This is why there's a long history of physicians using the term "cripple" to describe intersex people. Historically, intersex people have been understood to have a physical deformity. This language persists in modern medical literature: e.g. hypospadias cripple is still a formal diagnostic term being used in medicine. 😬

Those of us who understand intersex as disabling tend to be doing so because in ways that relate to how intersex is embodied. Intersex people who identify with disability because of the chronic pain they have as a result of IGM. Intersex people who have unstable hormones because of IGM. Intersex people who have needed accommodations to take time off from work/school for surgeries. Etc.

The reasons that intersex people like myself identify intersex as being in line with the disability community is because our rights struggles revolve around our bodies. Whether we get bodily autonomy. Whether we have to expose our genitals to doctors just for their curiosity. Whether we can access the medicines we need.

The controversy around crip tends to revolve around cripplepunk being explicitly for physical disabilities only.

The tenets of cripple punk that I see shared around state explicitly that: "Cripple punk is not conditional on things like mobility aids & 'functioning levels'" and "Always listen to those w/ different physical disabilities & different intersections than yourself. Do not speak over them"

To those of you who believe that crip(ple) should only be for physical disabilities, I ask you, in the spirit of cripplepunk, to consider that intersex, if understood as a disability, is a physical disability. Best I can tell, room is made in the cpunk community for chronic illness and chronic pain. Why not intersex also? 💜

As best as I understand it, the controversy about who is/isn't cripple largely centres on a sense that people with physical disabilities need space to talk about our experiences without neurodivergent people monopolizing the conversation. 👀

Intersex people participating in disability conversation are very aware that we are on the margins here. People like myself who are inclined to see intersex through a disability lens tend to have other disabilities - often mobility ones (I'm a part-time wheelchair user). I obviously can't speak for every intersex person out there, but from where I sit it seems really unlike that intersex people would "take over" the crip space.

Intersex may not be rare but it's also nowhere near as common as mobility disabilities or neurodivergence, and we're nowhere near as coordinated. As a community we are incredibly fractured, and still in the consciousness-raising days. We are not an organized threat, we're a bunch of people in pain, trying desperately to get doctors to stop performing coercive surgeries on our bodies. 🫤

For some of us, disability rights/justice looks like the best route to go to try and make that happen. I'm far from alone in feeling that the queer community has done an underwhelming job of advocating for our issues, and many of the gains we intersex people have gotten have come thanks to disability organizing.

It's maybe worth noting that a large number of intersex people are resistant to seeing intersex as a disability. Indeed, one survey respondent (out of 30) shared they found pretty much the whole survey to be offensive. This is not something that intersex people are united on. Intersex folks have a wide variety of feelings about where intersex best belongs (queer community, disability, both, neither, etc).

Crip is More than Cripple Punk

This post has ballooned in length but I do want to note a couple of other things about the term crip:

Others have already pointed this out, but crip and cripple in practice are not being used the same ways, and it may be productive to think of them as different words.

"Crip" was reclaimed as a pan-disability term, starting in the 1970s. It made its way into the performing arts in the 90s, and then academic crip theory from there. This activist tradition has been using crip in a pan-disability sense for a long time at this point -- much longer than cripplepunk (coined 2014). Terms like crip time and crip labour come from this pan-disability framework.

Crip continues to be a pan-disability organizing term, such as in #CripTheVote and Crips for eSims for Gaza. Tumblr may skew towards cripplepunk but other spaces lean a lot more towards the pan-disability context - all of the in-person activism I've participated in has uncontroversially understood crip as pan-disability. 🤷

Honestly, I'm not sure what is best going forward when it comes to the cripple usage question. 😵‍💫 Crip is a word with a very well established pan-disability sense.

And it's clear from the survey responses that it resonates with the vast majority of disabled intersex respondents. I didn't think to ask people why - I can only guess that some individuals identified with crip out of the pan-disability sense, and others out of a sense that intersex is a physical disability.

For anybody who wants a breakdown of the ratings of the candidate terms, here are the averages (weighted so people who identified with a given use case / column had a bit more of a "vote"). The use case of intersex-in-disabilty-community is the column titled "COMM".

As always, my flag designs are public domain unless otherwise noted. You are 100% welcome to repost the flag and its definition without all my Discoursing.

I have one more post to write up in this series! We're nearly done! 😅 Thank you for reading, thanks once again to the survey respondents, @scifimagpie, and I'd also like to thank the archival blogs I keep tagging repeatedly for this 💜