Not fitting in, but she doesn’t know it yet… In 1994, in Finland, a perfectly healthy girl comes into the world, only to find out later that she is not like the others… Meet Sara Forsberg, an extraordinary girl with an extraordinary story. As Sara herself says, absolutely everything in her life was normal until about grade 7 or 9, but from this point on, life started to change drastically.
While at school all the girls were getting together to talk about “girly topics” such as menstruation, growing breasts and puberty, Sarah was gossiped about by the boys what a “flat plank” she was still. Then she started to worry and feel uncomfortable and looked for solutions, one of which was to wear a bra stuffed with socks to be, let’s not be afraid of those words, “as normal as possible”. She also started buying sanitary towels and pretending that she was a woman, that she was menstruating. Well, we have all sat behind a school desk and know how cruel other children can be.
View this post on Instagram
Forsberg turns 16 and still shows no signs of puberty, so her mother takes her to the doctors. An ultrasound makes the situation even more serious. The doctor tells her that the test “does not find” her ovaries. The family is worried, the tests continue and a few months later they find out that Sarah was a male fetus in her mother’s womb and was supposed to be born a male, but during the development of the fetus there was a genetic mutation, and she was born part female, part male. The shocking news was not all, fortunately, during a series of tests, doctors discovered three malignant tumors in the girl’s body, which were removed in time and successfully.
The message was like a lump in the throat: the girl will never be able to conceive and her body is “inhabited” by underdeveloped testicles. Imagine what a 16-year-old teenager must have felt when she was told that she was neither a boy nor a girl… She was overwhelmed with unspeakable feelings and fear. Sarah received an explanation, like a God-given confirmation, that she was a misfit, a freak, a freak of nature. Mother Nature loves a good prank…
View this post on Instagram
“Being a mother was my biggest dream, and it fell apart,” says Forsberg. The world began to crumble when she found out that she would never be able to conceive, at least “naturally”. Well, you have to go on living, and little by little, over the years, Sara has come to terms with the news, her thoughts and her body. It must be mentioned that before the diagnosis she was brought up as a girl, a lady, a woman, nobody questioned or thought otherwise.
You are probably thinking, what next? The girl started taking estrogens to kick-start her hibernating puberty. The female hormones helped a little, but not as much as expected, and the main thing that happened was that the girl grew up very tall, taller than most guys. Her height was over 180 centimeters. By the way, Sara Forsberg’s sex chromosome is 46XY, which is found only in the male body.
View this post on Instagram
The hardest part of having such diagnosis is talking to someone about it. Sarah felt extremely lonely and misunderstood, but online correspondence sites helped her. The internet also launched her career, and she became well-known in Finland after making a video about languages on Youtube. It’s no secret that when you are famous it is hard to hide your duality. And once, her story almost made the tabloid press. At that time she didn’t want anyone to know her story so a good lawyer sorted the situation out. She just wanted to be normal, but people talk and whisper amongst themselves, and that’s how you get the nasty, life-ruining rumors. Then the girl started to feel very anxious and afraid of going out in public.
Well, what about her gender identity? “I was brought up as a girl, everyone always thought I was a girl and I grew up as a woman, even though I don’t have the 46XX chromosome, I just want to be seen as a woman,” she says in her YouTube video. “It’s so good to finally speak out on my own, of my own free will”, says Sarah. You can watch the full Youtube video here:
So that’s Sara Forsberg’s life journey. Now twenty-nine, she is, as she puts it, “a radio presenter, a songwriter, a daughter, a friend, a sister, and as deserving of love and respect as any other human being”. The Finnish singer, Youtube star, TV personality is willing to share her ups and downs if it will help, make the existence of just one person in this world easier. So let’s talk about one more thing that Sara is not happy about – tattoos.
“I’m not saying they’re all ugly, but if I had a back button, I’d definitely use it,” says Sarah. Sara got her first tattoo when she was eighteen, and since tattoos are like a drug, you get one and you want more, Sara has many. “It spread like a herp on the face of a Lithuanian prostitute”, is the description Forsberg uses. She regrets that one day the idea of getting a tattoo popped into her head. It’s hard to resist the temptation when you’re surrounded by tattooed people (and she just wanted to fit in), so after looking at tattooed men in their 40s and getting a record deal, she decided to get tattooed “like a real rock star”.
View this post on Instagram
Reality returned, knocking on the door, when a year later, her career and contract, which had just started, suddenly came to an end. Over the years, her approach to life, her style has changed, the way she wants to represent herself to the world has changed. That is where the problem arises. “I think tattoos should only be allowed from the age of 25, only then maybe we have a bit more brains, we’re more developed and mature,” says the girl.
View this post on Instagram
The trouble is, when the outside of a person doesn’t match the inside, the girl started hiding her tattooed arm from everyone, even her closest family members. Although no one condemns Sara for this and no one encouraged her to make a choice that she cannot simply erase, she regrets it herself. Of course, she has come to terms with it, and she is learning from her mistakes, and it is no big deal that she will now have to live like this for the rest of her life. It sends out a simple message to think carefully about your life choices. If we are talking about tattoos, do not forget that they also age and change, the ink spills over the skin and you can be left with a big black spot on your arm from a once beautiful tattoo. Yes, the girl is considering getting rid of her tattoos and has already tried to remove a few, but this is also an important step that needs to be well thought out and weighed up. You can see the full Youtube video about Sarah’s tattoos here:
Sara Forsberg is an extraordinary girl, blessed with a lifetime of great, great, immensely difficult challenges that not everyone could handle. Now you are probably wondering why I used the word “blessed”, since her life is a rather tragic event… Well, the answer is simple, because it is only these ” twists and turns of nature” that have made her a human being, that have encouraged her to live, to pursue a career, to be a positive person and to never give up. These difficulties have shone like a guiding star on her path, she knows who she is and what she is worth, and that is an admirable achievement for any human being. In this article, we have introduced you not only to an extraordinary ‘mutant’ who does not fit the norm, but also to a person who has lived a fantastic, if not a little heart-rending, story that the whole world should hear.
