I kinda feel like transness is under the intersex umbrella, I was wondering what you think!
It makes me groan and sigh because I've only encountered this sentiment come from a place of bioessentialism.
Even though intersex and trans people have so many things in common, I've never seen this sentiment come from a place of solidarity.
I've overwhelmingly seen it come from trans people who think finding some biological basis for transness will make them Valid. This tends to come from a place of naivety about intersexism and/or ableism: because trans people are pathologised as mentally ill, some trans folks think that getting pathologised as physically ill or deformed will be an upgrade. These folks tend not to realise just how deeply society hates physically ill/deformed folks!
Intersex folks are relentlessly medicalised, often from a really early age. We're pathologised as physically deformed rather than mentally ill.
This difference in pathologisation results in some rather profound differences in how society sees and oppresses us, identity formation, community formation, history, and so on.
Intersexism is fundamentally a form of ableism. In the Global North, intersex people have been socially lumped together with deformity and disfigurement for AGES. Eugenicists happily conflated intersexuality with cosexuality because they believed we are "less evolved", more "animalistic". Society understands us as physically deformed, monstrous, as broken and in need of fixing. Or better yet, preventing us: intersex-selective abortion is already a thing.
I was diagnosed with my variation as a teenager. It was thrust upon me by medical professionals and came hand-in-hand with "treatment" (that I had no say in), after which I had to figure out what that meant for me. In my experience, intersex identity formation is very "outside -> in", whereas other LGBT identities tend to be very "inside -> out".
In many ways, I've felt that being intersex has had more in common with my physical disabilities than it has in common with my other LGBT identities. Some aspects of intersex justice are more at home in the disability justice world, some aspects of intersex justice are more at home in the LGBTQIA+ liberation world.
Both intersex and trans people are subjected to gender policing, denials of bodily autonomy, society's preoccupation with genitals/genitalism, epistemic injustice, etc. But I think to try and treat transness as a kind of intersex, or intersex as a kind of transness, does a disservice to both groups. Mutual respect and understanding is essential for solidarity, and we need to be able to relate to each other without trying to subsume or assimilate the other.
