Intersex.Wiki

(This is a reclaimatory pride flag. Be normal.)

A term used for individuals with intersex variations, often types of hypogonadism, who physically appear like eunuchs. Even today, many medical sources describe some intersex variations with terms like "eunuchoid(ism)".

This flag is for any intersex individual who feels "congenital eunuch" applies to them in whatever capacity, regardless of assigned sex at birth, genital appearance, socially imposed gender/s, current gender identity, etcetera.

Brief flag design explainations under the cut. Warning that the H-slur is written in full under here twice.

Content that is under the keep reading cut:

Colors weren't picked super deliberately with seperate meanings, intentionally supposed to be a compliment to the reclaimed hermaphrodite flag first and foremost to oppose its bright & warm colors. Other representations can be the blues indicative of the historical usage of "eunuch" being almost exclusively applied to individuals with male-typed bodies, and the dark & cool colors representative of intersex variations that cause hypogonadism, hypo/apubescence, agenitalia, and other "neutral" traits; as opposed to a word like hermaphrodite usually associated with mixed or "androgynous" traits. Pluto symbol is also essentially just a compliment for the astrological Mercury (occasionally Earth) symbol used for intersex folks, mostly inspired by my intersex headcanons blog where dwarf planet Pluto was suggested. TL;DR I just thought it would be neat. Symbol edit was not made by me but a friend on Discord because I was struggling otherwise tysm Raizel /gen /pos <3

For the poll I'll break this into:

Being directly called eunuchoid: somebody describes you specifically as eunuchoid

Being indirectly being called eunuchoid: somebody describes people with your variation/traits eunuchoid -- e.g. you have Trisomy XXY and they say people with Trisomy XXY have eunuchoid bodies/traits.

I personally don't have a variation that gets called eunuchoid, but I know from reading about intersex variations that this is a commonly used term in the scientific/medical literature to describe people who would historically have been called congenital eunuchs (i.e. their bodies naturally look like the bodies of people who were castrated at an early age.)

so thank you :]

Yeah, I've talked to some intersex people and I now refer to myself as TWDP (Typical Wolffian Developmental Path).

I think it's misgendering and completely undermines the entire reason terms like TWDP/TMDP are useful.

Body parts are not something you are— they are something you have.

A person is not a "wollpathian" the same way a person is not a "male" (with regards to sex). Sexes are social constructs. A person has (or had) a TSDP (Typical sex development pathway), this is no different than saying a person has (or had) a certain individual body part, like testes or a penis or whatever else. It just refers to a cluster of body parts that appear together in perisex individuals. It is a neutral statement regarding anatomy only with no regards to gender. Anyone can have any sex traits regardless of gender.

The phrasing of that term defines trans women by their bodies and is literally defined by the person who coined it as a synonym for "the male sex", it's transmisogynistic and blatant misgendering.

TSDP - Typical Sex Development Pathway - referrs to perisex people's sex traits.

Altered-TSDP or A-TSDP- referring to perisex people who have altered their sex traits, such as via medical transition. To be used when relevant.

I dislike using the words male and female to refer to sex traits because it misgenders trans people with those sex traits. And I also just don't believe in "biological sexes" to begin with.

TMDP (Typical Mullarian Developmental Pathway)- referring to typical/perisex development of characteristics such as breasts, vulva, uterus, ovaries, etc.

Examples of people with TMDP

(perisex) cis women

(perisex) trans men

some (perisex) nonbinary people.

TWDP (Typical Wolffian Developmental Pathway)- referring to typical/perisex development of characteristics such as facial hair, penis, scrotum, testicles, prostate, etc.

Examples of people with TWDP

(perisex) cis men

(perisex) trans women

some (perisex) nonbinary people.

What if someone has/had neither TWDP or TMDP traits? They are intersex.

(Too tired for ID, sorry)

High quality versions of the spork intersex flag (link), for intersex folks with ambiguous genitalia!

Our read for February 2025 was “Wicked” by Gregory Maguire, originally published in 1995 and adapted into a musical of the same name, as well as a motion picture released in 2024.

This read posed some difficulty for the club. Most members of the club were able to finish it, but we had a great deal of critical commentary on it. 

The intersex representation left us wanting. Although Elphaba is fairly explicitly described as intersex, her intersexuality is treated as monstrous. Because Maguire has refused to confirm she’s intersex in interviews, and her intersexuality has been dropped in the adaptations, it feels like Maguire only gave her ambiguous genitalia for shock value and not as earnest representation.

Michelle had a lot of feels about this read: xe was “A big Maguire stan in [xer] teens, and didn’t really understand the politics [at the time].” Initially, Michelle was more favourably disposed to the book, having nostalgic reasons of fondness for the work, but critical analysis soon made xer wince in dismay at some of the creative oversights. Xe had previously read the work a couple of times, but not since her teen years;With a greater understanding of anarchism and resistance, it strongly affected xer reaction to the text. “Apparently coming back to a book series like 20 years later is pretty much ideal, because you’ve forgotten enough of it that it’s completely new.” 🙃

Elphaba’s Intersex Identity

The way Elphaba was coded intersex was pretty explicit, with mentions of her unfeminine figure and somewhat ambiguous genitalia openly in the text. 👍️ Rylee noticed many little nods to gender issues, like Elphaba’s remark that “I am a female, though not by choice.” There was some possible transmasc coding there.

Michelle found the intersex coding less offensive than expected (again, for 1995, xer expectations were rather low) and resonated with the way Elphaba protested her gender and some of the nuances of that. Xe had a great deal of affection for Elphaba as a character, having a strong fondness in general for strong, thorny female characters. Although it was imperfectly accomplished, Elphaba was depicted as a rebel and an anarchist, fiercely intelligent and questioning of society, all traits that Michelle enjoys both in real people and in fictional characters.

That being said, Maguire apparently has been evasive about whether Elphaba is meant to be intersex or not in interviews, saying that it’s “open to interpretation”, and everyone hated that. 👎️ The text is not particularly ambiguous, especially compared to other books we’ve read. We felt the ambiguity was cowardly, and subsequent adaptations had been able to conveniently erase it from the narrative – denying intersex people a prominent opportunity for representation. 👎️

Furthermore, there was a particularly nasty element with the intersex representation; Elphaba was clearly portrayed in ways indicated to be monstrous to those around her, and it appears that her intersex coding was meant to play into her depiction as “unnatural” or “marked by wickedness,” as it were. Obviously, none of us liked that. 👎️

Michelle felt like treating Elphaba’s identity as a literary device was gross, and that representation should not be “up to the reader”.

Michelle pointed that “it borrowed the trappings of monstrosity theory and queer objectivity theory without delving into what it means to be abject or monstrous.” While there was some value to the character, the depiction “also hurt.” It was something of a wakeup call for xer, and xe thought she might be gentler with future intersex books in terms of how they handle representation, in comparison to this one.

The favourable judgements

Michelle pointed out that the prose, worldbuilding, and queer writing were more inclusive than xe remembered, and was pleasantly impressed by how they held up. For Rylee, however, the book evoked “Blood and Honey”, a Winnie the Pooh satire of the unnecessarily dark and gritty variety. Rylee also had difficulty with the audiobook’s lack of differentiation between the intentional capitalizations of particular words, such as animal and Animal. “Wicked has the one-joke premise, but also has a comprehensive novel on top of it.”

That said, Rylee appreciated the antifascist themes and conservative Christianity versus individual introspection and agnostic musings. Maguire, a gay Catholic, clearly made much use of his background in the work’s uncertain and complex personal theology.

Elizabeth liked the writing for Galinda, and found her character realistic, in terms of people ze’s met. The depictions of colonialism were interesting, as were the scenes where Samira set boundaries with Elphaba. “Forgiveness for the sake of the person who was wronged and not for the person who, like, did her wrong to feel good about themselves.”

Where it didn’t work

Feral absolutely hated the writing style and felt the style impeded its own storytelling; it (Feral) found the politics heavy, yet meaningless, and the dark content felt “weirdly devoid of emotion,” and emotions that were shown felt “forced or inauthentic.” Remy agreed.👎️

Elizabeth found the violence to be simply gratuitous, and really hated the time jumps and the pacing of the story. Feral also agreed. “It felt like finally something exciting was going to happen, and then suddenly, there’s a huge time jump.” It felt that writing technique lowered the stakes drastically, an ineffective choice for a book about fascism. 🫤

Michelle conceded that xe had probably learned some bad pacing habits from this book in particular! “I think this book probably got deep into my DNA as a writer and a reader,” xe remarked, considering her own canon and the book’s influence on xer writing. However, everyone agreed that the pacing was very odd and uneven, and that the ramping of and subsequent diffusion of tension was an unpleasantly unsatisfying read. Xe also commented that “literary fiction sometimes subsists on vibes and symbolism and calls that a plot,” and remarked that it was a bad habit xe was still unlearning for xer own fiction.

Even Michelle, who was initially more defensive of the book, had to roll xer eyes hard at the “male writing” section describing some of Elphaba’s body parts.

We had mixed opinions on the depictions of the fascist takeover. Michelle found the helplessness and ordinariness of life continuing relatable given present circumstances, but Feral found the whole depiction of fascism very frustrating and ineffectual, even meaningless. “The whole book feels like it’s trying to be deep and dark and provocative without ever really having the guts to truly go for it & without putting in the work to provide meaningful commentary on the events being reported.” It described the book as “grimdark for the sake of being grimdark” in places, such as the infamous Tiger Scene, and had no truck with that.

Many of us were frustrated with the abrasively edgy take on sexuality. On one hand, the discomfort with sexuality in the text felt intentional, possibly a commentary from the perspective of the writer’s time in the closet. However, the deployment of sexual assault was repeated, often crass and sensationalist, and felt thoroughly unnecessary at times. It’s a common problem in Literary Fiction that sex or sexual violence are deployed for both shock value and ambiguous artistic purposes – making the sex “weird” is a common odd trope among these books.

Michelle said that, damningly, a lot of the sexual violence could be scrubbed from the book, and it would be a better book, at the end of the day. Rylee and Michelle both compared the TV series “The Boys” favourably to this book in terms of that series’ portrayals of violence and sexual violence, which are more sensitively and seriously handled than in Wicked.

A note on disability representation

Elizabeth also was interested in the way that Elphaba’s sister Nessarose, who also had a birth difference, lacking both arms, played into respectability politics, while Elphaba refused to do the same. However, the depiction of her disability and balance issues felt strange and unrealistic to all of us, since people born with limb differences and other disabilities are used to their bodies, and know how to move around in them. The depiction of disabled villains yet again was very exhausting.

Michelle added, “One of my friends got screamed at in social media recently for pointing out that a bunch of major Marvel heroes are disabled and it doesn't get talked about because they present as successful.”

In addition to the disability coding of villain characters, there were also desirability politics representation issues. Madam Morrible was presented as ugly and unattractive, and the tired coding of “hot people = good, ugly people = evil” was deployed yet again. Everyone was frustrated with the book for this. 🙄

The adaptations and context

Michelle had listened to the musical version of Wicked as well as having seen the most recent movie not too long before reading the book, and consequently, had some thoughts. The book was at the grimdark end of the spectrum, and the original books and movies were on the “candy cane” end of the spectrum, as xe put it; the recent movie adaptation had fallen neatly in the middle. Xe praised the film’s use of cinematic language to evoke the original Wizard of Oz. “In comparison, the book is like not just plunging into a cold, cold bath, but a cold bath with random pieces of broken glass in it.” 🫠

Rylee also mentioned an interesting piece of media that offered further possible insight – Wicked: The Real Story, a documentary that appeared to have origins as a student project. The documentary included interviews with Maguire. Apparently, the book was originally intended as “a sort of Oz-themed Lolita.” (It’s probably fortunate that we did not get that version of the book.) Instead, Maguire found himself drawn to the “loveable outsider” status of the Wicked Witch after writing her early childhood. This lends additional ambiguity to the nature of Elphaba’s depiction as a monstrous person, and suggests unfavourable things about the choice of giving her an intersex identity as well.

An interesting element of the book in general is that it is, very technically, up-market fan fiction. Michelle was critical of the way the book’s “Literary” reputation effectively gentrified fan fiction. It also gave xer insight into how Literary Fiction as a self-declared non-genre genre tends to include, in Canadian and American literature at least, both “genre fiction” that’s gentrified (science fiction, fantasy, horror, etcetera) and “middle class masturbatory stuff”.

This led directly into critiques Rylee had earlier made of the poor handling of sexual violence; the fan fiction community tends to be far more responsible and careful with its depictions of this topic than this book was. We agreed that the book felt like the literary equivalent of “Oscar bait”. We discussed how extreme horror and erotica can have  lot of artistic value by committing to the subject matter, and how Wicked fell short of this. Rylee also compared it to an adaptation sequel called Carmilla’s Revenge, by a descendant of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Mark Williams – but the sequel adequately included trigger warnings.

Feral was frustrated that the book had come out in 1995, during the initial splatterpunk movement, and speculated on how much better the tiger scene would have been if handled by Poppy Z Brite or Clive Barker.

Final thoughts

On 2023-09-29 we met to discuss our first foray into academic intersex studies! We read three chapters from Transgender and intersex: Theoretical, practical, and artistic perspectives, edited by Stefan Horlacher (2016).

Overall reactions:

Dimitri: I liked there were perspectives I don't normally think about or see

Elizabeth: I found the Costello chapter really useful because I've wondered why there isn't more trans and intersex connections and this explained it for me

Michelle (@scifimagpie): it tapped into and articulated a larger strain in the queer community “the people who want to have a gender” vs “the people who want to destroy gender, there is a fundamental struggle in that can only be dealt with through tolerance and acceptance

vic: multiple chapters make clear that intersex is made by doctors. This thing happens when you give birth and you don't know what to do and conveniently there’s someone confidently giving you a (usually really bad) answer…  we're foisting off this thing that doctors aren't trained to deal with it properly plus have medical arrogance

Connections to Disability Studies

Though the book was intended to get intersex studies and trans studies in dialogue, we made many connections to disability studies throughout the discussion.

Elizabeth: The book talks about the dynamic that the doctors are the ones who socially construct intersex, which is similar to how doctors contribute to the social construction of disability. 

Elizabeth: And also how in our society, when it comes to who is listened to most on disability/intersex, doctors come first, followed by parents, and it's those of us actually affected who come last (disability/intersex)

Michelle: it was interesting to see the arguments against eugenic abortion… The amount of eugenicist propaganda that's still around in our society, the text addressing the fact that people would abort an intersex foetus didn't surprise me but did alarm me

Elizabeth: Coming from disability studies I felt the question of who is/isn't intersex isn't actually a productive question, in DS we posed those questions for a minute before realizing it's not productive, to instead focus on ableism

Dimitri spoke about the idea of seeing your body as a garden that you tend to, rather than a machine to be fixed, and how it’s been a helpful framing

Michelle: one thing about accepting my intersex identity is that my body isn't broken for having a hormonal imbalance and it's just a way of being

The social and medical models of disability were invoked by Costello in chapter 4, to show contrasting models of intersex (social vs medical) and transness (social vs medical).

-=-=-

Chapter 1: Introduction by Stefan Horlacher, Pages 1-27. 

This chapter gave a brief overview of the state of trans studies and intersex studies, and the motivation for putting these two research areas into dialogue. 

We didn’t talk much about this chapter.

Elizabeth: I personally learnt a new word, repronormativity, from this chapter! Per Wiktionary, it refers to the “assumption that all humans want to have children, especially within the context of a monogamous heterosexual relationship”

vic rather aptly described it as “so GERMAN”

-=-=-

Chapter 4: Intersex and Trans* Communities: Commonalities and Tensions by Cary Gabriel Costello, Pages 83-113

This chapter reports on a sociological study of trans and intersex communities on Second Life, noting commonalities as well as tensions between and within the communities. 

Everybody found this the easiest chapter of the three to read lol 😅

vic: “I really appreciated the breadth of voices that were included. The author clearly has an argument, but still lets people speak. Like with the person who said ‘I'm not intersex’ and the author was like ‘this could come from fragile masculinity’, it was neat.”

Costello’s conceptual framework

To understand both intersex and trans communities, Costello employs a framework which differentiates a:

Medical framework, in which being intersex/trans is framed as “as a biological problem: a physical lack, superfluity, or malfunction” (p98). While Costello doesn’t use the word “truscum”, this is how many of us are used to referring to people who understand transness through this lens.

Identity framework, in which being intersex/trans is “framed as social in nature: social stigma is directed toward those who are in some way physically variant.”

An important insight of this study was that to understand the relationship between the trans and intersex communities, you have to realize there are four communities at play, not two:

Medical framework trans people (truscum/transmeds)

Identity framework trans people

Medical framework intersex people (who are the only ones who use DSD)

Identity framework intersex people

And as Dimitri summarized, “the tensions [between the communities] arise in the disorder framework, a lot of the problems lie in the disorder framework, and it's pretty important to make that separation”

In Costello’s study, anti-trans sentiment was linked to the intersex-as-disorder framework 

Costello writes about how the majority of intersex people are trained from birth to employ the disorder framework, which can easily result in anti-trans sentiment. Many intersex people are raised in a way where the slightest gender deviance is punished, and feel threatened by gender deviance. 

Multiple people noted how the intersex participant “Anna” from Costello’s study had misplaced anger at trans people, that it’s unfair to blame trans people for trans fetish porn when trans people have such difficulty getting conventional employment, and that the demand by cis & perisex people is more at issue

Elizabeth: so many intersex people are told they're intersex by a doctor and that they're disordered and the doctor will fix them so they're not given any community because the doctor is like "I'll fix you" and people are just used to the disorder framework because that's what they've only ever seen.

vic: Yeah, being born visibly intersex getting framed as a medical emergency

Elizabeth: really liked the dig that the shame of the parent comes above everything else

Dimitri: many parents don't know what's going on when their intersex baby is born and they're kinda pressured into the surgeries…  the parents might have veered to a more neutral stance on their own, maybe they have some hesitance about having a kid being different, that the surgeries are such a pile-on by everyone around them.... the parents of the kids need their own support, what do the parents need or could have had to make them not make those choices

Similarly, intersexism from trans people was linked to the trans-as-disorder framework

Costello discusses how many disorder-framework trans participants made statements along the lines of wanting to be intersex, or have an “intersex variation of the mind”, mistakenly thinking that this means they may be entitled to free gender affirming therapy (it actually makes it harder to access gender affirming therapy).

Costello explains why this sort of sentiment from trans people is poorly received by intersex people: “It alienates intersex people employing the identity framework by working against their mission to recast physical sex variance as diversity rather than disorder. It alienates intersex people employing the disorder framework by implying that trans-identification [...or] gender-confusion should characterize the intersex person. And the stories told by some trans* people employing the disorder framework about having an impossible intersex history angels intersex people of all camps.” (p107)

Michelle: To be intersex is to have a medicalized gender, and how any gender nonconformity is medicalized… it makes sense why so many trans people would cling onto a misunderstanding of intersex

Michelle: the medicalization of being transgender and you need surgery to fix a flaw in your brain, and the medicalization of intersex, they both need an anti-eugenics approach of let people be a little broken/different

Elizabeth: as a disabled intersex person it's been confusing that trans people would want medicalization like they don't know how terribly medicalized ppl are treated, and the chapter helped me realize they are already medicalized and they're trying to get a more "legitimate" medicalization rather than realizing they’re trying to play a rigged game

vic: transness is medicalized, too–the diagnosis is gender dysphoria and the treatment is transitioning. Also transitioning is only seen as a viable treatment because literally everything else doctors did to “cure” trans people didn’t work (they tried *so* many things). Trans people treating medicalization as something that’s desirable sucks, but I feel so deeply for anyone who was put in a place where that seems like their only option–people who feel like their only way forward is to claim things that don't make any sense. They're like “please, I'll do anything, I'll lie out of my ass, help me”. Those poor people!! And, of course, they also cause harm. It's all so sad. 

Criticisms of Costello’s chapter:

Elizabeth: I felt a weakness was not talking about the hypervisibility of trans people vs the invisibility of intersex people. Like trans people who have huge platforms to talk about gender stuff and should know better than to perpetuate perinormative ideas about sex.

vic: transmascs tend to really minimize our own difficulties. We're not well studied, and when we are, the data consistently shows we have the worst outcomes of any gender (in things like health, mental health, employment…). Disheartening to see Costello buy into it at times. (We still really liked the chapter though! 💜)

-=-=-

Chapter 5: Transgender and Intersex: Unavoidable Essentialism and the Normative Struggle for Recognition by Sebastian Jansen, Pages 115-140

High level notes

This chapter makes the argument that it’s impractical, if not impossible, to avoid essentialism of some form when theorizing about sex/gender, and so academic gender studies scholars should spend less time trying to avoid essentialism and focus more on improving the material circumstances for intersex, trans & LGBA+ individuals.

vic: I think they were saying that we can't do it because it can't be done without throwing trans & intersex people under the bus

Elizabeth: ch5 was how I realized that in the social [identity] model of intersex where we see intersex as a natural variation it is essentialism and I'm okay with it thanks to this chapter

We all agreed this was a challenging read. As vic put it: “it was very ‘as you know’ and I didn't know”, and that the author was probably nervous about writing it.

Jansen’s chapter got us talking about the nature of gender

Michelle and vic talked about how finding out truth about gender is building houses on shifting sand

Michelle: I liked the stairwell metaphor [that female is one level of a building, male is another level, and there’s a stairwell in between]... I don't like the idea of female and male in opposition, they are categories, you can be both/neither/change

Elizabeth: I did like how ch5 talked about how gender isn't just a thing in your brain, it's made through interactions of people interpreting your gender in interactions and they didn't talk about euphoria and I think gender euphoria is that feeling of people seeing you for the gender you are

Michelle: [Judith Butler’s]  gender as conversation reminded me of how art and research are forms of conversation... is gender a form of art?? [we then spent some time talking about this]

Elizabeth: I like the idea that gender should be like hair colour - it's there, you can change/experiment with it, it affects how people see you, but we don't organize society around it and I agree that's a good goal

vic: my gender is contextual - it's different depending on whether in an arts context vs. in interacting with landlord, etc

vic: in War & Peace there are four pages spent describing the beauty of a woman with a moustache–Tolstoy waxes quite poetic about how beautiful & beauty-enhancing her moustache is.

Elizabeth: yeah so many cultures see women's mustaches and/or unibrows as beautiful and hate how current Western culture hates hair

Elizabeth: yeah it's SO RECENT the idea that women shave legs, the Gillette company had saturated the men's market and convinced women that their hair is bad

A main critique of Jansen’s chapter was how it only considered Western perspectives

Elizabeth: ch5 was so Western, based on a mind/body dualism and I wanted there to be a discussion of other cultural constructions, like in cultures without mind/body dualism from what I can tell it's often that trans and intersex are not separated. 

We then spent some time talking about different cultural ideas about sex/gender such as Two-Spirit, and the intense medicalization of transness in Russia

Dimitri described how Russian/Slavic culture is big on repressing any kind of sexuality, and being queer is deeply tied to perversion, which kicked off a discussion of Left Hand of Darkness

Elizabeth: another reason I wanted postcolonial stuff was it'd be useful to have strategic essentialism discussed (Spivak), which seems really relevant to a discussion of essentialism.

Overall, we found the reading insightful and thought-provoking. We were all glad we got to give our brains some exercise, and we’ll be reading more intersex studies in November! 😅 Join us for a discussion of Holmes’ Critical Intersex on Nov 24.

In January and March 2024, we read the 2022 book Envisioning African Intersex by Amanda Lock Swarr, and it was a harrowing, nauseating, emotional experience, but some of the best writing on and about intersex issues that we've had in the book club even to date (note: this was written retrospectively in March-June 2025). The review will be divided in two parts, reflecting the two-part reading experience of the book. For Jan 26 2024, Michelle and Elizabeth were present. 

Content note: This book dealt extensively with colonial violence, physical personhood violations, sexual trauma visited upon black/African bodies, and similar and related topics. Please be prepared for discussion of racial violence and trauma, and intersections with debility, dehumanization, eugenics, and ableism.

Preliminary and retrospective thoughts:  The most outstanding thing about this particular book is that, in retrospect, it has become our gold standard for academic intersex writing. This might be a little surprising because it was written by a perisex individual, but Swarr clearly put in the effort to learn from and participate in the intersex community, and clearly articulates her motivations to write the book. It stands out as an instance of how to do positionality the right way.  For those who want to learn intersex issues, this is absolutely recommended as a starting point. It’s not an overly long book, and the prose is clear, legible, and sharp. It isn’t abstruse or jargon-laden, the way one might expect of an academic text. 

In fact, the burning anger and clear communication style of the book work in harmony. There is a clarity and simplicity to the style that makes it shockingly accessible to a lay person, or at least, to people outside the depths of the academic world – praise that cannot be offered to all of the academic nonfiction titles we’ve read so far. Another refreshing, sustaining element of the work was that despite the nauseating and troubling content, Swarr made sure to end every chapter on a happy, hopeful, or uplifting note, with examples of activist progress on intersex issues related to the topic of each chapter.

We are both white, and this was our first time learning about the racist history of how intersex was socially constructed. In brief: eugenicists believed that intersex (though they used the h-slur) was a property of “lesser” organisms. And because they were intent on “proving” the supposed inferiority of black bodies, this meant “proving” that intersex in humans was mostly seen in black people (and a rare and exceptional thing in the “superior” white race). Swarr demonstrates how this has had a major effect on how intersex is understood in society, from physicians’ reluctance to recognize common intersex variations as such (when white people have them), to how black athletes are singled out for sex verification testing.

Swarr’s incisive history lessons

In the introduction and first two chapters, Swarr lays out (with burning cold fury) the history of sexual exploitation and spectacle of African people, in the context of colonialism that dates all the way back to the European land grabs in Africa in the 1800s. And boy is there a lot of it. For example, the well-known case of Saartjie or Sarah Baartman, whose non-colonized name has been stolen by history. The “Hottentot Venus”’s sex differences were a subject of fascination and cruel spectacle by Europeans, and she was dehumanizingly exhibited across Europe. 

In the context of intersex history, differences, and activism, Baartman is an important figure, and unfortunately, a germinal one. 

Aggressive colonialist efforts attempted to demonstrate the perceived inferiority of black/African bodies and minds with scientific rationalizations. The racist idea that black/African people are hypersexual and animalistic, with poor self control, had to be validated in order to justify the chattel slavery trade and exploitation of the people and land. How better to do so than with the hot new trend of the era, evolutionary biology? 

(For more about Darwin’s feelings about race and eugenics, such as his dislike of both and hatred of slavery, consider this article or this article. It’s worth noting that Charles Darwin was disgusted by the eugenics and race science his cousin put forth.)

With seething fury and elegant readability, Swarr lays out the sexual investigations perpetrated against African bodies in search of physical sex differences that proved a “lesser” sophistication or development (compared to white bodies, of course). Intersex bodies or traits, and sex differences in general, became a fixation among white physicians. 

No Pictures, Please

Swarr here makes a bold choice that diverges from the common “blacked-out face, naked body” photographic norms frequently normalized by medical history texts. Instead of presenting photos, and implicitly validating the dehumanizing scrutiny of white medical gazes searching for visible differences, Swarr describes the photographs. 

This technique was revelatory, and took both of us aback in its efficacy. It felt punk rock, but in an academic way. It would have been so easy for Swarr to do what, say, Reis did in Bodies in Doubt, and include pictures and woodcuts of various people’s bodies, exposed for the reader to judge and scrutinize, and compare to perceived norms of white perisex bodies. Swarr’s refusal to be complicit in the chain of scrutiny and sensationalism hit us both like a truck, and would shape our perspective on previous academics as well as those to come. 

As I (Michelle) put it, expressing my understanding of Swarr’s stance, “I'm not going to put people's bodies on display because that is coherent with the thesis of this work in a very important way, and I refuse to exoticize or reveal and violate people's privacy in the same way as it has been violated for hundreds of years. You don't get to ogle.”

One of the other powerful effects of this technique was that Swarr effectively deconstructed the reflexive tendency to try and categorize exoticized, medicalized bodies. However, the throughline of abusive and dehumanizing actions by physicians and scientists from the nineteenth century to the present cannot be ignored. Swarr lays out how the pseudoscience of eugenics was just given an image makeover and turned into population genetics and especially evolutionary psychology – which is functionally as scientifically messy and unsound as eugenics, and has the same atrocious habit of using a conclusion to reverse-engineer the cause. Swarr shows the process concretely, such as through listing specific academic journals on eugenics that renamed themselves into population genetics or evolutionary psychology journals.

Prove the Expectation 

Returning to the previous mentions of eugenics and hypersexualization, the horrifying thing about the application of this particular fallacy is that it created a situation where sexual differences were expected among black/African bodies – and the expectation of higher than (white) average presentation of intersex traits. “Citation chain” analysis is a useful tool for analysing intersex history, as which debunked or fallacious information is repeated as factual just because it’s been referred to by other academic sources so many times. A strategy of definition, scrutiny, repetition, and legitimacy occurred over and over. 

The scrutiny of black bodies by white eugenicists was extensive and exhausting, down to things like measuring the widths of African assigned-female pelvic bones and comparing them to the pelvic bone widths of white/European women. Since there is a spread of variation between population members of cultural and ethnic groups, appropriately representative data about measuring bones would not, in fact, yield useful, determinative conclusions. Determining intersex status or ethnicity from pelvic measurements is on par with using the caliper measurements of skulls taken by physiognomists, trying to determine the content of a mind, personality, and history…from bumps on the skull. 

Swarr documents how repetition legitimizes: this spurious concept was repeated so often it became a scientifically expected fact. Even now, it’s somewhat difficult to obtain reliable data on the frequency of intersex traits among African and black populations, because of a kind of expectancy effect. The zombie statistics, as they’re referred to on the podcast Maintenance Phase, just keep coming back – even though by all rights, they should be dead and debunked. 

There were also cases where overtly false information or aberrant behaviour was cloaked in scientific inquiry, including potentially predatory behaviour on the part of some scientists, who were just way too interested in genital differences among people, and trying to see and observe them. There were also cases in which anthropologists either flat-out lied or treated false information as scientifically verified, which led to harrowing inaccuracies and scientific sensationalism. In one instance, a German trader was convinced that a particular Papua New Guinean person had intersex traits, and photographed them, and this was treated as being worthy of scientific validation – rather than, say, interrogating whether a random German demanding to photograph a person’s genitals was predatory or invasive. 

Yet another thing Swarr did was to critically review and contextualise the methodology of people like physician John Money, who is considered a prominent and seminal light in the field of surgical intercessions in intersex children – in a word, intersex genital mutilation, in many cases. Furthermore, calling out problems in the field of genetics was as courageous as it is necessary. For instance, Swarr uses the term “gender” to talk about sex traits in some cases, because sex is also an artificially constructed category, a decision Elizabeth applauded. It also means that gender should not and cannot be assumed from physical appearance – which is actually just correct and accurate, even though it’s not socially accepted widely yet.

Blackness and Intersex 

Elizabeth pointed out, “I just kept being disappointed by how people are turning off their brains at some of the most obviously false things,” and described an obviously false, but widely believed, descriptive statement about black women’s genitals. Another issue that became blatantly apparent was that cultural acceptance of gynecomastia was common among multiple African groups - and white racists couldn’t wrap their heads around it. We both expressed frustration and outrage at how obvious it was that these scientists were thinking with their horny goggles on rather than critical consideration. As I (Michelle) said, “this is like science dictated by fetishes.”

Some of these assertions about black bodies would have been anatomically unfeasible and unrealistic, yet were quoted by supposedly serious scientists with every pretention of scientific accuracy. For example, the idea that black women have labia that are so elongated they “hang down to the knees”. As I put it, “they were so disappointed that, God forbid, these African women had relatively normal genitals, but then they had to measure the crap out of them to justify any degree of difference.”

Swarr lays out an effective critique of the concept of “third gender”: it’s been used by anthropologists and biologists as a colonial “junk drawer into which a great [deal of] non-Western miscellany is carelessly dumped.” It includes concepts from all over the world and every historical period, without regard for consistency or coherency. It has no regard for how “woman” or “man” may have been understood in cultural context. It reinscribes a dual gender system (“two plus other”) while also exotifying and homogenizing non-Western cultures. Or as @taliabhattwrites has put it:

Given eugenicists’ goals to “prove” that intersex is more common among non-white populations, many so called “third genders” were described misleadingly with the h-slur to to help imply they were ore intersex than they actually were, and “third genders” that were primarily intersex (e.g. the guevedoches) have been relentlessly exotified and exceptionalized.

One thing which was slightly tricky to navigate and discuss in the text was the perspective on blackness versus Blackness; Swarr, coming from an African perspective, dislikes the capitalization of Blackness. This is not a universal preference, and Michelle is personally used to the capitalizing, as this is the norm in the world of Black diasporic literary fiction.

More about Colonialization and South Africa 

Swarr unflinchingly points out how white physicians in South Africa saw colonization as a positive thing, and themselves as active agents of it. We had an extensive discussion about how gynecologists and urologists can interpret and perform their jobs in a way that enforces and polices gender norms. As Michelle said, “I'm just sitting with that because gender police definitely reflects how I feel when I first got my PCOS diagnosis. I'm sorry ma'am, these testosterone levels are a little high. How fast were you going to that intersection? I remember that was the moment, especially when I asked, is this going to affect my fertility? That feeling of being defective and of my future like closing before me.”  After reading this book, the phrase “doctors are gender cops” made its way into our book club’s lexicon, and has stayed there ever since. 

Swarr is unflinching about discussing the problems with the term “diagnosis of sexual disorder” (DSD) and how stigmatizing the language is – the issue of DSD would reoccur in future works and discussions repeatedly. As well, the policing of which intersex variations are considered “actually intersex” is usually implemented by doctors, and has arguably been very destructive to the community. Who gets to be considered “intersex” by physicians? People with chromosomal differences? Genital differences? Hormonal differences? Those with a particular combination of all three? The implicit fear of physicians in potentially normalising intersex and sex variations becomes palpable when the actual delineation of sex differences is examined. To quote our discussion again, “Intersex is kind of the queerness that dare not speak its name, because it’s so medicalized.”

Intersex, Disability, Debility, and Prejudice

Swarr clearly does not see intersex people as broken in any way – just part of the range of variations among humanity (and non-human animals, of course). But as disabled people ourselves, we were both struck viscerally by Swarr’s implicit assertion that, in the same way that we say trans men are men, trans women are women, and nonbinary people are real – intersex is normal.  

In fact, Swarr was defiant in not specifically defining the limits of what and who is “actually intersex”, and focused on the oppression of intersex people, as Elizabeth said. “This is a rhetorical move that has been used in disability studies for decades, because of the controversy of how do you define disability? And the scholars were eventually like, fuck that, we're just going to study and focus on ableism instead.” 

We had a lively and emphatic discussion of agreement on the way the medical system fights porous definitions of gender and sex. Michelle expressed, “We see conservatism in medicine, because if you can alienate and exoticize African bodies and black bodies, and you can reinforce white norms, you can also reinforce gender norms. Men have this measurement, women have this measurement, and it's much easier to keep people in little boxes. And it's really interesting how gender and sex as hard divisions are self-perpetuating.”

Humans versus Animals

One dismaying thing we realised from the text was that there’s often a lot more joy and acceptance of non-human intersex variations. A bird or butterfly with bilateral gynandromorphism (i.e. plumage or wings that diverge from gender norms) is celebrated as a wonder of the world. Human beings who present with divergent secondary or primary sex characteristics are seen as requiring medical intervention – even when it’s entirely unnecessary. 

Swarr mentions briefly the history of the h-slur in biology. For millennia, this word meant intersex, and its use in biology to mean cosexual/dichogamous is surprisingly recent. In the early and mid-16th century, colonists started using the word to describe black people’s genitalia in the same texts where they also described black people as “like animals”. Only after this use was established, did 17th-century biologists start to take up the word to mean cosexual and dichogamous in nonhuman organisms.

We also discussed the differences in disability perception for animals, and Elizabeth pointed out the ways in which animals’ lives with disabilities are perceived as unworthy, unpleasant, or not worth enduring. 

Using this ask as an example:

Perisex folks. STOP SENDING ME ASKS/SUBMISSIONS CONFESSING TO DOING INTERSEXIST SHIT UNLESS ITS TO ASK FOR ADVICE OR RESOURCES ON HOW TO DO BETTER.

Genuinely what do y'all think to achieve by sending me such things?? Is it to apologize? Is it to get it off your chest??? Is it to upset me??? This is not a confessional, I am not a priest, stop doing this.

Anon, if you are apologizing (even though you never even said sorry, but this is the benefit of the doubt), don't. I don't want it. Apologies don't do anything for me, or for any other intersex person. Actually, you oughta apologize to yourself. You could have put yourself in serious danger because, newsflash, intersexism is a thing. Hence the fucking username. And the point of this blog.

If you are asking for advice, say that. Ask it. Ask questions, be curious, but be good faith. Shit like this does NOTHING for neither of us.

God. I am so sick of this shit. Why do perisex folks feel so comfortable doing this?? It's not cool, it's not funny, and it's not productive.

It puts you in danger of receiving ridicule and just means that the intersex community itself will receive more bigotry, because while you are not actually intersex and insults aimed at you supposedly being intersex might not hurt you because it's not true, those comments will hurt actually intersex people.

ALSO CAN PERISEX TRANS/QUEER PEOPLE STOP GIVING YOUNG QUEERS THE ADVICE TO PRETEND TO BE INTERSEX, IT'S SO FUCKING DANGEROUS!

full disclosure: im a perisex trans guy, so i have not experienced intersexism, but from what I have read from other intersex people, bigots don't care. They don't care if it's a choice or not. If you look like a queer, you are a queer.

And I will admit, this throws me for a whiplash, not from intersex people ofc, but from bigots, because it's hypocritical. Transphobes and homophobes will argue about how trans and gay people chose to be this way. They say me and my trans siblings are ruining our bodies and choosing to believe we are some imaginary thing. They say gay people are allowed to have gay feelings but they are not allowed to act on them. So one could falsely assume that bigots care about choice.

I think this is the core of why some trans people will lie and say they are intersex or have intersex traits (disclaimer: i'm not condoning or rationalizing this, but I'm merely observing the 'why' here). It is a counter to the "you chose this and that's why you are wrong." They think "I'm not like this by choice" is a shield from any criticism from bigots.

Lying and pretending to be a discriminated minority aside, the biggest issue here is thinking bigots actually operate on the 'choice' logic, because they don't. We know this because intersex people tell us they don't care. Their experiences are proof of that.

Just from my own observations about 'bigot logic:'

Being trans is a choice and intersex people don't exist.

If intersex people exist, they are so small in terms of the population that they don't really matter.

If they see an intersex person in real life, they see a freak.

Bigots do not think "Oh, they didn't choose this so they are clear." They think "Oh, this is a queer freak, I'm going to call them a [insert relevant slur here]." And if we are following their logic about trans people, yeah, that's hypocritical!

Now some bigots think that intersex people are choosing to not align themselves with the binary gender they are closest too, but I honestly think this is also a surface logic to the deeper logic underneath. And this deeper logic is the same logic that the bigots in the previous paragraph with their hypocritical arguments.

The consistent, underlying logic that is hidden by the "choice" rhetoric is that if you break the gender binary, you are sub-human. End of story.

Bigots do not actually care about whether or not you are intersex or trans, whether you chose it or not, you break the gender binary and you are sub-human. That is what intersex people have been saying. They. Do. Not. Care.

Bigots are not honest and we shouldn't trust they actually believe what they are arguing (i.e. "Being trans is a choice and that's why it's wrong) because what they actually believe goes far deeper than their words.

Tl;dr: Intersex people have been telling us bigots don't care, and they have been right all along.

End of post, Disclaimer below read more.

Disclaimer: I am a perisex trans man but I am working to be a better intersex ally. I encourage intersex people to comment and reblog and please call out anything inaccurate that I have said. I also encourage you to add your own experiences. Everything here is my own observations of bigots and people in the LGBTQIA community, and reflections on my own thoughts prior to being more educated in intersex rights. I made this post to give intersex people a voice and to hopefully frame why pretending being intersex is wrong to trans people in a way that makes sense.