Intersex

Intersex people are persons born with gonads, genitals, or sex chromosome configurations that do not conform to binary notions of male or female.

Quotes

 * I got in touch with a support group [for intersex people] when I was eighteen. They agreed to send me some information. … A big, brown envelope arrived, and I … opened it in private and read through it. I was … partly relieved in that I now knew what my condition was exactly, and why I'd had the surgery, and that it was an intersex condition. [But I was] … shocked and … horrified that nobody had had the decency to tell me about it as I was growing up. … The doctors decided not to tell me or my parents that it was an intersex condition, because they [thought] that [I would] grow up psychologically unbalanced and unable to cope with the [knowledge]. … The clitorectomy … cut the nerve endings out of the clitoris, [and] some of the erectile tissue; but most of it was left tied back onto the skin to the pubic bone. … [I]f I get aroused, it tightens up and pulls away from that bone and causes … excruciating pain. That's something I'm left with for the rest of my life; there's nothing that can be done about that.
 * "Melissa", in her interview for the documentary film Gender Trouble (2003)
 * I think I've done quite a good job of integrating male and female attributes. I've since discovered that so many people who don't have intersex conditions do just the same after a midlife crisis. … What I don't understand is why people who are normally so willing to accept that each human being is unique, are suddenly so afraid of variation when faced with the fact that between the conventional extremes of what we understand as being male and female there are endless shades of variety.
 * "Barbara", in her interview for the documentary film Gender Trouble (2003)
 * Sex segregation directly harms many intersex and transgender athletes and would-be athletes. But, these policies also harm many cisgender people who do not see a place for themselves in certain sports because they sense and are told by parents, peers, teachers, and coaches that they do not measure up to the normative masculinities and femininities that we attach to those sports. … [T]he material evidence of binary sex is not always visible, measurable, or stable over time.


 * Trans feminists seek to interrogate society’s ingrained assumptions about the social and cultural meanings we ascribe to biology. They also generally incorporate an analysis of intersex people, who do not fit this reductive model, and who have suffered historical and ongoing mistreatment at the hands of a medical establishment obsessed with imposing binary biological sex on to bodies that don’t ‘fit’. The experiences of trans and intersex people show us that not all humans fit perfectly into two clear-cut categories of biological sex; indeed, the belief there are two separate sex categories is itself an erasure of sex variations that occur either naturally or through medical modification.
 * Shon Faye, Chapter Seven