#interfeminism

Happy Pride Month everyone!! This Pride Month, don't forget about intersex people!! Intersex people aren't some weird anomaly nor a fictional thing, we are real and we deserve a voice and a space and a community. Intersex people may be straight or not (including lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, or any other sexuality)! They also might be cis or trans or neither or both!! Intersex gender identities can have a very wide variety just like anyone else, and this may be exacerbated by frequently being inconsistently gendered or raised as one gender when their body has traits as what other people may view as the "opposite" (though really men and women aren't all that different so I don't really think there is an opposite, but that's not what this post is about). There are disabled intersex people, intersex people of colour, fat intersex people, old intersex people, young intersex people, and any other type of intersex person you can imagine! It is very possible that you know an intersex person even if you (or even they) don't know it.

Honestly the internet becomes a lot less anger-inducing and a lot more generally depressing when you approach batshit out-of-left-field seemingly bad faith takes, not with assuming the person behind them is some intrinsic evil failing to be "correctly enlightened" - but a hurt person, projecting their hurt in the only way they know how to do in the modern online culture of oversharing, overgeneralizing and needing everything to be poignantly tied to some flavor of "activism."

Begging people to stop referencing the radical feminist theory of "sexed socialization" ("male socialization" vs "female socialization"), and fighting for it under a new definition, when they really just mean "socially-imposed gender" ("socialized as a girl", "socialized as a boy.")

Social construction of biological sex is more than an abstract observation: it is a physical reality that many intersex people go through. Because society makes no provision for the existence of people whose anatomical characteristics do not neatly fit into male or female, they are routinely mutilated by medical professionals and manipulated into living as their assigned sex. Intersex people are usually not given an opportunity to decide for themselves how they wish to live and whether or not they want surgical or hormonal “correction.” Many intersex people find it appalling that they had no say in such a major life decision, whether or not their gender identity happen to match their assigned sex. We believe that genital mutilation of intersex children is inherently abusive because it unnecessarily violates the integrity of their bodies without proper consent. The issue is not even whether or not the sex one was assigned matches her or his gender identity; it is whether or not intersex people are given real choice over what happens to their bodies. Trans people feel dissatisfied with the sex assigned to them without their consent according to the simplistic medical standard. Trans people are diverse: some identify and live as members of the sex different from what was assigned to them by medical authorities, either with or without medical intervention, while others identify with neither or both of male and female sexes. Trans liberation is about taking back the right to define ourselves from medical, religious and political authorities. Transfeminism views any method of assigning sex to be socially and politically constructed, and advocates a social arrangement where one is free to assign her or his own sex (or non-sex, for that matter).

This poll is looking for the opinions of ONLY intersex people

Happy International Women's Day!

I find it not only helpful but necessary for transfeminism to go hand in hand with interfeminism. Not only is the plight for both groups similar, but there is a large amount of overlap. I am someone who is both transfeminine and intersex. These two aspects of my identity have resulted in various instances of oppression and bigotry against me in my life.