#vastly

"'It's a shame we couldn't find the index,' our vastly freckled doctor said."

I've seen posts imply having a DSD is separate of being intersex, that it's something you can identify into if you just Feel like you don't meet the convention of a male or female without having a DSD but whereas gender identity is the innate behaviour, intersex is the external, physical, bodily version of that. Thus every third woman with PCOS that gives her body hair insists they're intersex etc. Because to them it means "I don't look fully like the sex I am" as opposed to genuinely having mixed chromosomes and sex organs. That it's just surface level beauty standards they "fail" to meet that puts them "between." Or it's when an organ doesn't function like normal. Under this view, having cancer is intersex because it's not typical for men or women to have it. Erectile dysfunction. Amenorrhea or ovarian cysts. These things alone are not DSDs.

I don't think it's something we can argue with at this point, and I'm kind of tired of trying to defend the term (which the medical community considers outdated anyway). I definitely consider it more descriptive than prescriptive in many cases. Not everyone with a condition that causes an "intersex" appearance will be intersex. Just like people can have more "masculine" or "feminine" features. It doesn't mean anything about their sex, and is surface. They're not mixed with male and female from this.

Most are regular men and women, XX, XY, with slight clitoromegaly or extra body hair so on. The conditions alone do not create a DSD or warrant a DSD diagnosis which is why they are separate. Because human bodies can have variation.

I maintain that being an intersexed person is different in that the appearance of the genitals etc has to be caused directly by the amount of androgen exposure, mix of chromosomes or sex organs you have from birth.

My reality is not ideological. I don't "identify" as intersex. I am intersexed. Or I would be if that term still applied. It just doesn't suit anymore due to this shift. The larpers and fake statistics are too loud.

\/ - Queen of Blades: A Kitana Montage - MORTAL KOMBAT 11

first I noticed that if I could see a character so positively, for his sweetness, even though he had gone through Very Bad Stuff, and even let people see it -- maybe i could imaging seeing myself or that i could be seen that way, instead of as a blank screen my mind projected constant repulsion and brokenness onto. as i became less afraid to see myself, i left my body less at times of interaction, and began to see the positive things others claimed they did that had perplexed me. that’s been an “upward spiral.”

then, i read zach describe jared’s resilience as being like the inflatable clown toys that you punch but always pop back up. “oh,” i thought, “if that’s the definition of resilience, rather than what I’d thought (total heroic recovery from your past) --- i guess i do have it then.” i’d never thought of myself that way before.

thinking about how jared’s fragmented identities relate has made it easier to open the door to letting some of my split-off parts tiptoe back in, and practice holding them at the same time, rather than being dizzied and frightened by the contradictions.

(gulp) reading the jarrich porn the wonderful and brave members of this fandom have written is beginning to help me understand some of my own crossed wires a bit better.