Leonne Zeegers was five years old, splashing in the family’s bathtub with her siblings, when her sister shrieked and giggled at the “something between my legs”. It was the first time Zeegers remembers feeling different. “My sister was eight then, she said ‘eh, you’re a boy!’ and I was crying because I didn’t want to be a boy, I wanted to be like my sisters.”
Zeegers was born intersex in 1961, in the picturesque village of Swallen on the German-Dutch border, to Catholic parents who worked as an architect and a housekeeper at the local church.
“I was born in two sexes,” she explains. “I call it hermaphrodite, because for me that’s most clear. My parents didn’t want to operate on me and so they raised me up as Leon, a boy. It was no problem because I was a very strong boy, everyone accepted me, and nobody had to look between my legs. Nobody knew then.” She shrugs. “Sometimes I acted a little bit female but often I was playing the tough guy, I was macho.”
Last Monday, Zeegers became the first Dutch citizen to win the legal right to identify as neither male nor female, urging legislators to recognise “a third gender”. Limburg district court in Roermond, in the south of the Netherlands, ruled that although Zeegers was raised as a boy and underwent surgery in 2001 to be legally recognised as female, her “personality is experienced as gender-neutral, feeling like neither a man nor a woman”.
Zeegers represented herself in the two-year-long case and had to submit extraordinary amounts of evidence, including anatomically explicit photographs, to secure her victory.
Today, at home in her three-storey townhouse in the centre of Breda overlooking the park, Zeegers fans herself against the muggy heat. She wears bright jewellery and subtle makeup against a polka dot top and cream palazzo trousers, her hair whipped up and pinned.
Having lived as a woman for the past 17 years, she is comfortable using female pronouns rather than “they” or “them” but describes herself as gender-fluid. “My breasts are real, my skin is smooth, I don’t have a beard or take hormones but now I am 57. I have lived life on both sides; sometimes I feel as a man, sometimes I feel as a woman, sometimes I don’t feel anything.”
Quoting Wikipedia, Zeegers believes that one in every 1,000 births is like hers – babies of indeterminate sex – and that “after the Greeks, hermaphrodites were erased. We didn’t use that term any more and put it away and pretended it didn’t exist. But we exist, always.”
She sets to work preparing a plate of crumpets and strawberries, while revealing the most intimate details of her life, because as she puts it “being honest and open is how things change. I don’t want the publicity of my picture out there because then everyone recognises you and talks about you but I am mentally and physically strong to take this on.”
Zeegers has worked as a trainee nurse, an insurance agent and, until relatively recently, a BDSM (bondage, discipline and sadomasochism) “mistress”. She was a champion athlete and was competing to make the men’s national Olympic swimming team in the 1990s but was thrown out after taking testosterone for the first time.
She made a fortune from buying and letting out properties in her 20s, but had sold her business by the age of 35 to spend the next five years travelling the world – mostly Asia, Africa and Indonesia – to find people like her and to understand herself better.
“When I came back, I started training as a psychotherapist,” she says. “I thought I could heal and treat myself. It was then I decided to change – in a couple of weeks I was a woman.”
It can’t have been an uncomplicated business. Zeegers also got married at 24 to a woman, which she describes as her most significant relationship, and fathered a child.
The couple divorced eight years later and she maintains a close relationship with her son – the dining table is covered with photo albums, including a recent one from his wedding – although, she says, the family’s discovery of her becoming a sex worker in her 40s was trickier to handle than her gender transition.
“My mother is still alive but both my parents grew up on farms. A lot of animals are born without a sex and for them, the way I was born was not a big thing,” she says. “Sometimes when I was very very unhappy I couldn’t be like other girls or boys, my mother would just tell me I was an angel.”
Owning and running Paradise, then one of Breda’s most notorious BDSM clubs, was less welcome. “We’re Catholic,” she murmurs. “So yes, anything different compared to the norm should be kept quiet, in the family, under the rug.”
It was working as a mistress “paid €200 an hour” where Zeegers says she met and had relationships with “judges, ministers, very many high-ranking government people” that helped build her landmark case. She opens a lever-arch file full of memorabilia and bondage photos. “I had 12 mistresses working for me, I had the biggest mistress company here.” There were police raids and pressure from journalists digging for stories on the club’s members, but Zeegers eventually called time on the business in the late 2000s “because I did not like it”, she says. “I don’t like BDSM, it’s not my thing, I’m a normal person who likes nice and soft intimacy; I don’t like hitting people but if I can help someone by hitting them, OK. But I was also a therapist, they would tell me their life stories and everyone came to me because I kept my mouth shut. I have photos of [clients] too – that danger was like a thrill to them.”
In her teens, however, she was understandably terrified of sex. “I was attracted to men and women but I didn’t know how …” She pauses. “I’m lucky I’ve never been hurt or there has not been violence – nobody would dare, I am so strong!”
Getting a job at a hospital at 17, for four years, became an education. “I met a lot of girls. We had a hospital bar and I danced with all the girls and because I was very good at that, girls assumed I must be very good in bed.”
Then known as Leon and presenting as male, Zeegers says it was probably her most promiscuous, exploratory spell. “I always told them my story beforehand. The first girl I was with said ‘Oh, I think my vagina is very strange and if you like that, I’ll like you.’”
Zeegers hopes her case has a ripple effect on social and legal attitudes, but downplays its success. “A lot of people came to me that I know would be helped by [the court ruling] and I was in a position that I knew a lot of judges. I talked to them and got advice on how to change the law and I found out exactly how to do it. My case is important but even the court has made mistakes.”
How so? “Because the court in Holland has declared it is time to recognise a third gender – it is not time to have a third gender, it’s time to have a third sex.” For Zeegers, the conversation around the meaning of gender is important but biological determination is crucial.
“Sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears,” she says. “Gender is your mind. For me, the body is just a suitcase for carrying your gender, that is how I see it.
“Gender is everything between the spectrum of male and female and if you want to be a masculine woman, that’s OK. If you’re a man wanting to wear skirts and makeup, that is OK. That’s my opinion and I realise not everyone ready is for it.”
In the parallel debate around trans identity, Zeegers believes social progress must be achieved with patience and stoicism. “You can’t do it so quick,” she says. “People need time, I needed time – I needed time to know myself because I wasn’t sure and it’s confrontational to throw this at people and expect them to understand very quickly. They won’t. They have no experience of this.”
But isn’t she tired of waiting for acceptance? “That’s why I am open and talk about my experience,” she says, quietly. “Because if you stay quiet there are more problems; I give up my vulnerability and it becomes like a shield.”