Newly crowned Miss Sundowns Sharon Khumalo proudly Intersex. This is not the first time the beauty queen has opened up about living as an intersex. In a recent interview with Sowetan, Sharon admitted she was shattered when she first found out at the age of 21.
Sharon told Sowetan how she was raised a woman and had no idea she had male sex chromosomes until she turned 21 and had not gotten her periods during puberty.
“For me there was no reason my parents could think otherwise. I grew up seemingly like a normal traditional female. It was just the delay (in having periods) and even then it was never the first thing we thought of,” she said.
A visit to a doctor revealed Khumalo did not have a uterus or ovaries. “After my first doctor’s visit I was shattered and I remember I just wanted to go home and cry it out because I went to the doctor thinking that he will just say ‘oh gain some weight, take this medication and then everything will be sorted’, and now he just dropped this bomb on me and I didn’t know who I was anymore,” she said.
Khumalo admitted sometimes it’s difficult when she thinks about never being able to be a mother. “Sometimes I am okay and then on some days I look at other women who have children and I know I will never have that, but I have learnt to accept that this is the situation and I can’t really change it.”
