens is you look at it like a response, like, I will get in trouble if I tell. Because that's how I understood it. I didn't look at it like, well, this is my story, my body, my. My truth. I looked at it like, well, mom says not to tell, so if I tell, I'll be in trouble, right? Like there's a negative outcome to me telling. And at the time, I did not realize that in their brain, the negative outcome was I would be ostracized. I would be made to feel like I wasn't a girl or questioned about my gender. But in my mind, the negative outcome was upsetting my family because I wasn't supposed to tell. And I was told they did say, if you ever want to talk to your aunts, let us know and we'll talk to them and set something up. Because this was. Again, I mean, we didn't. I couldn't just text message them. I couldn't go on the computer. I could email them from our dial up Internet. But outside of that, it wasn't really an option. We didn't have cell phones and they didn't love talking about it. So. So it was like, well, if you want to set Up a conversation and everything. It just felt so forced and weird that I was like, nah, I'm good.
- [17:50]
Anny Riter
That's interesting, too, because it's like, you know, your parents wanted to kind of remain in control in a way of who knew what and when and which makes sense, but, you know, to sort of. If you were going to talk to your aunts, that they would want to know that you were going to be
- [18:09]
Dani Shapiro
talking to your aunts.
- [18:09]
Anny Riter
That wasn't going to happen on your own.
- [18:12]
Jackie Blankenship
Well, that was definitely part of it. And I think from their point of view, my mom's was, well, I need to ask them if they're okay with that, because they were still. I mean, they really have a lot of trauma from it themselves. And even now in their mid-70s, I would say. I would say one of them has come around to talk about it, but the other, there's one that still will never talk about it. I believe her children probably don't know.
- [18:37]
Anny Riter
What about your sister? Was there any discussion about telling her or not telling her?
- [18:41]
Jackie Blankenship
You know, it's funny, I don't know when she learned about it. I believe my mom and dad must have told her. I knew she knew about it, but it didn't come from me. And I think that was one of those things that I carried. Always wondering, I know people in the family know this about me, but I don't know who in the family knows this about me. And I don't know who knew before I knew. I don't know who was gonna find out and when or if, you know, I didn't. It was such a weird thing to talk about.
- [19:12]
Anny Riter
How did that sit with you, that feeling of, you know, having a sense that some people knew, maybe they knew before you knew, some people didn't know. You weren't supposed to talk about it. How did that exist in your psyche and in your. In those years where you're growing up, you're entering puberty, which is also the beginning of when some of this is starting to reveal itself in your body or not reveal itself as it were, where you know your body's not changing like everyone else is. No period, no body odor, no hips, no, like, pimples, you know.
- [19:48]
Jackie Blankenship
Right.
- [19:49]
Anny Riter
None of the typical hormonal shifts. You're having a singular experience. You're not the only person in the world who's having it, but you're the only person in your immediate world. And it doesn't present in any kind of exterior way. So nobody knows this.
- [20:03]
Jackie Blankenship
So when I was in middle school, it would have been the late 90s. And that was still a time where you weren't talking about your period. You weren't talking about. You didn't want anyone to see that you had pads or a tampon in your bag. You know, that was something that was still very embarrassing. So my girlfriends didn't talk about it. It wasn't something that came up. I remember learning when each friend first had their period because their mom would call my mom when they were just having their coffee talk and tell her, and then she'd tell me so and so started their period, sweetie, you know, that kind of thing. And that's how I knew my friends had started their periods. But outside of that, I was developing at the same trajectory. Growing breasts, getting, getting taller. You never would have known from the outside that I had a difference.
- [20:57]
Dani Shapiro
We'll be right back. Jackie has the surgery when she's 15, during winter break from school in the year 2000.
- [21:15]
Jackie Blankenship
I'm in 9th grade, and 9th grade is a shift for everybody. You start high school and it's, you know, girls are getting meaner than middle school. I cared more about my social life than my schooling, for sure. And I cared more about boys. All of a sudden I was getting crushes. Boys, you know, were me to dances. I just might. The things I cared about were suddenly a lot different than what I cared about before. And I knew that I had to have that surgery in ninth grade and. And we were gonna do it on either holiday break, winter break, or summer break. And I don't know why we landed on winter break. I don't remember why, but we did. And I had to end up missing about two weeks of school so that way I could have the procedure and then recover throughout the next month before going back after holiday break.
- [22:05]
Anny Riter
Was it presented to you as like a big procedure, like. Or was it presented to you as like, oh, it's gonna be nothing? Because I. My understanding is that it was not nothing, you know, and there was like a recovery and having to miss school for a while. Did you have a sense going in?
- [22:22]
Jackie Blankenship
It was presented as a pretty serious surgery. You're gonna have to stay the night in the hospital. They're gonna have to put you under, and you'll be on painkillers and it's just gonna hurt. But it wasn't life threatening in any way. So it wasn't like I was scared dying or anything like that. But I remember about a month before, it was like, you know, just before Thanksgiving maybe, we had to drive up to the University of Michigan and that is where I had the surgery, where I met the doctor for the first time. And they needed to do an ultrasound to find the testes in my abdomen before they booked the surgery. And we drove up there, and I remember her saying they only would refer to the surgery as a gonadotomy. And I was like, what is. Like, I had never heard the word gonad before. And even then, I didn't know. I didn't know what I was having done. When I talked about it at home, I referred to it like a hysterectomy when I have my surgery, which is like a hysterectomy, and no one ever corrected me. So when I remember sitting there and doing the ultrasound, and the doctor had to measure them on the ultrasound chart, and she said, isn't it funny that you're going through all this and have to have this big surgery for these two little things that are this, you know, a radius of this many centimeters. Isn't that funny? And I said, yeah. And I said, it's like a complete hysterectomy, right? And I think at the time, I thought I was sounding smart, like I knew that a hysterectomy. You were having your ovaries removed. And I thought that this was like, the same thing, right? And she kind of stopped and said, no, it's not that, because they're not ovaries. And I said, what are they? And she said, they're gonads. And I said, is that like an ovary? And she said, yes. And that was that. No one said, well, they're testes. No one sat me down and explained, this is what's happening. They are testes. They are producing your estrogen like women's ovaries, you know, would. But they are testes. They only referred to them as gonads because that's the only term I knew for them. And so I continued to call it a hysterectomy because I didn't know what else to say. Like, everyone acted like this was no big deal because I would be missing school to go have it, but people wanted to know where I was.
- [24:44]
Anny Riter
And your parents didn't tell. I mean, they certainly didn't tell your school, you know, what the surgery was that you were having. But the administration and your teachers at the school, did they know that you were. That you were having surgery?
- [24:57]
Jackie Blankenship
So my mom says to this day, her biggest regret when we went through all that was not being more forthright with the school, because she was very defensive of it, because of how she was Being treated by the doctors. They were treating her in her opinion. And in my opinion, looking back, like she was stupid until. Just do whatever they say. She felt like they wanted her to be their puppet. And it was confusing. And they would say things like, well, if you use this language or tell her this, she could develop gender dysphoria, which we look at like a mental illness is how they presented it. And that would be scary. And my parents didn't want that. And so they were doing whatever the doctor said. And then, you know, they told my mom, well, you don't have to tell the school this. It's no one's business. And then that idea really grew root than her. It's no one's business. They're right. This is her story, and we don't need to tell the school. And I think that she looked at it more like. Like it was my right in my privacy and not their business, which is true. If I was an adult in a workplace, it. The difference is I was in. I was 15 learning, you know, biology and literature and reading Shakespeare and having to do homework and testing on it. And I missed two weeks of school. So I came back. And not that I deserved special privileges, but I was going through a lot mentally and I was going through a lot hormonally. I had just gotten my natural hormone production taken away, and I was then put on artificial hormones, and I had to go up and down and dose. The doctor told me when I came through, when I woke up from surgery that I was now menopausal and that I was going through menopause. And I would be put on estradiol as I went through menopause. And that I had to stay on it because I wasn't old enough to go through menopause yet. So that's where I was at. I was getting hot flashes. I had tender breasts. I had all the symptoms of someone going through menopause. But then I'm also on Vicodin. I was on a morphine drip. Cause the surgery was pretty intense at the time. And when I went back to school, I remember the teachers. No one had an ounce of sympathy for what had happened because they didn't know. They thought I had just some little procedure. And so they handed me a stack of homework and said, why didn't you do this over break? And I said, I don't know, because I was on Vicodin. Of course, I didn't read Romeo and Juliet, so. So I failed every class. And I had to then spend the rest of high School, I mean, they're not joking when they say if your GPA gets low in the beginning, it's hard to bring back up. And it affects you when you're looking at colleges and you're going into the future. And mine was low, very, very low. And it brought me to a really low point in my life. In my adolescence, I suddenly was very, very active on the cross country and track team. And that was really my second home. And I wasn't allowed to race because my grades were too low. So I not only felt less feminine and scared and confused, but I'm coupled that with I felt like the dumb kid. And I very much felt stupid. And I, like, I wasn't smart like my other friends. And I played it off like it's because I didn't care. I don't care. I don't care about school. I don't want to. I'm not going to do that homework. I don't care. But the reality was I had let myself get so far behind with everything going on, I wasn't going to be able to catch up without help. Now as an adult, I can look back on that and think, I love my parents to death. I think they did the best they could with what they had at the time, but that was their job to be involved and help me. And I mean, I remember when grades came out and the report cards were still sent in the mail to your house and you had to wait by the door and get the mail before mom came home because she was going to see your report card. And I remember it coming and it's saying like, D D D minus D. And I knew I'm going to be in such big trouble. And I remember them looking at me like, like they didn't know me. Like I had two heads. They said, what happened? I remember my dad was so mad and he never gets mad. He is the most even keel guy. And I remember him throwing the report card on the ground and saying, are you on drugs? What happened? Are you, are you taking drugs? And he genuinely thought I might be out with friends smoking weed or something. And I remember thinking, what? No, why would you think that? And so then their alternative to that was, I must be lazy.
- [29:25]
Anny Riter
No one put it together.
- [29:27]
Jackie Blankenship
No one put two and two together that well. She missed a lot of school. Oh, we never sat down and did her homework with her. Oh, we didn't make sure she understood. No, it never came to that. And so then I spent the rest of high school catching up on those grades and I. And I still felt left then by my peers. I was benched from every meet, every race, every track meet until the grades could come up. And that was going to take a long time. So everyone knew on the team, why, why isn't Jackie running? She's one of our best two milers. Well, it's because her grades are bad. And so every week they'd see that my grades were still bad. So to, to everyone around me, I just felt like, like I was stupid.
- [30:03]
Anny Riter
And it's such a cruel thing because probably running track would have been one of the outlets for you both in terms of it was something you were really good at, it was something that you really enjoyed. And also, you know, just all of that pent up energy, all that confusion,
- [30:23]
Jackie Blankenship
it really felt like I. Everyone was so disappointed. And that was the common denominator. Everyone was. My parents were so disappointed. I remember my coach getting the news that he had to bench me and he said, I'm just so disappointed in you. You've always been so reliable. Like, I'm just disappointed and everything. I'm disappointing everybody. But in my mind I hadn't done anything. I didn't do anything to be in this circumstance. And right before college is when the other secret about my body kind of came to light. I was a senior in high school going into my senior year and I went back to the doctor for my yearly follow up post surgery. And I'm now two and a half, three years post surgery. And they informed me that now that I'm 18, if I wanted, I had to start dilation therapy. And I didn't know what that was. And I asked, why would I start that? Well, what is that? And unbeknownst to me, I was born without a vaginal canal. I didn't have a vagina. And that was dropped on me suddenly my last year high school.
- [31:25]
Anny Riter
Because you had turned 18. And prior to that, I mean, what, what was the reason for your not being informed of that earlier?
- [31:32]
Jackie Blankenship
Well, my mom told me I. The way it was phrased was I might need some kind of therapy when I'm older and I want to be in an intimate relationship with my husband someday. And I remember thinking, I'm not going to talk to you about this. What are you talking about? And I didn't know what she meant. I was real, like weirded out. So I turned 18 going into my senior year. I was a legal adult, which meant I could go to these doctor's appointments alone. And you know, at that point, my mom's working full time two Jobs. My dad's working. So I thought I was being the big girl. You know, I had printed maps off of MapQuest and drove the three hours by myself from our town in Kalamazoo to Ann Arbor to University of Michigan to see this doctor. And I thought I was going in and just talking to her and doing my first big girl doctor's appointment. Because, you know, we were learning that all women eventually go to, you know, the gyno. You go to your woman doctor appointment, and you all have that moment when you go for the first time. And I guess I just thought that's what I was doing, too, like my friends were doing. And when I arrived and they told me that I. You know what I mean? Her jaw was on the floor. At that point, I had just. I mean, honestly, out of sheer luck for them, not attempted to have intercourse. I had never drank a drop of alcohol. I had never gone to a party. And it wasn't because I didn't get invited, and it wasn't because my parents would have said no. They were pretty liberal, easygoing parents. I didn't have curfew. I could do what I wanted. I just didn't. It wasn't something that interested me. It didn't even occur to me because, you know, back in the 90s and early 2000s, the only thing taught was. Was abstinence. Abstinence. If you don't do it, you won't get pregnant. And that was what was taught to us. So the people I knew that were vocal about having sex were the ones that were, like, gossiped about. And it was like, oh, my God, they're having sex. So when. I'm sure many more were that we didn't know about. And so it never even occurred to me to do that. And so when I went to the doctor and they explained to me my options, I was just flabbergasted. She told me, you can do this dilation therapy. And she gave me, like, real scientific, like, well, we see this percentage of people. It works on them, and. Or you can do a surgery where I graft skin off of you and create a deeper vaginal canal. And I was like, why do I have to do this? Because it was presented as you have to do this. And she said, well, you won't have a fully formed vaginal canal right now. You only have about an inch and a half of development. And I said, okay. So it never was given to me as an option that maybe, you know, maybe I don't want to do that. Maybe that's not Something I want for my body. It's my body. You know, maybe I don't want that. Maybe that's not the kind of sex I'm going to be having. But that wasn't ever an option. It was, you are obviously going to have heteronormative sex. Obviously you're going to want to please a man some, you know, sometime in the next five years you have to do this. You have to do this to your body. And they gave me a brown paper bag of dilators and just sent me home expecting me to do that every day for 30 minutes in my bedroom, forever.
- [34:47]
Anny Riter
I'm speechless at that. Which rarely happens to me. But I mean, it's true in so many different areas of medicine. And is it discomfort? Is it just the medical industrial complex, like we're just gonna move this along. Is it not really having a kind of, kind of compassion or empathy for the human being? That's like they're sending an 18 year old girl home with a paper bag full of dilators and saying like, this is what you're gonna do?
- [35:20]
Jackie Blankenship
Yeah. And I said, well, how long do I have to do it? And she said, well, until you feel comfortable, like you feel that that's enough, like you've done enough. I was like, okay. And then I said, well, when. And then I'm done. And she said, well, no, it won't hold that. So you'll always have to do it unless you're sexually active. And I'm like, so if I'm not, I have to go back to doing it the rest of my life. And she said yes. And it was, it was a shock and it was not something I wanted to go do in my bedroom across the hall from my mom and dad. It was not something I wanted to take with me to college in my shared tiny dorm room. How was I going to make that happen? It was super uncomfortable and something I was embarrassed by and something I didn't want anyone to know.
- [36:10]
Anny Riter
Well, and it's also just about the most joyless thing I can imagine. The idea of this, this young woman there just having to do this thing to herself as opposed to giving herself pleasure. It's like the opposite of that, right?
- [36:28]
Jackie Blankenship
It was preparing myself to give pleasure to someone else is what it was. And I remember at that same appointment I was just ill prepared in general for everything that was going to happen because that was when I started to feel everyone's having these experiences and I'm not and I feel different. Around then, a few friends were starting to have sex And I had friends talking a little more openly about their periods, and a few of them had, you know, gotten on birth control or gone to a gynecologist for the first time and were having these experiences that I would never have. And I felt, when I went to that appointment, I think I felt really cool before the appointment. I'm like, my friends, I'm going to a lady doctor. And I think I just felt really, like, feminine having to do that like they did. There are other ways people can be born that. That lead to this same outcome. And so this isn't just a, you have AIs, you have to do this thing. There are many women that have had to go through dilation therapy for other reasons. But because I have that, you can't do, like a pap smear. I don't have a cervix to look at. So I was not prepared for this doctor that I barely knew to put a glove on and stick their hands inside of me. I was not prepared for anything like that. And so with students watching, because I was at a learning hub, so I had, you know, male students in the room watching this woman measure my vaginal canal and then tell me how many inches it was and how much I would actually need if I was going to be sexually active anytime soon. And it was humiliating. You know, these people watching, and she's showing me on her finger, threw her digits on her finger. You're about right here. And obviously that's not going to work, right. Like, it was just some playful, funny thing, and it definitely didn't feel that way. And at the end of the conversation, she asked what I was doing next. And I said, oh, I'm going to cross country practice and I'm hoping to run in college in a year. I'm applying for schools. And she made a flippant comment about when I need my physical for them to go back to her and to not tell the school. I had this. And that was the first time I was specifically told not to tell someone in a social way. Like, I always was told not to tell, like, friends. Like, it wasn't like something like. Like idol gossip. It wasn't something. It was personal. But no one had told me. Like, I couldn't tell an authority figure, for lack of a better word. So I was like, oh, well, I. I mean, I wasn't planning on it. I didn't even have the language to, like, it never would have occurred to me had she not said that to tell the school I was applying. I didn't know why I would. Or my coach. But her reasoning was it was the year 2002 or 3, and she didn't want to see me for some reason, not be able to run because I had XY chromosomes. And she's like, I'd better be safe than sorry. And my birth certificate says female. I never would have had any issues. But if. And she can't promise that that wouldn't have happened. But that freaked me out.
- [39:24]
Anny Riter
So do you think she was trying to be protective of you there?
- [39:26]
Jackie Blankenship
Yes. Yes, I do.
- [39:28]
Anny Riter
And yet it's one more person saying, you can't talk about this.
- [39:33]
Jackie Blankenship
Yes, exactly.
- [39:40]
Dani Shapiro
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Jackie moves through her teenage years carrying a secret she cannot name. And in a way, she grows more and more isolated as her body becomes something she doesn't fully understand. But in another way, Jackie is very much out there. She's not only an athlete, but there's another world she steps into, one that feels almost like an alternate reality, one in which she's on stage and under lights competing in pageants. In that world, Jackie leans into performance, glamour, and control. She loves wearing the gowns, vying for the crown, and becoming someone who's both visible and celebrated, recognized for her beauty. And when people inevitably ask questions about her body, her surgeries, she has an answer at the ready. A story that sounds clean and contained. A cancer scare, a hysterectomy, something unfortunate but understandable. It becomes the version of the truth that follows her everywhere. And in that space where image and narrative matter so much, Jackie learns how to present a life that makes sense even when the real one just beneath it does not. At least not yet.
- [41:14]
Jackie Blankenship
I did pageants throughout late middle school and all of high school. I did smaller ones that my parents could afford, and they could only afford one a year. These other people would travel the state and do them every other weekend trying to win a crown. I. We didn't have that, so I did one a year. And I never won. Never. I'd be top five sometimes. I never won. And when I got to college, my mom's like, if you're going to continue those, you got to pay for them. And took a break in college. So I left the home, didn't do pageants anymore and just ran cross country and track for Ferris State university. We're at NCAA D2 school in Big Rapids, Michigan. And I went to school. I was a super duper senior. Took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. With it, met my husband there and kind of found myself like many people do, and then got a job and I could pay for pageants. And I was like 24, and I started getting back into the past pageant seen.
- [42:03]
Anny Riter
Then when you started dating your husband, how honest were you with him about your history?
- [42:11]
Jackie Blankenship
I was very honest with him. I had boyfriends before him that didn't get any scope of the truth. They got the weird hysterectomy story that I told everybody. But with him, we worked together at a restaurant, and we were just really, really good friends in the beginning. And so I kind of had told him more than I told everyone else. But he knew I didn't really have all the language, I think, for what had been done and what and why it had been done or any of that. So as I got older and Google became a thing and I could go on Facebook. I remember when Facebook first came out and I was in college, and you had to wait for your college to get accepted by Facebook, Facebook to be able to use your college email and join the social media. And it was a big deal. And so my college was one of the ones that you could use Facebook. And that's when I started typing in things like complete androgen insensitivity syndrome just to see what would happen. Like, what, What. What am I going to find? Right? And I'd find. I found support groups, and I found, you know, secret group you had to join to talk to people. I found Wikipedia pages of what CAIS was, and it kind of contradicted everything I thought it was. And so he was dating me as I was starting to learn. And so he heard every spiral out of my mouth as I learned it, because he was learning it with me.
- [43:42]
Anny Riter
What was it like to finally have language? You know, you were just pushed along this path of you do this and you do that, and this is what's gonna happen. That's what's gonna happen. But you don't have the terminology or language for it. And then suddenly there's this trove of information and also other people. Other people.
- [44:04]
Jackie Blankenship
So I always knew the name of what I had. Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. That was never a secret or held from me. But the big thing was I didn't have the accessibility to learn more about it. There was no, you know, I wasn't going to learn about that at my school library, at my high school in Kalamazoo, Michigan. That wasn't researched. It wasn't talked about. And on top of that, the Internet was such a New thing. I didn't have that option to go look it up and research it. So it really was halfway through college when I learned that the, you know, information is at my fingertips. I just got to look. And so when I finally looked and learned about it, the beginning, I had a lot of denial, like, I'm not. I'm not reading it. And I would almost like, didn't get the answer I wanted, but I got the answer I suspected. And so I would kind of shut it out. And then every, you know, few months or so, I'd be feeling emotional about something or I'd be feeling down, and I'd pop out that computer and I'd, you know, google it again or look something up and click on websites with people talking about it or blogs. And then I'd, you know, slam it shut. And I kind of did that game for a couple of years and got information that way. And then I finally applied to join an anonymous support group for people with intersex variations. And they didn't even. They called it DSD still then. And that's when I started to meet people who also had it or had different intersex variations.
- [45:36]
Dani Shapiro
As Jackie moves into adulthood, her life begins to take shape. She marries in 2013, and in 2016, she and her husband become parents with the help of a donor egg and her sister as a gestational carrier. It's a complicated, deeply emotional journey that finally becomes real when their daughter is born. At the same time, Jackie's building a public life, working in radio and TV and continuing in pageants, stepping back into that familiar world where presentation matters and where you can really shape a narrative about who you are. Gradually, she begins to speak publicly, though she remains careful when speaking about her experience. Well, a fraction of her experience. She talks about the struggle, the infertility, the difficulty of becoming a mother. But what she doesn't talk about is the reason for the struggle. The deeper truth of her very self remains just out of reach.
- [46:37]
Jackie Blankenship
There was an eight year span where I filled myself with so many activities. I think that my high school past that felt very much like a loser. I felt left. Then I felt stupid. I would have been way too scared to try the broadcasting class or try the theater class or to audition for a play. I never would have done any of that because I felt labeled by everyone around me as not hard working and not very intelligent. So I went through a phase from 24 to like 30 where I did everything and anything and everything. I did multiple pageants. I did community theater. I had Never done a play in my life, never sang a note. And I was in, like, four musicals at our community theater. I was just getting involved in just doing any activity that I could. I joined a hoop dancing class. I was just always doing something. I was running marathons every, you know, two months. And I was just very busy keeping myself occupied with random things that I thought would fulfill me. And I was on the news. I was working as a reporter. And all the other reporters and anchors around me were around my age, 28 to 31. And they were all getting pregnant. I would say, like, three of them were getting pregnant. And we were, you know, with my sister, trying to do IVF and have a baby. And I felt like I want to share my joy and excitement and journey like they are, but theirs is visible, right? They're on the news pregnant. And so I remember starting to feel that pang of jealousy a lot, because we'd have sponsors or local boutiques and places sending my coworkers gifts and things and congratulatory things because they could see them on the news they were pregnant. And I was like, well, we are, too, but it's just different. And so I began talking about infertility because I was way too afraid to talk about being intersex. And I kind of took that and made it my platform. And I competed at the Mrs. Michigan America pageant and got first runner up with the platform of infertility awareness and education. Talked about one in eight couples, but it just always felt like a lie. And I felt like I had connected. I was a storyteller. That was my job. I worked in news and radio, and I did mostly features when I was in news. And I connected with a lot of people locally who were also having infertility struggles. And they really admired my speaking about it. And I felt so disconnected from them and uncomfortable. I felt like just like a fraud, right? Like I was getting this attention and these accolades for talking about infertility when I was like, but I'm not infertile, necessarily. I am, but it's for a totally different reason. And I don't remember a time in my life believing I could have children. Cause I was so young when I learned I couldn't.
- [49:29]
Anny Riter
Right? And so that would be, you know, a story that you could tell yourself of why at that time, you know, like, why it was okay to, like, you're giving a voice and a platform to a very real, very important subject that a lot of people aren't comfortable talking about. Because, you know, there's shame involved with infertility and there's, you know, just so
- [49:50]
Jackie Blankenship
much that's fraught well, and it affects so many women. And I think that it also made me feel very connected to a womanly experience when I felt like I had missed other experiences that bond women. And I felt like that was important. But then the bigger it got, it almost became, like, bigger than I wanted it to. I was being interviewed about it. I was writing articles about it for local publications. I was having boutiques call me, you know, going to support groups and talk to people at the fertility center and talk to groups that were coming in. And it was making me very uncomfortable.
- [50:31]
Anny Riter
Because you felt inauthentic?
- [50:35]
Jackie Blankenship
Yes.
- [50:36]
Anny Riter
You were being 70% authentic, or that's
- [50:39]
Jackie Blankenship
a good way to put it. Yes, 70%. Like. Like, the only truth of mine was, I can't have kids like these other people. But the difference was they were going through heartbreak every month when they'd get their period and all these things. But, like, I never had even had a period. Like, I couldn't relate to any. Like, they'd say, I remember people, you know, if we were at an event and someone would walk up and be like, I just love listening to you and hearing your journey. You know, I struggle, too. And every month, you know, I can't believe I pray not to have my period. And I used to pray to have it, and I would nod and go, yeah, yeah. But inside, I was, like, dead. Like, I didn't. What, do I just look sympathetic? What do I like? I was playing this part, hiding this big other truth.
- [51:21]
Anny Riter
So what changed?
- [51:23]
Jackie Blankenship
Well, we hit Covid in 2020, and I had taken a break from pageants. We were all at home. I was working in morning radio. I had a morning radio show, and we were touted as the first two woman morning radio show, all woman produced in our state in Michigan. That always was very exciting. But then it also always sat weird with me, too, because I had such a different woman experience than other women. We had come off of COVID and I had gained some weight, been drinking too much beer at home, eating snacks, and I thought, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna get in shape and enter that Mrs. Michigan pageant again. I'm gonna try it again. So I did, and once again, I got first runner up. And I was like, oh, well, that's that. Well, the gal that won at the time was a really close friend of mine, and she ended up getting diagnosed, very sad, with what's called Tarlov's cyst on her tailbone. And they're basically cysts wrapped around her tailbone. And so she couldn't go to Mrs. America because she could barely sit, let alone go on a plane for three hours and walk on a stage. So they basically said, jackie, you know the drill as the first runner up, you have to fulfill the duties. She can't go. So I was like, oh, I'm going to Mrs. America. I'm going to Vegas. So I'm getting ready to go to Vegas. I'm going to Mrs. America now. This was so cool. I used to watch this on TV growing up. I, you know, I remember Alan Thicke being the emcee for a while. Like, this is so exciting. And when I was there, I don't. I just made the decision, I'm going to talk about being intersex. Why not? What? I didn't even win to come here. Like, who cares what I have to lose? This is my only time going there. And I ended up talking about an interview to a few of the judges, and they were really fascinated. And I remember thinking, wow, they seem they're so into talking about this. Okay. And then on stage, I didn't expect to make top 15. Like, I had done so many pageants and I. I'd done this. I'd been in this ring before. So I made top 15, and that was my big goal. And I'm just like, now I'm ready. I made top 15. Let's go party. I'm done. Well, then they narrow it down to six, and I made top six. And in the top six, you have to answer an on stage question. And they asked me on stage, what is one thing if you had, like, a wish that you'd wish for? And I said, I was diagnosed at a really young age with a difference in sexual development. And it's not talked about. I was told to keep it from everybody. And I had a surgery to change my body without me understanding my body. And if I had a wish, it would be that no one else has to go through that. And we're more educated on differences in development and intersex conditions. And that was kind of it. And it was kind of quiet, and I got some claps, but then I made it to top three. Then I ended up winning the whole thing. And everyone said they just really felt moved by that answer, I guess. So at that point, I was the first openly intersex Mrs. America.
- [54:16]
Dani Shapiro
It's a beautiful thing when someone finds her voice, when her voice emerges from within her after a lifetime of secrecy and silence and is suddenly unstoppable In Jackie's case, on stage, under the lights, under pressure, in front of hundreds of people, she speaks the truth of herself. The poet Adrienne Rich once wrote, it is that which is under pressure, particularly the pressure of concealment, that explodes into poetry. And this is precisely what happens. Poetry, liberation.
- [54:56]
Jackie Blankenship
I remember in my 30s, when I was still a reporter, I got sent out to breaking news. There was a vandalism done at a local church that had put a art structure that was meant to resemble a cross, but it was rainbow because they wanted to be a church that welcomed LGBTQ people. And someone had thrown red paint all over it and graffitied it. So the church decided, well, to combat this, let's have people write their story, something secret, an anonymous thing about themselves on this cross. It's still art. You know, we're not going to let this happen. So I went to go to the story, and I'm there, and I'm live on television, and I saw on this cross someone had written in Sharpie, I'm intersex, and I'm here in Grand Rapids. And I remember feeling immediate panic, being so panicked, like, afraid that someone was trying to press prank me or, like, screw with me or say something to me on the news about this. And so it was really wild that only four years later like that, probably four or five years later, when I won Mrs. America, that those feelings had left and I was so much more comfortable talking.
- [56:19]
Dani Shapiro
To say Jackie has come a long way would be an understatement. She is Mrs. America. She's an advocate, a mother, a truth teller, a force.
- [56:32]
Jackie Blankenship
I feel like I have two lives right now. You know, one side of my life is a mom. My daughter's at that age. She's almost 10, and she's busy. She does competitive dance and she has activities every night and she's got homework. And I just feel like I wear my mom hat a lot, and I'm really busy with that. And then on the other side of things, I am a content creator. So I actually left my career in broadcasting this past year. I just finally hung up my headphones and decided I was gonna take content creation and advocacy full time in whatever way that looks and look, as in looking for opportunities while still making my content and doing my thing. So I've since then I try to do daily videos educating people about the different intersex variations and what that means and different policies and how that affects intersex people. And I like to talk about the idea that surgeries were not anti surgery for People who are intersex, we're anti surgery when they don't know what's being done or why. So that's something that I like to really talk about most, because that's the biggest thing with my surgery is I'm not angry that it was done, because that was the information and the medical knowledge they had in 1999, 2000, was to remove those testes. What I'm unhappy with is that it wasn't shared with me what it was being done fully, and people knew and I didn't, and it was my body.
- [58:02]
Anny Riter
And your daughter, it just struck me when you said how old she is. She's the age that you were when your parents sat you down.
- [58:12]
Jackie Blankenship
Yes, and I had a really full circle moment with her. They're going through reproductive health right now in her class, and they had, you know, one of those moments where all the girls went into one room and all the boys went into the other and they were learning about their growing bodies. You know, she got in the car after that conversation, and I said, well, let's talk about it. What'd you learn? And she's telling me all what she learned and, you know, what she'll be doing when she's older and what she won't be doing. And I said, I was really honest with her. And I said, it's gonna be a learning for me, too, Greenlee, when you are going through this, because I never had that. I never went through that. And she said, I know. I remember you telling me. And they told us that we shouldn't feel alone because all girls go through this. And I told them, no, they don't. And I said, well, thank you. I'm really glad that you said that.
- [59:15]
Dani Shapiro
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio. Molly Zakur is the story editor, and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and and your story could appear
- [59:27]
Anny Riter
on an upcoming episode.
- [59:29]
Dani Shapiro
Our number is 1-88-8-SECRET0.
- [59:33]
Anny Riter
That's the number zero.
- [59:34]
Dani Shapiro
You can also find me on Instagram annyriter. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
- [59:43]
Anny Riter
check out my memoir, Inheritance.
- [60:06]
Jackie Blankenship
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Jackie Blankenship
What?
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Jackie Blankenship
Just make sure we protect each other
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Jackie Blankenship
This is an I Heart podcast.
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