This is Your Reminder that Elphaba Thropp is Probably Intersex

And I have the receipts to prove it

Warning: the following contains (gentle) spoilers for Gregory Maguire’s 1993 novel Wicked, as well as the stage musical and feature film. There are also references to human anatomy, sex, course and outdated language, and the historical and continued existence of trans and intersex people.

I still count Christmas Day 2006 as one of the single best mornings of my young life. Recently abandoned by my biological mother (and having gone several Christmases in a row without her), my new stepmother was making an extra effort to help me feel included in her own family, though she was struggling to figure out how.

I didn’t have much in common with my three stepsisters (all around my age and older), and no one in either my close or extended family really knew what to do with me. For the last few years, I’d unwrapped eye shadow palettes and nail polish sets alongside them, forced a grin, and stuffed my gifts into a drawer for the year, where they remained untouched. My father was not a “gifts person” to begin with, and I’d been feeling more and more distant from him as he settled into our new family. After years of living as an only child with a single parent, I was lost in my role as a “fourth daughter,” especially in a home where everyone seemed much much more adept at femininity than I was.

But there was something different about that morning, and it would change me forever.

As I reached into my red velvet stocking (my name hastily scribbled in glitter glue so it would match the others), I pulled out a copy of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

As a self-described “theater kid,” I was thrilled. Wicked: The Musical debuted on Broadway at the Gershwin theater in 2003, right as I started high school, and had since dominated the hearts and minds of every socially-stunted weirdo with whom I shared a lunch table.

And it got better.

As I thumbed through the pages of the paperback, tinted green the way a leather-bound classic might be foiled with gold, a pair of tickets fell at my feet. When I picked them up, the promise was clear: in just a few short months, I would be watching Wicked on stage at the Pantages in Los Angeles.

The rest of Christmas Day was a blur. I planted myself firmly in the elbow crook of our overstuffed sectional and lost myself in Maguire’s world of Oz, determined to devour the novel in its entirety before I returned to school.

In the winter of 2006, Wicked was everywhere. Though Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth sang in their starring roles for just about a year, the musical continued to rocket onward without them, reaching well over 1,000 performances on Broadway and jumping the Atlantic to open in London just three months before Christmas. And for a high schooler at the time, musicals as a whole had recently earned a more resonant place in the cultural zeitgeist with the premiere of Disney Channel’s High School Musical.

And maybe that’s what my stepmother had in mind when she stuffed a copy of the novel in my stocking that year: an updated, bouncy, teen-friendly romp into the technicolor world she last visited with Judy Garland. Maybe Zac Efron would be there too.

But that’s not what happened.

Like many adaptations, Maguire’s Oz was a little spicier than the one I would later watch from the balcony of the Pantages. His pages had many of the same basic plot beats and character details made famous by the Broadway bombshell, but they were anchored by something my parents couldn’t have possibly anticipated:

Wicked was not written for a teen audience. Not by a long shot.

Within his book, Maguire doesn’t just explore the breezy surface of themes like belonging, prejudice, and justice– he dives head first into the Mariana Trench. Characters like Elphaba, Galinda, Fiyero, and Boq don’t sing about how much they want to visit the wizard, or the importance of friendship, but they do at one point visit a sex club. Many fans of the novel remember– in vivid detail– what it was like to read about Elphaba’s first amorous encounter with the (very much married) Winkie prince Fiyero, who in the novel is dark-skinned and covered in azure ceremonial tattoos:

“...she would not be touched below the waist by hands. They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field…”

But what caught me off guard the most, and likely shaped the person I was about to become as an adult, was how much of the novel was overtly political. Elphaba isn’t just the daughter of a cold-hearted governor, as she is in the stage production and later in the film, but of a minister. A minister who spends her childhood carting her and her siblings through a country filled with poverty and inequity and populated by a people who are intentionally subjugated by exploitative, capitalistic purposes beyond their control. While in school, she isn’t just momentarily moved by the plight of one of her Animal professors, she dedicates months of her life to helping with his research (research which eventually leads to his murder). While living covertly within the walls of the Emerald City as an adult, she is part of a violent underground revolutionary network and attempts to carry out a targeted assassination.

So, like I said, there are very few songs.

There was another reason why Elphaba’s journey seared itself to my heart, and it’s one that wouldn’t make sense to me until years later, when I would dive into the book as an adult. And it would happen before I finished the first page of the prologue.

As the story opens, we watch as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, spies on a troupe of travelers making their way across the yellow brick road. The strangers: a Lion, a Scarecrow, a Tin Woodman, and a young girl, are resting for a moment and discussing their theories about the witch’s evil origins.

The Lion begins:

“Psychologically warped; possessed by demons. Insane.”

The Tin Woodman piles on:

“She was castrated at birth. She was born hermaphroditic, or maybe entirely male.”

The Scarecrow adds:

“She’s a woman who prefers the company of other women.”

Two more suggestions:

“She’s the spurned lover of a married man.”

“She is a married man.”

Holy shit. Was Elphaba Thropp being transvestigated on the very first page?

It made sense. American conservatives have hardly recently invented the concept of accusing enemies of bending societal gender norms. And in 1993, when Maguire’s book was first published, we were very much still in the throes of nationwide homophobic moral panic. Use of the word “hermaphrodite” aside, there was no reason to be shocked.

But then, a rewind to the moment of her birth.

In the musical, baby Elphaba has just about twenty seconds of screen time – long enough to show the audience that her green skin is an unwelcome surprise for her parents, who are immediately repulsed.

That’s not quite what happens in the book.

In a chapter titled The Birth of a Witch, Elphie’s father is absent entirely, and her mother is drugged into unconsciousness. Only midwives are present as Elphie is born, who have the following exchange in the seconds after the little green baby enters the world:

There was no wail, no bark of newborn outrage. The child opened its mouth, breathed, and then kept its own counsel. “Whine, you fiend,” said the crone, “it’s your first job.” The baby shirked its obligations.

“Another willful boy,” said the fishwife, sighing, “Shall we kill it?”

“Don’t be so nasty to it,” said the crone, “it’s a girl.”

“Hah,” said the bleary-eyed maiden, “look again, there’s the weather vane.”

For a minute they were in disagreement, even with the child naked before them. Only after a second and third rub was it clear that the child was indeed feminine.

Let’s return for a moment to the term that caused me a moment of pause in the prologue: hermaphrodite.

Though it’s not a word you hear much in polite conversation anymore, it was first coined by the Greek physician and philosopher Hippocreates sometime between 460 and 370 BC. You might recognize him for a handful of equally important reasons, not the least of which is the Hippocratic Oath: the foundational ethical code used by physicians today.

Hippocreates nabbed the term “hermaphrodite” from Greek mythology, where Hermaphroditus, the child of Hermes and Aphrodite, serves as a representation of the merging of masculine and feminine energies. Hermaphroditus was also the great grandchild of Atlas, the Titan condemned to hold up the heavens.

It wasn’t until the dawn of the 20th century when we would start to see some updated terminology. “Intersex” became the medical standard for a child born with some degree of anatomical ambiguity from about 1917 onward, with a major update to how these cases were handled right around 1950. It was then, with a cultural backdrop surging with musicals such as The King and I, Guys and Dolls, and Oklahoma!, when doctors at Johns Hopkins University became the first to try and eliminate intersexuality in early childhood through involuntary surgery.

Because the dominant theory of the time was that a child born intersex was sure to grow up to become a homosexual (and in the 1950s, this was thought to be as damning to a child’s life as being born with a second head), physicians developed a subjective scale later satirized by intersex activist Kiira Triea into a tool she dubbed the “Phall-O-Meter.” The scale designated an “acceptable” length range for a newborn’s reproductive anatomy, with the low end identifying female babies and the high as male. The space in the middle? These would be “treated” with involuntary surgery, almost always defaulting to an approach that left parents with an unambiguous baby girl. Because it was an easier surgery than constructing a longer phallus (and physicians were almost always hoping to stack the deck in favor of eventual heterosexuality), most babies born intersex after 1960 would leave the hospital with hand-selected “she/her” pronouns.

Is this what would have happened to an ambiguous baby Elphaba? It’s impossible to know, as she took matters into her own mouth only moments after her birth.

The child yawned, and the fishwife absentmindedly gave it a finger to nurse on, wrote Maguire. The child bit the finger off at the second knuckle.

The question, of course, is whether Maguire knew he was dipping his toes into LGBTQ+ discourse around intersex identity.

It isn’t entirely out of the question.

Wicked was first published in 1996, just three years after the founding of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), and right as academics and biologists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling were writing articles about gender identity and intersexuality in publications such as the New York Times.

If Elphaba’s identity as intersex was purposeful on Maguire’s end – why?

Here could be a clue: in another early chapter, Maladies and Remedies, Elphie’s childhood nanny ruminates on her young charge’s gender in relationship to the expectations of her parents:

Was Elphaba devil’s spawn? Was she half-elf? Was she punishment for her father’s failure as a preacher, or for her mother’s sloppy morals and bad memory?

Nanny knew her worldview was foggy and chaotic, pestered by demons, faith, and folk science. It didn’t escape her attention, however, that both Melena and Frex had believed uncompromisingly that they would have a boy. Frex was the seventh son of a seventh son, and to add to that powerful equation he was descended from six ministers in a row. Whatever child of either (or any) sex could dare follow in so auspicious a line?

Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.

Way before I understood myself as transgender, when I was just a sixteen-year-old who felt out of place and lonely in my own life, this moment felt profoundly empowering to me. As a character on page, stage, and screen, Elphaba has always stood as a figure of self-determination. Wicked as a whole asks readers and viewers to contend with a part of ourselves that questions the resolve of our integrity. Are we willing to stand alone against injustice? Against a world that tells us they know us better than we know ourselves? Is our inner knowing stronger than the shame our parents taught us to carry, but never trained us to bear?

As it turns out, even a character as strong and willful as Elphaba isn’t exempt from shame. The next time we encounter evidence of Elphie’s anatomy, she’s an adult living in the Emerald City with her lover, the prince Fiyero. After a late evening tryst, Fiyero steals away for a quick potty break before returning to bed, where he takes a moment to admire her:

Fiyero looked at the form of his lover, more pearly than green tonight. He had bought her a traditional Vinkus fringed silk scarf– roses on a black background– and he had tied it around her waist, and from then on it was a costume for lovemaking.

…he admired the curve of her flank, the tender fragility of her knee, the bony ankle… There was an odd shadow near the groin– for a sleepy moment he wondered if some of his blue diamonds had, in the heat of sex, been steamed onto her own skin– or was it a scar?

But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket.

Elphaba goes out of her way more than once to conceal her body, even from herself, and it’s not just a matter of her hue.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, just about 1.7% of the global population is intersex, or somewhere between 1 and 2 people out of every 100. And as limited as our understanding was even in the 1990s, we’ve continued to learn just how wide the intersex umbrella really is, and what it does to a child to have medical decisions made against their will and then kept secret.

One of our most profound discoveries has been the long term effects of medicalized shame. Elphaba’s transition from a child confident in her identity to an adult who still carries the weight of learned and inherited shame is one that is very familiar to me. I know what it feels like, just as Elphie does, for a stranger to clock that shame before we’ve had a chance to fully understand it.

Because the Tin Woodsman was right – we have the textual evidence to confirm that her green skin wasn’t her only bodily difference at birth. The same year I first read this book, the year I started at a new school in a new house with a new family, my classmates would have my number too. I would open my backpack one day to find one of my school binders carved up– an accusation permanently etched in four letters that I’d never heard spoken aloud before:

DYKE.

I didn’t have green skin, but my peers still saw me coming from a mile away. It was clear to them that I was different, and that was enough.

The question of whether or not the author did any of this on purpose is one we may never be able to answer, but there’s a reason that Elphaba’s story hits home for queer people, with or without the textual evidence to back it up. Her story is one of authenticity in the face of misunderstanding– inner truth when it’s hardest, and an attempt to interrupt cycles of shame before they have a chance to start again.

That might not have been what my parents had in mind when they slipped a pair of theater tickets into a paperback on Christmas Eve, but it’s a gift I’m happy to continue to keep.