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Intersex Awareness Day

Today is Intersex Awareness Day! Intersex people are born with sex characteristics that don’t meet medical and social norms for female or male bodies. You can learn a little more about what this means here.

Intersex Awareness Day is celebrated every October 26, commemorating the first recorded public protest by intersex people in North America, which took place in 1996.

Led by activists Morgan Holmes and Max Beck, a group of intersex people and their trans allies gathered outside the American Academy of Pediatrics annual convention to protest the non-consensual and medically unneccesary procedures often performed on intersex children to “normalise” their bodies. They spoke in particular about the importance of listening to intersex people in making decisions about their own bodies. As Max said at the time:

“I’m here representing over one hundred fifty intersexals [sic] throughout North America. One hundred fifty intersexuals are saying: Please! Listen! You doctors, you pediatric endocrinologists and urologists treating intersexuals, you nurses interacting with intersexuals and their families, listen to us! We understand intersexuality, not because we have studied the medical literature—although many of us have—not because we have performed surgeries, but because we have been grappling with intersexuality every day of our lives.”

The activists held a banner which read “Hermaphrodites with Attitude”; as Morgan explains, it was “a caustically cheeky title that refused to be ploughed under into shame at finding the term “hermaphrodite” or “pseudo-hermaphrodite” in all of our medical records.”

You can read Morgan Holmes’s account of the protest it here, and Max Beck’s here.

(Note that while intersex people do not necessarily consider themselves queer, queer and intersex communities have a lot of shared history, and, as in 1996, have often worked together to combat the narrow expectations of binary sex and gender imposed on them by society.)