#actuallyintersex

CW: intersexism

Came across this infographic during some google image searching and I'm still kind of a state of despair about it because it's not just offensively wrong about what intersex is, it was used to teach university students about queer issues:

Alt text: LGBTQIA+ are defined one by one. Intersex is defined erroneously as "These are people who were born with genital organs of both sexes (male and female). It is a genetic condition."

It's one thing for your rando perisex person to be getting this wrong on social media. It's another thing entirely when it's professionals getting this wrong in an educational setting. 😩 And that this infographic appears in a peer-reviewed publication. 😩

It's even worse to know the students that were taught with this infographic were medical students, who will be the ones traumatizing intersex people for decades to come 😩

It's so wrong in so many different ways:

Intersex is not limited to people with genital differences. Most intersex people have intersex variations that are not apparent at birth, with puberty being the most common time of life for variations to present. Many people find out in adulthood having no outward physical differences.

Of the intersex people with genital differences, they do not have two sets of genitals. Most genital differences are still recognizably female or male (e.g. spadias), and those who have ambiguous genitals have one set.

Intersex is not "male parts + female parts" or even "intermediate male/female parts", it is an umbrella term for anybody whose primary/secondary sex characteristics don't line up with what is expected for male and female bodies. Some intersex variations make women look more feminine, or make men look more masculine.

Defining intersex by genital differences doesn't just exclude most intersex people, it also sets the tone that we are defined by our genitals. To be publicly intersex is to have non-stop DMs about your genitals. This sort of framing sets up openly intersex people for invasive questions and harassment, and it keeps large numbers of intersex people from coming out.

Many intersex variations do not have a known genetic basis. Many intersex variations are caused by exposure to certain hormonal levels in the womb. Certain medications when taken during pregnancy can trigger intersex variations.

While bodily variation is necessary for being intersex, the social experience of stigma, discrimination, isolation, hyper-medicalization, and hyper-sexualization are all just as much a part of being intersex.

📣 Perisex allies: this is shit you can stop. When you see other perisex people parrot this sort of misinformation, correct them. Direct them to look up resources written by actually intersex people.

Here are some starter resources to give:

Intersex explained by Hans Lindahl

Media and style guide by IHRA

FAQ by intersex-support

and to me, that makes it very clear that a lot of this stuff has been happening in smaller and bigger ways for many years before this, and that many of the intersex users on here who might have claimed to be transfeminists at one point have not bothered to evaluate the ways in which we might be complicit in perpetuating this kind of shit within the online intersex community.

i'm thinking about the amount of interactions i've had with intersex people on this site who will privately say to me "well, i agree with what you're saying about xyz tumblr user, but I like their other intersex posts" or "well I can't say anything about transmisogyny on this blog because I'm mutuals with one of their mutuals and i don't want them to get mad at me" or "the intersex community is so small, i can't afford to alienate people by speaking out against what this person is doing" or people just reblogging posts claiming that terms are historically intersex exclusive without bothering to do a basic search of whether or not that's true. or several other examples I could give of ways that people are spreading this rhetoric or participating in harassment campaigns under the guise of plausible deniability. i'm also thinking a lot about all the intersex transfem friends i had on here who have now deleted their blogs and who have been basically de facto exiled from other intersex groups that they used to be a part of, and how we now just connect in other ways online because they were facing so much harassment on here.

sometimes it feels like the main discussions on here that involve intersex topics seem to have shifted so far away from real life discussions of intersex experience and instead seem to mostly just be about intersex identity as a rhetorical concept. and in particular, people trying to find ways the concept of intersex identity can be weaponized to attack transfeminist theory.

I'm also reflecting on how so much of this shit isn't new. I remember back 3 and a half years ago when mod Stev and I made an announcement in the (now mostly inactive) intersex discord server associated with this blog saying "Please don't use the word/concept of transandrophobia or transmisandry in this server; here's four sources and a long explanation of why this is the guideline if you want to keep engaging in this space" and how big an upset that was at the time and the amount of hate we got for that from some people. I'm thinking about how there was a known transphobic intersex tumblr blogger who got so mad about me calling her out on her transphobia that she deleted her blog back in...i want to say it was 2021? and despite that, she came back this year for a while and got popular again incredibly fast, in part because of the ways she was openly spreading terf rhetoric.

the intersex tag on here seems to me like the worst it's ever been in terms of harassment and intra-community violence in the six years this blog has been on tumblr in a way that is also concerningly bleeding into some of the irl intersex activist spaces I'm in. and i think that if the tumblr intersex community doesn't start actively speaking up about the shit that is going on right now and actually confronting the people in our community who are posting hateful rhetoric and harassing trans women that it is just going to get worse. especially when it comes to transmasc people in the tumblr intersex community who have been silent or actively posting this kind of thing, (and to be clear, i'm saying that from my positionality as a tme intersex person--this is a critique that i'm including myself in here.)

The idea that we're just rare mutants that need to be fixed, or can be ignored for the sake of the majority, would further begin to fall apart. Recognizing people with PCOS as intersex makes it harder for them to treat people with PCOS like broken women.

Doctors treat their intersex traits as a malady that needs to be fixed. Even in the case of a cis women with PCOS and gender dysphoria or health issues, the treatment is so often laced with intersexism and coercion. There is no real choice given, and no affirmation of one's body as worthy of respect regardless of what it looks like.

This isn't unusual in the treatment of intersex people - people do try to hide from us the fact we're intersex (entirely, or by saying we have a disorder instead). But by not even considering people with PCOS under the umbrella, they prevent them from finding community with people like them, and advocating for themselves.

This is all to say, people with PCOS are not less intersex than other intersex people. They are just as intersex, and face all the scrutiny that comes with it. But more than that, they are integral to intersex liberation - and queer liberation overall. Your story as an intersex person with PCOS matters. We need you, and we want you with us.

May you find peace, community, and healing. May you find comfort and home in your body. May you find health and wellness. You are loved, and you belong - just as you are, and have yet to become.

and this frustrates me so fucking much. not because i want to deny the impacts of transphobic oppression--i'm a trans intersex person, trust me when i say i am intimately aware of transphobia. this frustrates me because there is no way we can achieve collective liberation if our "allies" fail to even engage with basic intersex topics and are seemingly unaware of the many forms of intersex oppression that we are already facing every fucking day. if you are not aware of compulsory dyadism, if you are not aware of interphobia, if you are not aware of the many different ways that intersex people are directly and often violently targeted--how the fuck do you think we're going to dismantle all of these systems of oppression?

if you were truly an intersex ally, you would already KNOW that this is not new, and would not be surprised--interphobia in sports has been going on for decades. you would know that we do have a community, an identity, a history--you would have already read/listened/watched to intersex resources that give you the background information you need for allyship. you would know that although there is a really distinct lack of resources and political education, that intersex people ARE developing a political understanding of ourselves and our oppression--Cripping Intersex by Celeste Orr and their framework of compulsory dyadism is one example of how we're theorizing our oppression. It's absolutely fucking wild to me how few people I've seen actually use words like "interphobia" "intersexism" "compulsory dyadism" or "intersex oppression"--endosex people are seemingly incapable of recognizing that there is already an entrenched system of oppression towards intersex people that violently reshapes our bodies, restricts our autonomy, and attempts to eradicate intersex through a variety of medical and legal means.

you cannot treat intersex people like an afterthought. not just because we're meaningful parts of your community and deserving of solidarity, but also because intersex oppression impacts everyone!!! especially trans community--trans people will not be free until intersex people are free, so much of transphobia is shaped by compulsory dyadism, the mythical sex binary, all these ideas of enforced "biological sex" that are just as fake as the gender binary.

it makes me absolutely fucking livid every time this shit happens because it becomes so abundantly clear to me how little the average endosex person knows about intersex issues and also how little the average endosex person cares about changing that. i don't know what to say to get you to care, to get you to change that, but we fucking need it to happen and i, personally, am tired of constantly being grateful when i meet an endosex person who knows the bare minimum. i think we have a right to expect better and to demand that if you're going to call yourself our ally, you actually fucking listen to us when we tell you what that means.

*everyone nods their head in agreement*

"....that includes intersex people"

and that 1% of intersex people who peddle it are usually self-hating pick mes who think intersexphobes are their friends and who throw trans people under the bus in the hopes it’ll save them.

As an addendum to the the guide to intersex questioning that I assembled, here are some other guides and resources I've found that may also be helpful!

For intersex questioning:

I think I may be intersex by TIGERRS

How do I know if I'm intersex? by Hans Lindahl

ARE YOU INTERSEX? by versegm

Here are some resources for general LGBTQIA+ questioning:

Questions to Ask When You're Questioning Your Gender

The Queer & Transgender Resilience Workbook

My Gender Journey Workbook