BROKE.

- you’re magical, oh yeah also magic is real, a wizard told you to go learn all types of magic and you did

- there are ancient entities living in the mines and sewers beneath your feet, and they ARE fighting, just fyi

- there’s an ongoing war happening, that is probably why the economy is the way that it is btw

- animals can talk…just occasionally

- you’re haunted by the ghost of your grandfather, but rarely

- there are tiny creatures that will fix things for you in the night but only if you meet their hyper specific demands. also they’re scared of you

- Yoba is an alien (?)

- also the local shopkeeper’s daughter isn’t his she’s the wizard’s and a townswoman named Emily is a psychic, in case you were curious

[pt: This pride month, a reminder to support intersex folks by deconstructing some assumptions /end]

Statements like these

"Im basically transitioning to be intersex"

"I wish I were intersex"

"I wish I had [intersex variation]"

Are by and large considered intersexist.

Why? Because intersex people are a marginalized group that faces pervasive forms of oppression and that are constantly erased. Statements that create confusion about what being intersex is (like saying you can transition to be intersex) or that come from an idealized/uninformed view of the treatement and oppression of intersex people make it harder for intersex people to talk about their experiences and find spaces where intersexism is actively decostructed and challenged.

Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (such as sexual anatomy, reproductive organs, hormonal patterns and/or chromosomal patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies.

By definition, this one taken from the OHCHR [link], an intersex variation is something you are born with, whether it shows up later in life or not.

That covers the first point. A variation of sex characteristics due to medical transition may lead to ambiguous genitalia. That is something intersex people can have, but also not have! It is not, therefore, synonymous of intersex and using the two interchangeably is born from a false assumption. Same with hormones.

On the other two points, what perisex people usually mean is that they wish they had some characteristic from birth that is atypical for their sex, which they associate with being intersex or having a specific intersex variation.

It is perfectly valid to want a certain body or wish you had been born with the characteristics/body that you desired. To associate that ideal version of your life with being intersex ignores the oppression and struggles of intersex people because it's a view that is focused on the positive effect for you specific person, rather than actual experiences of intersex people with those variations. (General you in all of this)

It's kind of like when people remark towards certain trans people that being able/unable to get pregnant is a good thing. It may be a positive for you if you had that, but that is not to say it is a positive experience as a whole and to a person who may have suffered because of it, it ignores their feelings and experiences by replacing them with a narrow, idealized and personal view of 'how your imagined experience would be'. Which puts your desires and fantasy as the focus instead of the life of the person with that characteristic.

I will also add what I think is a wonderful explanation by myirlnameiscloud [link]

I sympathize with you. This sentence almost always comes from a place of dysphoria, but the person saying it usually doesn't realize what being intersex entails. We're almost always still forced into male and female boxes, with IGM and forced HRT. Being intersex wouldn't alleviate your dysphoria, because you'd still likely be forced one way or another. They also don't specify what kind of sex traits they want, because they think being intersex is one specific way of being. Perhaps a better statement you could say would be "I wish I had sex traits atypical of pericis males/females," because there's nothing wrong with that, and that is in fact achievable! You can get HRT and surgeries to also have atypical sex traits, and it's completely fine, awesome, valid, and normal. You can do all that without being intersex, and often times it's easier to access the HRT and surgeries you need when you're perisex. I rate this sentence in between bad and good, because it usually just comes from a place of misunderstanding, and can be corrected with some explaining. 3/10

Yes, surgeries and medical transition exist, but people can also mourn or wish they'd had a different body/experience from the start of their life. So, you can just say what you mean!

'I wish I had just been born with the sex traits I want instead of having to go through expensive surgery' ✓ (whether those be perisex typical or not)

'I wish doctors/family/society didnt make it so hard to get/deny me the hormones I want' ✓ (often this gets associated with being intersex because people misunderstand being forced to take hormones as, an upside of intersexism, like 'easy access to hrt that I struggle to get')

'I wish I was just born with the hormones I want to have and didnt have to go through a medical transition process' ✓

'I wish I had been raised as a girl/boy/neither and didn't have to experience being raised as the gender I was imposed on' ✓

For most of my life once I came out as trans I have had other trans people (mostly transfeminine and non-binary) say to me that they wanted to be more androgynous like me before transitioning. I didn't understand what they meant because I didn't know what being intersex was at the time, and I saw myself as very masculine and boyish and it made me dysphoric, but I realized what they meant later. The voice that wasn't as deep as my pericis men peers. The fuller lips. The shorter stature. How fast my hair grew prior to me getting allopecia in my senior year of high school. My less muscular build. And with the trans people who were transitioning away from femininity, they wanted those more androgynous traits paired with my flat chest I had before started estrogen hrt in my freshman year of university.

They didn't know the full picture though. They didn't know that my primary intersex variation is considered rare and how it worked wasn't fully understood so I was treated like a lab rat at the local hospital from age 5 until I was around 14 or 15 and told my parents that I didn't want to keep going back and after a while of me protesting they listened. They didn't know I was on forced hrt that whole time. They didn't know about the scars from IGM. They didn't know that I got monthly genital inspections and hormone tests. They didn't know that I was baffled in health class since I didn't realize I had ambiguous genitalia until I learned what being intersex was in college since I went to a rural high school that was rather religious and conservative. They wanted all of the parts of me that they envied but none of the trauma or the grieving or the hardships that came with it. I am sure if they saw what happened to me in that damned hospital they no longer would've envied me. I experienced intermisogyny my entire life and didn't even know it until this past year.