Hermaphrodite! It's a word which usually invokes snickers or eye-rolling. But for those people born a combination of genders (estimated to be about 1 in 2000), it can be heartwrenching: a life lived in silence, secrets and fear.

Actress/author Katherine Connella steps out of the shadows to frankly reveal her childhood and adolescence growing up intersexed. Deemed a boy a birth (in spite of full female interior organs and irregular genitalia), she fought her whole life to prove what she was: a female. Katherine discusses survival of a number of traumas: incest, medical abuse, mental hospitalization, chemical-induced manic depression and a series of sexual assaults. Yet through it all, she write with a spirit of humor and a positive outlook.

"I know my life would have been bizarre under any circumstances," Katherine chuckles today. "But being intersexed added an entirely new and dark layer to the big picture."