From Southern Voice

I'm still not able to put my thoughts into words regarding my friend Max. So I am pasting in a recent profile published in Southern Voice in Atlanta. Max was all about spreading his story, so please indulge me in helping him achieve this goal.

I will be dying soon; when is anybody’s guess. This sucks, of course, totally. But I am content. I look at my life and am satisfied — and that’s saying a lot. A definition of successful, even. I count myself lucky. Blessed. Full. Rich.” — Max Beck, Dec. 31, 2007

On Jan. 12, less than two weeks after Joseph Maxfield Beck, known to everyone as Max, wrote this final entry in his blog, he succumbed to cancer, at home and surrounded by those who loved him. And despite the pain he suffered from chemo, radiation, side effects of powerful drugs and just being sick all the time, he never lost his spirit, said his wife, Tamara Beck.

“He was diagnosed in March 2005 and it was stage four then,” she said this week, seated on the couch in her Grant Park home. “He was such a fighter. He said, ‘I’ll be the miracle case.’”

Beck, who was born intersexed and lived most of his life as a woman, was 41 when he died of vaginal cancer. He is survived by his family, including his wife, 7-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son.“My family speaks for itself. Something I never even thought I would, or could, have," Beck wrote in his final blog entry. "I found my soul mate, and she dragged me kicking and screaming into marriage and fatherhood. Kicking and screaming, and I am so glad that she did, for my children are the center of my world, a miracle of noise and laughter and mayhem of which I am so proud and — every day — in breathless amazement.”'

UNFINISHED GIRL'

Arriving home from school during this interview, Beck's daughter introduced herself, then announced, “Daddy’s not here."

Tamara explained to her precocious child with an affinity for dinosaurs that daddy was going to be in the newspaper. “He would have liked that,” said Tamara, who serves as the Grant Park playgroup liaison.

Max wasn’t a stranger to publicity and felt telling his story was a form of activism, Tamara said.He was interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2005, featured on The Learning Channel, profiled on the HBO documentary “Middle Sexes” and appeared on the PBS series Nova.

Max unabashedly told his story of being intersexed to not only reporters, but to young people facing the same struggle and doctors who have intersex patients. One of his passions was working with the Intersex Society of North America (www.isna.org).

Max very frankly discussed his experience of being raised a girl named Judy — an “unfinished girl” the doctors explained when she was a preteen undergoing hormone therapy and eventually genital surgery.

At the time, Tamara said, doctors believed in assigning most children born with ambiguous genitalia as girls because, and she quoted one doctor, “It’s easier to make a hole than build a pole.”Judy eventually married a man, but decided she was a butch lesbian when she fell head-over-heels in love with Tamara in 1992 after the two met in college in Pennsylvania.

When Judy told Tamara that she had a “horrible” secret, Tamara said, ironically, she feared Judy had cancer.

But when Judy — and Tamara is careful to talk about Judy and Max as they were, actually, two different people — told Tamara her “shameful secret,” Tamara said she told Judy it didn’t matter “because I love you.”

“The horrible thing of it was this amazing person was carrying around this enormous secret alone,” Tamara said.“She was and he was the most interesting person I met. He was incredibly deep, able to see beyond the banter to the important stuff,” Tamara added. “Everybody liked him. He had charisma. He had a genuine way of relating to people that was refreshing and surprising."

There is a match to your rough edges, Tamara explained, and Max was that to her. “That was my person,” she said. “He was the person who loved me unconditionally. We had a deep knowledge of each other. I was very lucky — I suspect most people don’t have that.”

FROM JUDY TO MAX

Max Beck found out about being intersex by accident when he sent off for vaccination records needed for a job. His childhood medical records showed he was a “male pseudo hermaphrodite.” Never completely comfortable as a woman, Judy began pondering becoming a man.

It was at an Atlanta Feminist Women’s Chorus concert, when they both went to the women’s restroom and were looked at by other lesbians as “some strange heterosexual couple,” that the couple decided to make serious changes. “That was an eye-opening experience,” Tamara said. “Even among our own we were different.”

Judy changed her name legally to Max and in 1998 started taking testosterone. A visit to the DMV for a driver’s license renewal resulted in a happy accident when a customer service employee took one look at Max and replaced the “F” with an “M” on his license. With that official designation, the two were able to legally marry in 2000.

At the time the couple got together, Tamara said she identified as a lesbian. But by staying with Judy and then Max, her love never faltering, she admitted she doesn’t really know how to classify herself.

“Does that make me the ultimate bisexual?” she asked.

Max never identified as a man, but if society gives you two boxes and male is how you are going to present, then a male you are, Tamara said.

“He did have some guilt about passing and the social privilege,” she said. “But just seeing him change from Judy to Max … there were subtle changes, but some of it was very core,” she said.

The couple never hid from their children, conceived with the help of donor sperm, that at one time daddy was a girl; photos of Judy and Tamara together still line the hallway of their home. To their daughter, the anguish her father suffered as a girl was simply “doctors being mean to daddy,” Tamara said.

For Max, gender was never simply either-or, she added. “He maintained a fluid identity where gender was concerned. Even when we were lesbians, he wanted to be the father,” she said.

As a man with vaginal cancer, Max Beck did not have a built-in support system to deal with this specific issue. A friend suggested he contact the Atlanta Lesbian Health Initiative, and there he found a small, intimate and close group to share his feelings, said ALHI Executive Director Linda Ellis.

LIVING WITH CANCER

“He called us because there was no one else to call,” Ellis said. “It took some conversations to explain and educate folks, but there was never a question [whether] he was welcome.”Ellis came to know Beck as a man whose wife and children were the most important things to him.

“Max had the amazing ability to take what life handed him and build a life out of it,” she said.“There are parts of his story that at first you want to gawk at, like a car accident. And every time a new person came to the group, he had to come out again every time,” she said, “but he did it with incredible grace.”

Ellis described his life as a “radical nature of normalcy.” Not only did he devote his life to his family, he was a recent graduate of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. By simply being who he was, he set an example for all of us, Ellis added.

“I want people to know Max’s story,” she said. “He lived life openly and with grace — and that is my best hope for all of us.”

The ALHI cancer support group continues to meet the first and third Thursday of every month, Ellis said.

“I'm content, I suppose, despite what can only be described as a raw deal, because, in retrospect, I discover I have lived a meaningful life. I have to confess, this wasn't something I planned...it just sort of, well, happened. But it did, leaving me and, I like to think, all of you, the richer.” — Max Beck