#adcocacy

When most adolescent boys in his Ugandan village were lobbing soccer balls, Julius Kaggwa was sidelined by an unusual phenomenon: He began to develop the breasts of a girl. His mother took this as a sign from the spirits that young Julius was intended to be female and she began to send him to school in girls’ dresses. The boy was mortified and became afraid to show his face in public. Life became so unbearable that he contemplated suicide. Today, Kaggwa, 44, is the founder and director of Support Initiative for People with Congenital Disorders, the first group of its kind in East Africa to serve the intersex population. Intersex individuals are those born with indeterminate sex because of hormonal, physiologic or other medical anomalies.