Intersex and Out

Co-authored by Dana Zzyym.

Some folks have written to ask why I haven't had any posts on my blog Intersex and Out for so long, so I thought I'd share the good news with everyone: it's because I was busy perfecting my memoir proposal so my agent could shop it and sell it to a major publisher! I went with the fantastic Hatchette Book Group, home of bestsellers like I Am Mulala, celebrity memoirists like Steven Colbert and Willie Nelson, and bestselling authors J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, Joyce Meyer, Nelson DeMille, and many, many more.

Shortly before my mom went into a coma and passed away in January, 2014, I had a conversation with her about how happy I was that I had found a fabulous literary agent who believed  that my memoir would be picked up by a major publisher. I told her that there were no guarantees, as everyone had told me how hard this was to do these days. She said, "Hida Patricia" (as she always called me), "tell yourself it has already happened."

I responded that I wasn't going to do that, because that approach hadn't always worked out for me. I told her that, instead, I just wanted to celebrate exactly where I was at that moment: that an agent who was great at picking books believed in my writing after reading the manuscript I had sent her. She said, "Okay, I understand, but I know it will."

I am comforted by all those who say that she knows, even from the afterlife, but I still wish, so very, very much, that she was here on this planet for me to share the news with her that she was right. :( :)

I am honored to have the quality of my writing recognized by such a top-notch publishing house, and incredibly grateful to be able to continue spreading awareness about intersex and gender variant people by sharing my story with the world on this level.

As some of you know, the title of my memoir has changed several times over the years. (And yes, it's been YEARS. I'm easily distracted by all the important activism to be done, by life, by finding a way to pay the bills, etceteras.) Even now, I've been warned by seasoned authors that the title may be changed before publication, but for now, it's Born Both: An Intersex Memoir.

I chose this title because it addresses what I think is the greatest challenge that intersex people face: the discrimination and/or horrific violence we are subjected to, often as infants, if we are born with sex characteristics that are considered both male and female. Also, it addressed the question,  "Are you a boy or a girl?", which I have been asked over the years as an androgynous, gender fluid person ("gender fluid" means your gender identity and presentation shifts).

This question is often asked unkindly, and the first time I heard it I got pissed. After all, I was raised in a world that rewards those who express binary sex and gender, and I struggled to decide which one of the two options I "really"  was.  But as my self-acceptance of the fact that I am non-binary-- both in sex and gender --  grew, I came to the place where the question no longer bothered me. In fact, I almost wanted someone to ask me again, so I could answer, simply, "I'm both." :)

Due to the extensive time given to preparing for book releases, etc., the release date isn't until January 24, 2017, but I believe that, as with all things in my life, the timing will be perfect. I'll be working hard on the final draft in the coming months, but I'll do my best to put out new essays in the meantime.

Well, they changed my original title - “Bullying By Any Other Name: What’s Really Behind Regulations for Women with High Testosterone” - to, “Stop Freaking Out About Female Intersex Athletes”, but otherwise I’m thrilled to have this essay run in the Advocate! (Read here: http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/09/18/op-ed-stop-freaking-out-about-female-intersex-athletes).

It elaborates on the issue in all the ways I didn’t have time to during my Aljazeera interview two weeks ago, particularly how examining intersex women’s actual performance records, as well as how sporting policies work, reveals that it's prejudice, not “fairness”, truly informing and enabling the current regulations.

I’m also thrilled they included a link to the petition to Let Dutee Run. Indian athlete Dutee Chand, the latest victim of these discriminatory regulations, has refused to alter her body in order to compete, and needs our support fighting the ruling against her. Please sign and share: https://www.change.org/p/let-dutee-run-don-t-ban-women-athletes-for-high-natural-testosterone

Earlier this month, two intersex blog posts about the term “cisgender” reminded me that it’s high time we talk about how current cisgender rhetoric facilitates intersex erasure. But wait, how does it do that? you might be asking. I thought cisgender was the new rage in progressive gender terminology? Well, let me explain.

For those of you new to the term, when I first found myself looking up “cisgender” (with a group of trans* folks at a 2009 New Year’s Eve party), wikipedia defined it as, “describing gender identity where individuals’ experiences of their own gender matches that of their sex at birth.” (FYI, before “cisgender” emerged, people would just say “non-trans*” to describe that experience.)

The framing of all non-trans*, presumably gender-normative, people as cisgender allows one to talk about “cisgender privilege”, which means, basically, the benefits experienced by people that fit into the social gender norms attributed to their biological sex. It’s the difference, for example, between being born into a female body & growing up to look & feel like Angelina Jolie, versus being born into a female body & growing up to feel and look (or want to look) like The Rock. People whose gender identity and expression conforms to the norms attributed to their biological sex face less challenges than those whose gender identity and expressions doesn’t.

But if you are born intersex, this doesn’t actually apply to you because there are no gender norms attributed to your biological sex as society doesn’t even acknowledge that it exists. Indeed, as “cis” means “on this side of”, and “trans” means, “on the other side of”, those of us who are not on either side of this binary framework of sex are inherently excluded from cisgender rhetoric. And note, we didn’t used to be, back when people simply said “trans*” or “non-trans*”.

While it is useful to distinguish between gender-normative and gender-variant people, the term cisgender only successfully does so if you pretend that intersex people and other gender variant folks don’t exist. For example, where do butch lesbians who proudly identify as female fit into the equation? Technically they’re cisgender, not trans*, because they identify as their biological sex, but they don’t experience cisgender privilege. I can think of a lot of males in the same boat. They’re not trans*but they’re not really cisgender either, according to “cisgender privilege” rhetoric. They fall into a grey zone that the term’s proponents did not take into account, which I call the gender binary blind spot.

As an intersex person with a natal “body/identity match”, I too fall into this gender binary blind spot. I noticed it the minute I announced, at the aforementioned New Year’s Eve party, “So I guess I would be cisgender then, because I was born intersex and I feel intersex.” Some people seemed bothered by my statement, because it troubles the intended use of the term cisgender, and specifically “cisgender privilege”.

You see, like butch lesbians, although I have the classic cisgender body/identity match, and am thus not trans*, I’m also not gender-normative. I’m cisgender, yet I do not experience “cisgender privilege”, but the opposite: the fact that I was born intersex immediately put me at a grave disadvantage in terms of gender. For no matter how “normatively gendered” an intersex person may grow up to look and/or identify, we are often immediately vulnerable, at birth, to non-consensual, medically unnecessary, cosmetic genital surgeries (a.k.a. Intersex Genital Mutilation/IGM).

In addition, unlike others whose bodies and gender identities “match”, when intersex people experience this alignment it can result in problems similar to gender dysphoria. For example, I struggled for well over a decade with deep confusion around my gender identity – not, like most, because it doesn’t match my body, but because it does! This is because of the fact that growing up feeling intersex in a male-female only world so unwelcoming of intersex people that modern society has tried to systematically eliminate us is challenging, and identifying and living openly as intersex is extremely difficult. Indeed, in today’s cultural climate, simply being born intersex is viewed as subversive.

The challenges to the application of cisgender rhetoric are resolved if intersex people (as well as other gender variant folks) identify as trans*, but intersex people have yet to be acknowledged by society at large because of how our existence troubles deeply rooted cultural beliefs about biological sex, gender and sexuality. Thus defining ourselves as trans* before our existence is generally understood and acknowledged simply serves to exacerbate our social invisibility. In addition, on a personal level, after years spent overcoming intersexphobia in order to truly embrace my non-binary identity, I want to revel in, rather than redefine, it.

If we are endeavoring towards an accurate, equanimous view of sex and gender, gender studies rhetoric shouldincorporate the reality of all gender variant people rather than erase it. However, I noticed at some point following that New Year’s Eve party that the definition of cisgender had changed in a way that further erased, rather than acknowledged, the intersex community. Today, wikipedia defines the term cisgender as used to, “describe related types of gender identity where individuals’ experiences of their own gender match the sex they were assigned at birth.”

The issues of intersex erasure in this current cisgender definition are twofold. 1. The term diminishes awareness of the gender disadvantage that intersex people experience, via IGM, as compared to those born with male or female bodies. 2. The term linguistically denies intersex people the possibility provided to others of experiencing a cisgender body/identity match, thus placing intersex people in an innately unequal position, as compared to those born male or female.

1. Obfuscation of Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM)

Many have discussed and some, such as intersex academics Morgan Holmes and Cary Gabriel Costello, have written about the fact that intersex people who were assigned male or female at birth and feel like men or women as adults do not experience cisgender privilege. As Costello, who is also a trans* and intersex blogger, explains in a recent post to The Intersex Roadshow, “Intersex children are born neither male nor female, but are forced into a binary sex category by a contemporary social ideology that says this is mandatory. Many are then subjected to infant sex assignment surgery to try to make their bodies conform to their assigned sex…. Just because a person grows up to identify with the sex they were assigned at birth does not mean they will feel surgeries they were subjected to were appropriate. Loss of potential fertility and loss of capacity for sexual sensation are prices that they may not consider worth the result of a somewhat-more-sex-conforming body….” http://intersexroadshow.blogspot.com/2014/08/cis-gender-trans-gender-and-intersex.html

However, the “sex assigned at birth” definition positions intersex folks who identify with the sex assigned to them at birth as cisgender, and thus recipients of cisgender privilege, despite the fact that they have typically undergone IGM, or at the very least been at risk to it. In contrast, under the original ”sex at birth” definition of cisgender, intersex people who grow up to identify as men or women are deemed trans*, because they do not experience a body/identity match. While this avoids the linguistic conflict of defining people as cisgender who do not experience cisgender privilege, the approach coercively assigns gender – in this case trans* gender identity – which is inherently problematic.

2. Obfuscation of intersex biological sex variation and non-binary intersex identity

By replacing the words “sex at birth” in the original definition with “sex assigned at birth”, intersex bodies are disappeared, replaced by the male or female ones assigned to us. Intersex people such as myself no longer experience a body/identity match because our bodies have been eradicated in favor of our “sex assigned at birth”, which is never intersex. (Note: as of November 1, 2013, intersex babies have been acknowledged in Germany — though not as “intersex”, but simply as a blank. If an intersex baby cannot be easily determined to be male or female, it can not be legally assigned as such on it’s birth certificate, unless a male or female body is surgically assigned via IGM. I examine these and other problems with the new German law in a separate essay, here. http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2013/11/06/op-ed-germany’s-third-gender-law-fails-equality.)

Ironically, the phrase “sex assigned at birth” comes directly from intersex activists, who have been using it for over two decades (intersex advocacy groups first emerged in the late ‘80’s in Australia and the U.K.) to refer to the sex that was surgically imposed on their bodies as infants. In the cisgender definition however, the phrase is employed for contrary means. Rather than being used to illustrate that some people are originally intersex at birth, not the male or female sex that is ‘assigned’ to them, the wording obfuscates intersex biological sex variance by utilizing only legally validated, male and female sex categories to define gender identity.

Due to deeply rooted cultural beliefs that biological sex consists of only “male” and “female”, the law acknowledges only women and men as citizens in almost all nations (Australia, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and, questionably, Germany, remain the exceptions). This in turn supports the medical establishment’s efforts to surgically eliminate intersex traits, and thus people, from society. These efforts are in effect a gendercide, and have been denounced as torture and acknowledged to be a human rights abuse.

Marginalized populations have historically had to assert their need for legal rights and acknowledgement, and today intersex people are in the formative stages of this process. It is thus deeply problematic that cisgender rhetoric utilizes the same two-sex legal system that promotes intersex gendercide.

Why should we define gender identity according to a faulty legal system, one that has only recently, in some locations, acknowledged LGBT people as equal citizens?Intersex people deserve the same right as trans* people to be acknowledged within gender studies and LGBT rhetoric as who we are before attaining legal validation. Thus if we create terms that define people whose identities match their bodies at birth as cisgender, then intersex people should be allowed the same right to identify as such that all other humans are afforded, rather than denied the possibility because we are not born male or female.

However, according to the “sex assigned at birth” definition, I am no longer cisgender but transgender, and this bothers me because I’m tired of societal efforts to redefine intersex people as something other than what we are. I am gender-variant, not because I have transitioned from one socially sanctioned body and/or identity to another, but rather because I have embraced being born with a body and identity that falls outside of these erroneously binary sex and gender norms. Thus, the term transgender does not describe who and what I am. I want to be accurately identified as intersex, rather than redefined as — or hidden within — a different population, for the same reasons that trans* people and others want to be defined as the gender they are: it feels good. Also, acknowledging intersex people is also a crucial step in ending Interex Genital Mutilation (IGM).

Under an inclusive linguistic framework, the question is not how do intersex people fit into cisgender rhetoric, but rather, why are we promoting false, binary conceptions of sex and gender by linguistically erasing, rather than acknowledging, the existence of intersex biological sex variation?

Fortunately some, like Costello, are making efforts towards inclusion. After a conversation in which we discussed these issues, he included an afterward to the aforementioned blog post which proposes an alternative that allows intersex people like myself, who experience a body/identity match, the equal opportunity to identify as cisgender. “If we were to add the term “ipso gender” to trans and cis gender, we could perhaps describe intersex experience more accurately. A cis gender intersex person would be one with an intermediate gender identity, since that “matches” their birth sex. An ipso gender intersex person would identify with the binary sex they were medically assigned (the social sex substituted for their intersex birth status being the same as their identified sex). And a trans gender intersex person would be one who identifies with the binary sex other than the one they were assigned by doctors.”

I find the addition of “ipso gender” an interesting solution. It speaks to the unique distinction between intersex people whose gender identity matches their assigned sex, and non-intersex people with this experience. It also, as stated above, deems intersex people capable of the same body/ gender identity match as everyone else. However, as Costello himself notes, it still does not resolve the challenges that intersex people pose to successfully discussing “cisgender privilege”, which I outlined earlier.

Conclusion:

The linguistic failures of the term “cisgender” illustrate the problems inherent in employing an erroneously binary biological sex and gender model to describe humans. In addition, the term’s employment of “sex assigned at birth” rhetoric obfuscates the existence of intersex biological sex variance (and thus, intersex people), as well as Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM). I thus suggest the terms “trans*” and “non-trans*” as a means of distinguishing between people who grow up with a gender identity that matches their biological sex at birth and those who don’t, as they’re accurate, they don’t coercively assign gender identity, and, as additional perk, they utilize a trans-affirming, trans-centric linguistic framework by defining all who are not trans* as “non-trans*” (just as all people of color were originally deemed “non-white” in a white-centric linguistic framework).

In addition, when distinguishing between people who experience gender privilege and those who don’t, I suggest the use of the terms “gender-normative” and “gender-variant”, as they too are accurate and don’t coercively assign gender identity. Using “gender normative/variant” terminology, butch lesbians can accurately be described as “gender variant”, for example, when examining gender privilege, rather than being recast as either cisgender or trans*. In trying to build a world that respects individuals’ right to identify their own gender, whatever it may be, it is critical that we use terminology that enables everyone to do so.

One of the icons of the queer community once said, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” I’m talking about the Western world’s first gay diva, the one and only, Oscar Wilde, whose wise words make me feel much better about missing last week’s blog post (as well as the “Wednesday” target this week, etc., etc., lol).

For those of you who (shockingly), may be unfamiliar with Wilde, he was a witty socialite and successful, respected writer back in the late 1800’s, who was basically tried and convicted of being gay (the official charges were “sodomy” and  “gross indecency”), and sentenced to two years hard labor. The trial left him bankrupt, and life in prison was so hard on him, that he died penniless, just three years after his release, at the age of only 46.

That Wilde, a renowned devotee of aesthetics (the study of art and beauty), ended his days in such a way – by mainly his own doing – is a striking example of the paradoxical nature of life. Before the trial, he was at the height of his career, having become one of England’s most successful playwrights, and he could have continued enjoying his success, and his lovers. But he decided to fight instead (and please forgive me if you know all about what I’m about to explain).

You see Wilde was not the one originally brought to trial for being gay. To the contrary, it was he who sued the father of his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel, because the father had called him a “sodomite”. (FYI, “sodomite” was derogatory, 1800’s speak for “gay”, and when I say Wilde’s love was “young”, I don’t mean underage: Douglas was sixteen years younger than Wilde, but a student at Oxford when they met.)

In order to avoid a two-year sentence, the accused had to prove that his description of Wilde was accurate, which he did during the notorious trial. It’s fascinating to think about why Wilde didn’t let the accusation slide –- given that it was true – but in any case, the fact that he went on the offensive instead is why I called him a diva.

And here’s where the paradox really thickens: had Wilde not been such a diva, he would’ve personally avoided prison, destitution and an early death, but the world would have been worse off for it. For it was his highly publicized trial that brought homosexuality under the global spotlight, for all to see. When asked by the judge what the line, “the love that dare not speak its name” meant (from a poem by Douglas, his lover), Wilde answered:

“The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare…. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “the love that dare not speak its name,” and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it…. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”

After a lifetime of enjoying luxury, pleasure, and success, Wilde placed the nail in his own coffin by defending homosexuality. Instead of denouncing, or at least denying, his behavior to save his ass, as one might expect from someone whose self-professed values had nothing to do with political self-sacrifice, he stood behind who and what he was, despite intense disapproval, and ended up doing time for it. That, my friends, is a badass.

But speaking of “the love that dare not speak its name”, today, intersex people are in the same position. We are “the gender that dare not speak its name”.  (And just to be clear, when I say “gender”, I mean it in the way that gender is used to refer to people, and is used synonymously with “sex” in many contexts, like in U.S. law, where “gender” is what goes on identification documents.)

Just as there was no easy way to refer to "gay" people in Wilde´s day, `there’s no easy way to refer to someone that’s not male or female today. People don’t know how to “speak our name”, literally. You can say, “he’s nice man,” or, “she’s a nice woman,” but what do you say for an intersex person? You can say just that, I guess – “they’re a nice intersex person”– but it doesn’t have the same ring you know? That’s because the words “man” and “woman” are nouns but “intersex” isn’t.

We can, and very often do, use “intersex women” or “intersex men” to describe ourselves, and it works great, just like “gay men” does.  In fact, many intersex people prefer that, because it keeps intersex people positioned within the masculine/feminine binary, which they identify with. It doesn’t frame us some kind of third sex or third gender or something.

The problem is we kind of are a third gender. I mean that’s the crux of our biggest human rights issue right? We are violated -- in the form of nonconsensual infant surgeries known as Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM) --- precisely because we are not male or female, the two current genders. And yes, I know better than most that we’re not a third sex per se, because biological sex is a continuum and if we wanted to accurately label it there would be tons of different sexes.

But gender is a social construct (we can argue biological sex is too, but it’s complicated and too long to do here), and all things being equal, if we created the gender identity terms, “man” for males, and “woman” for females, we should have also created a term for those who are not male or female. Oh wait! We did: hermaphrodite.  But a prominent psychologist by the name of John Money thought it would be better to stick with men and women and eliminate that gender category altogether, and he convinced the medical establishment to try and do that by surgically eliminating intersex bodies.

For a brief period we were coming out and proclaiming that’s what we are – hermaphrodites – but then some outspoken intersex folks in the United States declared “hermaphrodite” un-pc, so many of us stopped using it. And there it is, the major paradox. We need recognition in order to say, “This is what we are and we deserve equal treatment”, but the “this” that we are is still so disdained that we’re afraid to put ourselves under the spotlight by claiming it (just look at what happened to Wilde, after all).

Most of us position ourselves within the accepted binary construct of “men” and “women”, but the world sees us as otherwise anyway, and tries to “fix us” into normal men or women. And while we’ve been saying “don’t fix us” for over two decades, if we don’t proclaim that we are something other than the two current options, and that we should be accepted as that - like Wilde did around sexual orientation– then why would the powers that be think they should leave us in our non-binary state? (See what I mean?)

The bottom line is that while many intersex people end up looking and feeling like typical males or females/men or women, some of us don’t. Also, some of us don’t need medical tests to diagnose our otherwise undetectable differences because our bodies are visibly and obviously a blend of male and female, just like the old classic label suggests. What should we call ourselves? Shouldn’t we have a name? Isn’t invisibility a huge part of the problem, allowing our harms to go unaddressed, and our erasure to continue?

In the past we had “hermaphrodites”, and I personally wish the label hadn’t been bashed because, just like “men” and “women”, it’s a noun, and it’s the label most people are already familiar with. In fact, on a personal basis, I still often use it if I tell someone I’m intersex and they don’t know what that means, because it’s the fastest way to give them an accurate sense of what I’m talking about.

Since a lot of people apparently found the word insulting though, and the greater community doesn’t use it, some of us sometimes use “herm” as a reclaimed, shorter version. I wrote another blog about this, about wanting to use “herm”, but since then I’ve had all these women – specifically women that I’ve been romantically involved with – tell me they hate “herm”.  And when I ask myself if I want to adopt a label that my lovers hate, the answer, perhaps sadly (not badass enough?), is no. So back to the drawing board I go.

I was recently interviewed by the awesome Vash Boddie of IMRU radio in L.A., the county’s longest running LGBTI radio station (airdate T.B.A.). At one point, he said, “everyone’s a little intersex”, and it got me thinking: who can call themselves intersex? It’s a relevant question because, believe it or not, there’s a fair amount of intersex appropriation going on these days.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of cultural appropriation, which wikipedia defines as “the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group”. There’s tons of ways this happens, and tons of opinions about it. Intersex people are sometimes subjected to something similar but one step beyond: identity appropriation.

Identity appropriation can be defined as, “the adoption of membership into a group by members of a different group”. It doesn’t happen that often, but a familiar example could be when white people say they’re Native American, perhaps to apply for a scholarship, because they have one percent native blood.

An example of intersex appropriation is what I experienced at a genderqueer group I attended. Someone asked if it was possible for them to be intersex, even though they weren’t born that way. The reasoning was: if you start transitioning from female to male, but decide you want to stay in the middle, are you now intersex? Can you call yourself that?

I understood their line of thought, but I explained that being intersex, or a hermaphrodite, as we were previously known, has been defined, since time immemorial, as something one is born. I also explained that the fact that we’re born this way is deeply integral to our culture and experiences as a people.

A good analogy is found in the fantastic Native American blog My culture is not a Trend. As the author states: “… folks who are Indigenous, Asian, or African were murdered because they looked and dressed different, because they were “other” than white, and because their cultures were deemed as “uncivilized” (which, was often a claim used to legitimize their colonisation). You have the agency to “try on” those cultures, whereas other groups of people were forced to adopt another culture (while still being discriminated against  because regardless of how they speak or what they wear, they still aren’t the right skin color).”

Intersex people have been forced to adopt the binary sex system – often via intersex genital mutilation as infants. Most of us didn’t experience the privilege of growing up to choose our gender with our sensitive, sexual body parts intact in case we want to use them as adults. So while the idea of being intersex may seem cool or fitting to some – and I agree that, ideally, it is – the reality is more similar to the one shared in the aforementioned blog. “Being a Native comes with a history of decidedly un-trendy events, such as… the eradication of entire tribes of people….”

Intersex people have also undergone attempts to eradicate us, and we are still socially marginalized citizens with no legal recognition or protection from discrimination (Australia is the only exception). Because of this lack of equal rights and protections, attempts to surgically eliminate “intersex” people by making us into “normal boys or girls” are still going on – when we’re far too young to fight them off.

But what about intersex people who didn’t get operated on?, you may be asking. I wasn’t, for example, but that just means I had other experiences specific to growing up in a body that’s not typically male or female. My fellow intersex blogger Claudia Astorino’s fabulous essay about what it was like not menstruating when all the other girls were, is a great example (athough it’s specific to her form of intersex, FYI, as some of us do menstruate).

The thing that bummed me out about my personal experience with intersex appropriation was that, after I’d explained how it’s harder to fight discrimination if people are confused about who and what we are, someone else in the group still said, “I think you can say you’re intersex, go for it!” She didn’t care at all that redefining and appropriating intersex is not what we want.

I was a bit hurt, to be honest, but this dynamic is nothing new, particularly when it comes to extremely marginalized communities. Just like Native Americans, most people can get away with talking about us and appropriating our culture and even our identities without having to deal with one us in the room. I’m glad this time I was in the room, because I know some of the people in the group did hear and care about my concerns.

I had an analogous experience to the person asking the question when, thirteen years ago, I got extension braids and even black people thought I was black. I know it may seem hard to believe, but my suspicions were confirmed when a new friend, who was black and had met me with braids, saw me after I’d taken them out and shouted, “Oh my god, you’re not black! I started talking to you because I thought you were….”

Fascinating as it was seeing where I got more or less love, I never even imagined it’d be okay for me to call myself black. Even if I were to continue being perceived as black for the rest of my life, there’s a whole African American cultural experience that I didn’t grow up with. And while I began to experience certain aspects during my brief time passing, it’s not the same as having my formative identity shaped by being black in a culture that privileges people with light skin. For this reason, I feel it would be disrespectful to African Americans to suddenly claim their identity-- especially as my life's work isn't devoted to ending racism, just as the folks I've seen calling themselves intersex are not working to end the many forms of intersexphobia, such as Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM) .

Nowadays, the preferred-gender-pronoun question comes up quickly when I speak about being intersex. I see it as a positive indication that we’re moving beyond Intersex 101, and folks are starting to wonder what we’re actually like, as people. I tell them that, just like non-intersex people, we have a wide range of gender identities and use all different pronouns to describe ourselves.

Personally speaking, my pronoun issues began in 1997, when I first realized my limitations with “he” and “she”. After a lifetime of living unquestionably as a “she”, for a whole year — since I’d stopped wearing makeup, women’s clothes, and doing all those little things girls do to make themselves pretty— people had been regularly referring to me as “he” or “sir”.

At first I corrected everyone because I wanted to expand their ideas of what women could look like. After a few months though, it became a pain, so I stopped. I missed being able to just get to where I was going without administering lessons in gender diversity, you know? Speaking of gender diversity, I’d also learned the year before that “intersex” is the word to describe the physical difference I’d long been aware of. After letting the realization sink in, making people say “she” didn’t feel entirely accurate anymore.

I realized that I’d be best served by something that defined me as neither man nor woman, but what I am and felt: intersex and genderqueer. (In case that word is new to you, “genderqueer” describes people who don’t feel like men or women, but rather, in between, both, or neither. It wasn’t in use yet back then, but it’s the best current word to describe how I felt.) So a friend and I brainstormed about a new pronoun for me. I suggested “ve”, but nixed it when she told me it reminded her of aliens because of a science fiction series “V” that we’d watched in high school. She then suggested “ze”, which I liked as well. Little did we know (remember, this was pre-google), that at right around that same moment a paper was published (in the fall of ’97) titled, “Ze, Zer, Mer”, in the APA (American Philosophy Association) Newsletters.

I was very amused to just recently realize that the author of this paper was unaware that people like me exist— on planet Earth anyway. As the opening sentence states: “…there are no singular pronouns in the English language that are commonly used without regard to gender to refer to humans, androgynous creatures (such as we find in science fiction and perhaps will find in fact on other planets), and persons without a gender…”. (Btw, I like the paper and find it very forward-thinking, I just couldn’t resist sharing such comical evidence of the fact that very few people knew about intersex folks back then.)

While I’m not from another planet, I sure felt like I was using ze back then. No one I knew or had even heard of in San Francisco’s notoriously cutting-edge gender scene was using “ze”, and I only did so in certain settings, on and off, until 2001. I remember the end because there was an event I read at where I used “ze” in my bio, and read a poem about third gender pronouns titled, “Viva Ze Revolution” (which in retrospect, was pretty bad, lol).

Today, “ze” is used quite often by genderqueer folks, but the option that’s gaining the most traction is the singular “they”, ”them” and ”their”. It makes sense, given that we’ve already been using this when we don’t know a person’s gender. For example, “I don’t know anything about the professor, but they’re coming to visit and I have to pick them up from the station.” But back to 2001….

I stopped my foray into gender-neutral pronoun use for three reasons: 1. going it alone sucked; 2. call me overly nice, but I didn’t feel like making all the people in my life – most of whom had known me for at least ten years – change their deeply engrained use of the English language to accommodate me; and, most importantly, 3. I started feeling and looking like a “she” again.

I’ve long said my gender identity is “gender fluid”, which for me means that it vacillates back and forth like the ocean tides, from feminine to masculine to both, neither or in between. I feel all genders, so I don’t really care what pronoun people use for me. These days, I mostly get “she” (which I’m totally happy with as an old school feminist), the occasional “he”, and even an occasional “they” or “ze”, given that I’m so out as intersex. But regardless of what people call me, I don’t bother to correct them, because none of these pronouns feel off or insulting.

In my ideal world, pronoun use wouldn’t be an issue: English would have one pronoun for all humans (like spoken Cantonese and Mandarin). Some people have created this for English as well, like author Marge Piercy in her 1979 novel Women on the Edge of Time, in which people in 2137 use “per” for all persons.

I love this genderless single pronoun approach, as it doesn’t force me to choose. For while “ze” and “they/them” are deemed gender “neutral”, their use implies that one doesn’t identify as “he” or “she”, which specifies a gender. However, avoiding gender identification by having a single pronoun for all humans doesn’t really work unless all humans use it.

            November 8th is Intersex Day of Remembrance, aka Intersex Solidarity Day, a day to remember our intersex elders, past and present. The date was chosen because Herculine Barbin was born on November 8th, 1838. Her memoirs were found post-mortem and published in 1978 under the title Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite.

Barbin’s life came to a tragic end after she was discovered to be intersex upon going to the doctor as an adult. She was tried in court, legally reclassified as male and forced to live as one, and committed suicide soon afterwards. While the end of Herculine’s life was painful, in chronicling it she gave voice to what it was like to be an intersex person at the time, and the plight intersex people faced if discovered to be such in a society wedded to enforcing the idea that only males and females, as we typically define them, exist.

Personally, Barbin’s story means a lot to me. It’s the first account of an intersex person I ever came across --other than hearing about the Greek God/dess Hermaphroditus as a kid -- and it happened because strangely enough (or not strangely at all, depending on how you look at life) I came across her memoirs in the summer of 1987, in a box of free books at the end of my freshman year at Wesleyan University.

I was immediately drawn to the book, and read it with furtive curiosity, feeling that her experience – before her difference was discovered – was similar to my own. She grew up in a convent surrounded by girls, and very aware that she was romantically attracted to them. Later, in high school, she fell in love with her closest friend – just as I did in Catholic high school – and they shared beautiful passionate nights together. It was a confusing but beautiful time for them, and I cherished reading about someone else that shared this mysterious physical difference that gave her and her love such unexpected pleasure.    

Although I wasn’t sure if I was, like Herculine, a “hermaphrodite”, I could definitely relate. Later, when I confirmed that intersex was the name ofr my difference, I felt unending gratitude that I was born in a time and place where my life didn’t have to end like Barbin’s. It gave me even more resolve to come out as intersex, unlike those who could not safely do so.  

Germany’s new third gender law becomes effective today, and has been hailed as a groundbreaking advancement for intersex people, but every intersex advocacy organization in Germany is opposed to it. Why? The answer is simple: the new law places intersex babies at risk for increased discrimination.

According to the law:

PStG § 22 Abs. 3: “(3) If the child can be assigned to neither the female nor the male sex, then the child has to be entered into the register of births without such a specification.”

As OII Europe, the European affiliate of the Organisation Intersex International (OII), elaborates, “Who determines that a child “can be assigned to neither the female nor the male sex”? According to current practice: only medicine. The power to define what sex is and who is assigned to which gender remains intact with the new regulation.”

So doctors, not parents, will make the decision whether to label an intersex baby “indeterminate”, and while parents do have the option of leaving their baby indeterminate or having them labeled male or female, the only way to attain a male or female designation is to employ so called “normalizing” genital surgeries which have been found to be so harmful that the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture (para. 76.77.) has condemned them.This is in contrast to the situation prior to the law, and in most countries today, where parents decide along with their physicians whether to label intersex babies male or female.

But isn’t giving intersex babies an indeterminate status until they're old enough to decide which sex they want to live as a good thing, you may be asking. In an ideal world free from discrimination: yes; but Germany, like most countries, has not banned “normalizing” surgeries, does not educate its citizens about the existence of intersex people, and does not offer intersex people legal protection from discrimination or even provisions for basic facilities such as rest rooms. While some parents may feel equipped to confront this, and will be open-minded enough to do so, many advocates fear they will be the minority. Instead, as Ins Kromminga, President of OII Germany, stated to me via email, the new law will likely pressure most parents to opt for “normalizing” surgeries “…even faster, since what parent wants to have no gender marker on their child with no other regulation that would protect this non-status?”

German and German speaking intersex advocacy organizations OII Germany, Zwischengeschlecht, and Intersexuelle Menschen (also known as the Federation of Intersex People in Germany) all agree that the law will place parents in a difficult position which may promote increased surgical violations against intersex babies. As OII Europe reports, “The risk of stigmatization would indeed be very large. Therefore… the new provisions could encourage the (potential) parents and doctors even more to avoid an “ambiguous” child at any cost (through abortion, prenatal “treatment” or so-called disambiguating [a.k.a. “normalizing”] surgical and / or hormonal interventions).”

Other members of the LGBTI community such as gays and lesbians have long stated that, like intersex people, they are born the way they are. Just imagine, however, if there was a way to detect this at birth, and that a law was enacted which forced doctors to label babies gay or lesbian on their birth certificates. Would this be helpful to them or their families? Would such a law even be viewed as ethical, given the bullying which gay and lesbian children already face without having their sexual orientation publicly declared on their IDs?

This is exactly the situation created by Germany’s new law. In fact, it makes intersex children even more vulnerable to discrimination than those in the analogy above, as Silvan Agius, policy director at ILGA Europe, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and intersex rights group, explains."Schools have toilets for boys and toilets for girls. Where will the intermediate child go? …The law doesn't change that. It does not immediately create a space for intersex people to be themselves."

Given all this, it’s easy to see why intersex advocates in Germany do not see the new “options” as such a positive development. The ethical solution is to give intersex babies labels that afford them the rights and protections that all babies have, and allow us to make our own decisions about whether to irreversibly alter our bodies.  As OII-USA states, “… we believe that in most of today’s environments children would be challenged by not being identified as boys or girls. Thus, we recommend that intersex children be raised as males or females, with the awareness that, like all people, they may grow up to identify as a different sex.”

Some intersex adults, including myself, desire a legal designation other than male or female – which was successfully lobbied for by OII Australia and others in Australia recently. This is our prerogative, and it creates a visible identity for intersex youth to step into, if they wish, just as early lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* activists paved the way for LGBT youth today. However, as with other members of the LGBTI community, this should be the individual’s choice, not something forcibly imposed on us, especially as vulnerable babies.

Intersex people across the globe have long agreed and declared that non-consensual cosmetic genital surgeries are a human rights violation. What we desperately need and most want are laws that ban the practice that is irreversibly harming intersex babies every day -- not ones that ban babies from being given socially viable labels unless parents use the practice to attain them. 

[1] http://oiieurope.org/bluff-package-for-inter-leaving-sex-entry-open-is-not-an-option/

[2] http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session22/A.HRC.22.53_English.pdf

[3] http://oii.org.au/23183/germany-third-gender-birth-certificates/

[4] http://www.expatica.com/de/news/german-news/Germany-to-allow-third-gender-option-at-birth_277293.html

[5] http://oii-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Your-Beautiful-Child.pdf

A few weeks ago, I testified as an expert witness on the television show Caso Cerrado (translation: Case Closed). It’s kind of like People’s Court but in Spanish, and is the first television show on a Spanish language station to have been nominated for an Emmy.

I was kind of terrified because the “case” would determine whether or not an actual intersex baby’s genitals got cut up. The mother was suing her husband, the father, for not granting permission to have their two-month-old’s clitoris surgically reduced -- the same surgery that’s called female genital mutilation and outlawed in the U.S. when performed on African baby girls. The one I’m very happy to have escaped.

Even though it wasn’t an actual court case, but an arbitration that wouldn’t set legal precedent, the family was real and would have to abide by whatever the arbitrator ruled. Yikes. I was grateful for the opportunity to influence the outcome, but horrified because I had no idea which way the decision would go: acceptance of this baby, or acceptance of what some of us call intersex genital mutilation.

The show hasn’t aired yet, so without giving away details I’ll just say I was thrilled with the outcome. The arbitrator, Cuban attorney Ana Maria Polo, was clearly well-educated on all sides of the topic, and understood the discriminatory nature of the arguments for surgery. It was a huge relief, and a sign of how far awareness about intersex people has come.

I’m hoping results will be similar in the current South Carolina Court case in which the parents of an intersex boy -- who was operated on before they adopted him-- are suing the state and the doctors involved.[1] The federal court denied motions to dismiss the case, concluding that M.C.’s medically unnecessary surgeries could be unconstitutional.[2] M.C, as he’s known in the press, was born intersex, with ambiguous genitalia, and his doctors decided that he should be surgically reconstructed to have a typical male or female body. They chose female, and recommended the necessary surgeries to officials from the state Department of Social Services, M.C.'s legal guardians at the time, without informing them of the medical and psychological risks involved, or that the surgery was medically unnecessary.

The doctors’ failure to provide adequate informed consent is part of why the lawsuit is possible. Fortunately, there are now resources available that doctors can share with parents of intersex newborns, such as Your Beautiful Child: Information for Parents[3] (available free online), to provide the necessary information that was not shared in this case. But sadly for M.C., his caretakers at the time were not privy to this and went along with the doctors’ recommendations. And while many are shocked by the case, it’s typical of what intersex people in first world nations have been being subjected to for over half a century, since the practice was pioneered in the U.S.. Adults subjected to these practices as infants and children have been informing medical doctors and experts of the harms they suffered as a result for over twenty years – privately, in academia and in popular mainstream media -- but doctors haven’t wanted to change their practices to address these follow-up reports.[4]

Maybe they’ll listen to others though. The U.N. recently recognized the irreversible physical harms and psychological harms caused by non-consensual genital surgeries on intersex babies, condemning the practice this past February.[5] M.C.’s parents too, the Crawfords, have come out in support of not only their son – who they knew was intersex when they adopted him -- but of intersex people in general.

In a video released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the organizations handling the case along with Advocates for Informed Choice[6] and two law firms, Pamela Crawford says, “By performing this needless surgery, the state and the doctors told M.C. that he was not acceptable or loveable the way he was born. They disfigured him because they could not accept him for who he was – not because he needed any surgery.”[7]

M.C., who’s now eight, identifies as a boy, and asks about the parts he would have had without the surgery. While the damage done to him can never be repaired, the Crawfords have taken on the lawsuit to try to put an end to these abuses. As Pam Crawford said, “I would given anything for this not to have been done to our child. I don't want it to happen to anymore kids."[8]

I don’t either.  Changing intersex babies’ genitals without their consent is wrong, regardless of whether medical experts dub them deficient or “abnormal”. As I pointed out once to a doctor that used this word, we don’t call children who are atypically intelligent or attractive “abnormal”, much less operate on them to remove their variance from the norm. Calling intersex traits abnormal is prejudiced and stigmatizing enough, but using prejudice to justify eliminating physical traits you don’t like -- without consent or medical necessity -- is a form of discrimination frighteningly similar to eugenics.

    [1] http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/groundbreaking-splc-lawsuit-accuses-south-carolina-doctors-and-hospitals-of-unnece#.UZMv7aKG3Ro

[2] http://aiclegal.org/aic-announces-important-first-victory-in-mc-case/

[3] http://oii-usa.org/1404/information-for-parents-2/

  [4] http://zwischengeschlecht.org/public/Open-Letter_9th-Joint-Meeting_2013_draft_b.pdf

[5] http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/reproductive_rights/2013/02/un-issues-condemnations-of-surgeries-on-intersex-children.html

[6] http://aiclegal.org/

[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qH4P5PtC4w&feature=youtu.be