We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris Arnone a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Chris, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

I read Alicia Roth Weigel’s memoir, Inverse Cowgirl, back in 2023. I’d never read a book like it, and I started to wonder about my own intersex childhood and journey. I kept thinking that maybe my life was fascinating enough for a memoir.
Then, in January 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14168. The overt purpose of this order was to attack transgender people, defining sex as very binary and declaring that gender and sex are the same thing. Along with this attack, the order attempted to erase intersex people from the national conversation. I couldn’t stand by and do nothing.
You see, when I was born, my genitals were ambiguous. The doctors couldn’t tell my sex when I was born, so for three days, my parents called me Baby. After a chromosome test and ultrasound discovered that I was male, I grew to have three surgeries as a toddler and a lifetime of medical complications thereafter.
My Name Was Baby: An Intersex Memoir is my story of growing up intersex in the heartland, of being an intersex boy in the face of Midwestern toxic masculinity. It’s also a book about larger intersex issues and our current political climate.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I actually didn’t start writing until I was in my 30s. My first writing gig was as a freelancer for Wizard Magazine, writing about comics and video games. Fiction was my real calling, though, and something that I hadn’t messed with much. But finally, with the encouragement of my now-wife, I wrote my first novel, The Lost and Broken Realm. I self-published it in 2013.
There’s a long journey between that book and now, though. I went back to school, earning my bachelor’s in English and and an MFA in Creative Writing. I self-published another book along the way before landing an agent in 2020. I’ve always loved speculative work, so it was no great surprise when The Hermes Protocol was published in 2023 from Castle Bridge Media. Two more books in that series have been published as well: Necropolis Alpha and The Cordelia Solution.
As I’ve grown as an author and a human, my work has focused more and more on sex and gender. Being intersex, my body affects how I see the world, and so it affects how my characters see the world, how they move through it.
Admittedly, I never had writing a memoir on my bingo card, but here we are. And My Name Was Baby is the most important work of my life.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn reading the reviews.
For a lot of early-in-careers authors, they see reviews and helpful feedback. It’s not. People write reviews for other reader, to inform other readers of whether they liked the book. This is not feedback for an author.
Take feedback on your work. Seek it out. But you want to seek it from people who have a vested interest in making your work better. This can be friends and family who are willing to be critical and helpful. Beta readers and paid editors are always great options. Find a writing group or workshop of other writers looking for feedback.
Public reviews? Nope. That’s not the place.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

When my work really affects someone.
When I was doing burlesque with Bohemian Cult Revival, we always sought out the “breath change.”
What do I mean by this? The laugh, gasp, sigh, shout, or cry. You know you’ve really affected someone when their breath changes like this.
This is one way I seek to affect someone. I want them to laugh or cry or gasp when they read my work. That tells me that I’ve tapped into their emotions in some meaningful way.
I also want to affect people politically. There’s so much power to representing all sorts of people on the page. Whether it is strong women or queer characters or people of color, everyone deserves to see themselves on the page. I really try to do that and to write all of those characters with care and attention.
Even more recently, I’m trying to affect how the world sees intersex people. Really, I’m trying to get the world to know that we exist at all, and the more education I can deliver around us and our bodies, the better.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://chrisarnone.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrismarnone/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChrisMArnone/
• Other: BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrismarnone.bsky.social/
  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/chris-arnone

Image Credits

Paul Andrews Photography