#perinormativity

I do support intersex transfems and I don't demand to know any trans or intersex person's AGAB because that is intersexist and transphobic. You do not need to identify yourself by your AGAB. Stop doing that. You would find that I support you just as vehemently as any other intersex trans person if you stopped being pissed off I don't exclude people like this in my trans activism.

This diagram makes the rounds periodically as an illustration of how sex development is complicated. Unfortunately, I don't think people really give it a close look, because it is incredibly intersexist.

The first thing to know about this diagram is it advocates for intersex genital mutilation. Here are actual boxes in the diagram:

"Genitals can be modified to look more typically female" is written in the part about how CAH looks at birth. "Dysgenic gonad and testis can be removed and genitals modified to look female" is under MGD at birth. "Dysgenic gonad can be removed and genitals modified to look male" is ALSO under MGD at birth and under PAIS.

Let's be clear here. This diagram is advocating that *babies* should be put through genital mutilation that causes permanent nerve damage, just so the babies can look "normal". 🤬

It also advocates removing gonads from babies, because they're the "wrong" ones. 🤬

The same diagram also advocates putting intersex youths on HRT to "promote (male/female) characteristics" or "regulate effects of [one's natural but apparently incorrect] male hormones". Again, coercive medical shit used to try and make our bodies conform to perinormativity without regard for our bodily autonomy, gender identity, goals, etc. 👀

Speaking of gender. The text that looks like the title of the diagram is the infobox on "the gender spectrum", which visually makes this seem about gender rather than sex. 🤨 This infobox also sucks: it defines trans, cis, and nonbinary, without any regard for how intersex people identify. I assume it's there to try explain to ignorant people that intersex is not gender, but in doing so it totally forgets that intersex people have gender and we often don't fit into these definitions of trans/nb/cis! It really reflects a view that intersex people aren't people with experiences and identities, we are just anatomical oddities. 🙃

The descriptions in the diagram are also gratuitously gendered. Like, "male hormones" are used rather than androgens, "female hormones" are used rather than estrogens, and there's vague shit like "male characteristics" (which ones?). 👀

Unsurprisingly, intersex variations are referred to by their pathologizing names, and they're called "intersex conditions" rather than variations. Language in the diagram throws around loaded shit like "biological male" (as in, intersex people are not). 🙃

Option One (1): Progressive language that's trying to be inclusive, but stops short and likely falls into the trap of perinormativity. (link) You know how folks tend to use ASAB as a new version of "(biological) male/female"? That nonsense.

Sorry if this is . Venty, I’m just so happy to see a blog dedicated to CAH and its varieties

NCAH culture is...

My project for myself this evening was to sit down and think through the different terms for not-intersex so that I could just pick one, be consistent, and also be satisfied that my choice had an actual rationale that I could explain to others. (TLDR: I landed on perisex.)

So likely this is because I'm not American but it wasn't until I joined tumblr and started lurking in the intersex tags that I encountered the term perisex. I'd only ever encountered endosex used in meatspace, and dyadic I'd seen in glossaries but not actually used in any text I'd read.

And I like endosex, honestly. My formal science training has me feeling like endo is a better contrast to inter than peri is.

(Google trends confirms my sense that perisex is an Americanism. Endosex appears to be the more common search term in the rest of the world.)

But what has tipped the scales for me in sitting down and trying to reason out a choice so I can be consistent, is that endonormative as a term is already taken. Linguists have been using it for something completely different for ages and it's just going to clash.

Similarly "endo" on its own also has a lot of ambiguity in the queer community - usually I see it as shorthand for endocrinologist. There's also ambiguity with endogenic systems.

In contrast, perinormative only ever gets used to talk about how society expects a non-intersex body. Perisex might be a newer word than endosex but from the google trends it's catching on, becoming the more searched of the two since 2022.

As for dyadic - I've never liked it. Again this is probably my science training here but to me dyadic means a pair, a group of two. It to me implies that humans come in pairs - male and female - and this pairing is needed to form a complete dyad.

To me "dyadic" as a term implies that: 1. People are incomplete without a het pairing (single people are valid!). Hearing intersex people refer to perisex people as "dyads" to me really drives this home, like the perisex people exist only to get paired off with some other person to be complete. 2. Only perisex people can be in a pairing (intersex people can be in relationships!) 3. Only perisex people can reproduce (many intersex people can!) 4. Species with sexual reproduction can only ever have two sexes (nope! There are species that have only one sex that can reproduce sexually, there are also many nifty fungi out there with more than two sexes)

None of that sits well with me. I also just don't like it for symmetry reasons - we contrast heterosexual with homosexual, transgender with cisgender, it just seems weird to me to buck the trend and contrast intersex with dyadic?

And because it doesn't follow those trends we can't leverage similar language for other queer identities. Perisex and endosex let us start talking about perinormativity/endonormativity easily and leverage what people already know about cisnormativity and heteronormativity. Dyadic doesn't have that.

No, mesosex should be thought of as a subset of intersex. I'd just say intersex. 👍️

I'm gonna give you a wall of text of context so upfront a TLDR: 😅

TLDR: positioning mesosex as in between perisex and intersex is like positioning bisexual as in between queer and not-queer. Intersex people are organizing for inclusive views of intersex and trying to create a middle ground between intersex & perisex plays into conservative efforts to divide and conquer us. 🧑‍🏫

So a big difference between being intersex and being trans/nonbinary comes from the role of medicine being far, far more powerful in its control and oppression of intersex people. In a lot of ways intersex is more like disability than like other queer identities. So much of intersex identity is gatekept by doctors. Intersex people are often told they're intersex by a doctor in a context of telling them they are disordered and broken. Fostering community amongst intersex people is hard because so many of us have been conditioned by doctors to think of themselves as rare freaks.

Right now we in the intersex community are fighting a kind of desperate battle for people to understand that it is intersex people who decide who is and isn't intersex, as opposed to it being up to doctors. And the intersex community consistently says that people with PCOS, Poland Syndrome, or even no diagnosis, who feel that their experiences line up with being intersex are intersex.

Meanwhile TERFs and other conservatives are pushing real hard to keep the definition of intersex as narrow as possible. They don't want intersex people to be common or for us to find community. They're invested in a narrative that intersex people are rare, and are disorderd men/women.

Right now, the track record of treating mesosex as not intersex has unfortunately been that it reinforces those conservative narratives. It's gotten used to imply that people with PCOS aren't really intersex, that they are mesosex instead. Same for undiagnosed intersex people. 😭

Even though this is not what I intended for the term, seeing what's happened with it in the wild it's been honestly scary and upsetting seeing this term get weaponized against an inclusive view of what intersex means. (And more experienced intersex folks raised concern about this well in advance 😨.)

Intersex being an umbrella category I think there is value in having microlabels within the umbrella category, which is why I updated my definition of mesosex rather than abandon the term altogether.

But yeah I would definitely steer far away from treating mesosex as though it's in between intersex and perisex - it's really not at all analogous to being nonbinary. I'd say a better analogy is that treating mesosex as if it is between intersex and perisex is like treating bisexual as being in between queer and non-queer.