intersexandout

[intersexandout]

How Intersex People Identify

Co-authored by Dana Zzyym.

Much has been said recently, on the heels of all the media attention on Caitlin Jenner and Rachel Dolezal, about the issue of how people “identify”. Meanwhile, Intersex people have also been getting attention in the media, and an increasing amount of folks are finally aware of the fact that we exist. Given both these factors, it seems like a good time to discuss where Intersex people fall into the discussion of “identifying” oneself. First off, in case you still haven’t heard of us: intersex people are born with bodies that are not typically or exclusively male or female. Although many folks are just recently learning about us, our existence is nothing new, but rather, dates back to the beginning of humanity. We were known as hermaphrodites in ancient times, and we’re just another example of the natural diversity of the human species. [Note: For all you grammar nerds and/or careful readers out there, you may notice that the word “intersex” is sometimes capitalized in this piece and sometimes not; that’s because one of us likes to capitalize the word as an expression of pride, and the other, while also proud, is more of stickler for grammatical correctness.] Before diving in, we want to note that lots of folks, both intersex and not, feel that intersex people shouldn't have to "identify" as such: we just are intersex because we were born that way. It's a biology based viewpoint similar to the way that people born with male sex characteristics don't have to "identify" as "men" because it's just assumed that they are. (Note we didn't say that their "biological sex" was male, but that they have male "sex characteristics". Cool huh? More on that soon in another essay.) At the same time, it has also been increasingly stated that not all people who are born Intersex “identify” as intersex, but rather, as men or women. It makes perfect sense to those of us who know, love, and/or support trans people. We realize folks don’t always grow up to identify as the gender associated with the biological sex traits they were born with. However, it’s very important to recognize that some of us who were born intersex also identify as such. That may seem obvious, but it bears repeating, given popular claims that the vast majority of us have binary gender identities, and that intersex people are not part of the non-binary gender community. We are very aware, from personal as well as advocacy experience, that it’s difficult to identify as something that hasn't been socially recognized or accepted. In fact, we’ve often been told by folks just discovering that they were born Intersex that they’ve been identifying as men or women simply because those were the only categories available to them. Indeed, that’s how openly gender fluid actress Ruby Rose recently answered the question when it was put to her character on the popular television series Orange is the New Black. Piper asks, “You don’t consider yourself to be a woman?” and Stella, Rose’s character, responds, “I do, but only because my options are limited.” Given the limited options, and the fact that most intersex children are particularly pressured to identify as either boys or girls, it’s easy to see why many of us would do so as adults. Saying that most intersex people do not identify as intersex without taking these significant social factors into account is like having said, “most homosexuals do not identify as gay or lesbian”, before it was common, accepted or safe for them to do so. Gays and lesbians have always existed, long before they began “identifying” as such, and it’s important to keep in mind that the same is true for intersex people. If we don’t, we run the risk of confusing folks into thinking that, since most of us don’t “identify” as intersex, then non-consensual “normalizing" surgeries are okay as long as we pick the “right one”. (Mind you, this reasoning is faulty as it misses the central human rights issue, which is that only we have the right to make such decisions about our bodies. Trust me though; I've often seen it.) The truth is, humans are a complex bunch, and intersex people, like all humans, identify our gender in a variety of ways and should have the right to do so. Some even prefer not to “identify” at all, stating that they were born intersex and do not have to “identify” as such or as any particular gender identity. Interestingly, there’s now a “gender identity” which describes this experience: agender. Also, humans are required to legally identify their gender, and almost all languages use pronouns that are gendered in some way. So even if we want to be genderless, it’s not yet entirely possible to escape identifying it, or having it identified for us. Here, then, is a breakdown of the three main ways in which Intersex people “identify” our gender. 1. Some intersex people identify with the gender associated with the sex they were assigned at birth (male or female). They express this with the terms “male” or “female”, “man” or “woman”, and/or “intersex man” or “intersex woman”. Tran and intersex scholar Cary Gabriel Costello has suggested the term “ipso gender”  for intersex people with this experience to distinguish them from non-intersex people who share it, typically known as “cisgender”. (For those of you till unfamiliar with the term, "cisgender" was recently added to the Oxford Dictionary, and is defined as, "Denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity conforms with the gender that corresponds to their biological sex; not transgender.") As discussed in one of our earlier essays, intersex people are vulnerable to extreme forms of violence and discrimination (such as non-consensual "normalizing" surgeries) due to the prejudice against the gender that corresponds to our biological sex characteristics. This does not correspond with the experience of "cisgender privilege", and holds true whether or not we have normative gender identities or expressions. 2. Some Intersex people identify as the gender associated with the ”opposite” sex as the one they were assigned at birth. They, too, may express this with the terms “male’ or “female”, “man” or “woman”, and/or “intersex man” or “intersex woman”. In addition, some of the intersex people in this category identify as trans, and may say they are both trans and intersex. 3. Some intersex people – including the authors of this piece -- identify as neither men or women, both men and women, or both. We may express this with the terms, “non-binary Intersex people”, "herms", "genderqueer", "gender fluid" and other non-binary gender identities, or, simply, “intersex”. Those of us in this group feel that our non-binary gender identity matches our original non-binary sex characteristics. We have sometimes been further marginalized, even within the intersex community, because both our bodies and our gender identities vary from gender norms. We also note that this outcome is exactly what those who promote Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM) are trying to avoid by subjecting intersex infants and minors to surgical and hormonal “normalization”. They incorrectly assume that changing our bodies will produce hetero-normative, gender-normative outcomes. It doesn’t. We know tons of intersex people whom, regardless of being subjected to IGM, have grown up to be queer - and unless you’re a big bigot you should realize that there’s nothing wrong with that! Some of you may be noticing that the intersex folks in this third category could be defined as cisgender because our gender identity matches our natal biological sex characteristics. However, just like intersex folks with binary gender identities, we do not experience cisgender privilege. In short, although created with the good intention of pointing to and dismantling the discrimination that trans people face, the term cisgender is based on the erroneously binary model of sex, and thus only works, as intended, if you pretend that intersex people don’t exist. (If you want to learn more about why, you can find an in-depth explanation here.) Back to the issue of how we “identify”, some folks have criticized intersex people who identify their gender as Intersex, stating this is not appropriate since it’s a biological term. In fact, one of us even wrote a blog post about these linguistic issues, suggesting that those of us with a non-binary gender identity use “herm”. However, biological sex and gender terms became interchangeable in the U.S. legal system when the first trans person was allowed to change their gender marker: rather than using “man” or “woman” to describe their new legal gender, the terms “male” or “female” were, and continue to be, used. Also, many trans people today use the biological terms male and female in social discourse to describe their gender identity. Basically, when it comes to how humans live their lives and are legally identified, “sex” and “gender” and the terms associated with them are conflated and used interchangeably. Thus, in an equal society, Intersex people should be similarly allowed to use our biological term to identify our gender if we wish. In fact, we believe that visibility and acceptance of intersex people as whole individuals with our own unique gender is critical towards ending the severe forms of oppression we are subjected to, including Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM). This is demonstrated by the fact that while enormous efforts have been made in the U.S. to spread gender binary conforming beliefs about intersex people, these claims haven’t slowed down the practice of non-consensual surgeries/IGM. As Audre Lorde so brilliantly put it, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. In other words, we can’t stop “normalization” of intersex people by trying to convince doctors and parents that we’ll all grow up to have “normal” – i.e. binary -- gender identities. The Intersex Campaign for Equality, a.k.a. OII-USA, believes that all gender identities are normal and equal, and that everyone deserves the right to be and identify as who they are. Further, we believe that in order to end oppression of Intersex people, including IGM, we must spread awareness of the fact that Intersex people identify as males, females, AND intersex persons – and that that is okay! Like all people, Intersex people are a diverse bunch, with a wide range of identities. We support them all, and encourage you to do the same. :) Originally published: http://hidaviloria.com/how-intersex-people-identify-co-written-with-dana-zzyym/

#intersex #intersex identity #intersex gender #intersex identify

[intersexandout]

These is the fantastic publishing house that will be publishing my memoir Born Both. Interestingly, their parent company is in France, and that is where the selfie that I use as my photo for this blog (& many other places), was taken. :) 

[intersexandout]

Mom, I did it: my book’s going to be published!

Some folks have written to ask why I haven't had any posts on my blog Intersex and Out for so long, so I thought I'd share the good news with everyone: it's because I was busy perfecting my memoir proposal so my agent could shop it and sell it to a major publisher! I went with the fantastic Hatchette Book Group, home of bestsellers like I Am Mulala, celebrity memoirists like Steven Colbert and Willie Nelson, and bestselling authors J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, Joyce Meyer, Nelson DeMille, and many, many more.

Shortly before my mom went into a coma and passed away in January, 2014, I had a conversation with her about how happy I was that I had found a fabulous literary agent who believed  that my memoir would be picked up by a major publisher. I told her that there were no guarantees, as everyone had told me how hard this was to do these days. She said, "Hida Patricia" (as she always called me), "tell yourself it has already happened."

I responded that I wasn't going to do that, because that approach hadn't always worked out for me. I told her that, instead, I just wanted to celebrate exactly where I was at that moment: that an agent who was great at picking books believed in my writing after reading the manuscript I had sent her. She said, "Okay, I understand, but I know it will."

I am comforted by all those who say that she knows, even from the afterlife, but I still wish, so very, very much, that she was here on this planet for me to share the news with her that she was right. :( :)

I am honored to have the quality of my writing recognized by such a top-notch publishing house, and incredibly grateful to be able to continue spreading awareness about intersex and gender variant people by sharing my story with the world on this level.

As some of you know, the title of my memoir has changed several times over the years. (And yes, it's been YEARS. I'm easily distracted by all the important activism to be done, by life, by finding a way to pay the bills, etceteras.) Even now, I've been warned by seasoned authors that the title may be changed before publication, but for now, it's Born Both: An Intersex Memoir.

I chose this title because it addresses what I think is the greatest challenge that intersex people face: the discrimination and/or horrific violence we are subjected to, often as infants, if we are born with sex characteristics that are considered both male and female. Also, it addressed the question,  "Are you a boy or a girl?", which I have been asked over the years as an androgynous, gender fluid person ("gender fluid" means your gender identity and presentation shifts).

This question is often asked unkindly, and the first time I heard it I got pissed. After all, I was raised in a world that rewards those who express binary sex and gender, and I struggled to decide which one of the two options I "really"  was.  But as my self-acceptance of the fact that I am non-binary-- both in sex and gender --  grew, I came to the place where the question no longer bothered me. In fact, I almost wanted someone to ask me again, so I could answer, simply, "I'm both." :)

Due to the extensive time given to preparing for book releases, etc., the release date isn't until January 24, 2017, but I believe that, as with all things in my life, the timing will be perfect. I'll be working hard on the final draft in the coming months, but I'll do my best to put out new essays in the meantime.

I want to extend an ENORMOUS THANK YOU to all those who encouraged me and believed in me over the years, including my mom, who I dedicate this post to. It's been a long, rocky ride, and I appreciate your support from the bottom of my heart. <3

#intersex #intersex book #intersex memoir #Intersex hida viloria

[intersexandout]

New Advocate Essay: Bullying Intersex Women Athletes with High T

Well, they changed my original title - “Bullying By Any Other Name: What’s Really Behind Regulations for Women with High Testosterone” - to, “Stop Freaking Out About Female Intersex Athletes”, but otherwise I’m thrilled to have this essay run in the Advocate! (Read here: http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/09/18/op-ed-stop-freaking-out-about-female-intersex-athletes).

It elaborates on the issue in all the ways I didn’t have time to during my Aljazeera interview two weeks ago, particularly how examining intersex women’s actual performance records, as well as how sporting policies work, reveals that it's prejudice, not “fairness”, truly informing and enabling the current regulations.

I’m also thrilled they included a link to the petition to Let Dutee Run. Indian athlete Dutee Chand, the latest victim of these discriminatory regulations, has refused to alter her body in order to compete, and needs our support fighting the ruling against her. Please sign and share: https://www.change.org/p/let-dutee-run-don-t-ban-women-athletes-for-high-natural-testosterone

Enjoy!

#advocate intersex athletes #women athletes high testosterone #stop freaking out about intersex #katrina karkazis women sports regulations #dutee chand #payoshni mitra #NYU Sports & Policy Program intersex

[intersexandout]

Post-Aljazeera, intersex athletes, & letting Dutee run!

So I showed my Aljazeera interview to the lovely woman I'm dating this morning, and it left me with some thoughts to share. The interview was about the IOC & IAAF's regulations for women athletes with naturally high testosterone levels, which ban them from competing as women unless they undergo medically unnecessary procedures to lower their T to "normal" female levels. (Watch here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw1ZTKAAZLcNck5UOXlIaUlTZFk/preview). First off, hurray to the producers for putting this on, and to host Malika Bilal for doing such an amazing job orchestrating all the guests with such grace as the debate heated up. And heat up it did?! Fortunately, everyone was cordial -- even me when intersex women were being discussed in opposition to "normal, healthy women" (twice), & called "individuals with inborn errors". Egads! I know doctors are used to dissecting everyone and labeling things as disorders, but really, what other group of people is referred to that way in the media? I do give kudos though to Dr. Ritzen for later apologizing for framing us as abnormal. That was good. Yes, we are not the "norm", but as I've pointed out many times (I think the first time, publicly, on film, was during my testimony at the SF Human Rights Commission's hearing on intersex people, in 2004), people who fall outside the "norm" in ways that are culturally valued are never called "abnormal". For example, how many times have you heard someone called "abnormally intelligent" or "abnormally beautiful". Second, I want to clarify for the record that I did make a mistake about men with XYY, or Diplo: they do not have high testosterone levels. I read that when I originally learned about this variation, but upon more research I have found that was incorrect. That said, Dr Ritzen and the other medical experts that consult or work for the IOC &/or IAAF (the two sporting bodies that have regulations for women with naturally high testosterone levels) have stated that there's no proof that high T levels give men OR women a competitive advantage, and so it's biased to test women for this and not men. Third, kudos to four time Olympian turned attorney Cameron Myler for stating, about the policy, "one issue that I have with it... is that it gives the opportunity to a National Olympic committee to, quote, 'actively investigate any perceived deviation in sex characteristics'. That seems to me like its incredibly subjective, and I'm not certain how that is interpreted." She also went on to say that, "if there's going to be a rule I would like that everyone be subject(ed) to it equally." Thank you! I believe she's the first female athlete to publicly comment about the unfair way in which the current regulations target athletes on a case-by-case, "upon suspicion" basis. Lastly -- because it's Saturday and time to resume my social life again :) -- I'll have an essay coming out soon that breaks this issue down in detail, but I want to make clear, since some folks have asked, that the reason I've been referring to these athletes as "women" instead of "intersex women" is because that's how they identify themselves. Are the traits that these women are being banned for intersex traits? Yes, and I'm very clear about that in my articles on this topic. But I'm also not into disrespecting someone's way of identifying, & we know that in regular speech most people use the non-biological gender labels "man" or "woman", rather than "male" or "female", so it makes sense to me to call people with intersex biology/anatomy/traits "men" or women", if that's how they see themselves and what they use. Some intersex peeps, including myself, use "herm" (short for hermaphrodite) rather than "man" or "woman", for obvious reasons. However, that's less common, and it's also currently kind of in that "we can use it but others can't" place, FYI. So that's it for this for now. Happy Saturday to all you lovely men, women and herms out there, and if you feel like watching something engaging, educational and short (about a half hour), please check out the Aljazeera interview. It also features fabulous intersex allies Katrina Karkazis (author of the excellent resource Fixing Sex), and Dr. Payoshni Mitra, who is advising the latest victim of these regulations, Indian runner Dutee Chand. They both made so many excellent points that it's too hard to list them all here. Better yet, if you want to support Dutee -- who is currently fighting to overthrow the ruling to ban her from competing -- please sign an share the petition started by Karkazis, Mitra, & Bruce Kidd. https://www.change.org/p/let-dutee-run-don-t-ban-women-athletes-for-high-natural-testosterone Dutee is bravely standing up against the regulations, refusing to alter her natural gifts in order to compete, and I cannot say how impressed I am with her and everyone that has come to her side. Remember, these types of regulations have existed for decades and been overthrown in the past. We can do it again. TX! Great link: http://www.letduteerun.org

#intersex #aljazeera intersex #the stream intersex #aljazeera athletes high testosterone women #katrin karkazis aljazeera #payoshin mitra aljazera #let dutee run #dutee chand #india women athlees #unfair sports regualtions women #hida viloria aljazeera #hida viloria women testosterone

[intersexandout]

Caught in the Gender Binary Blind Spot: Intersex Erasure in Cisgender Rhetoric

Earlier this month, two intersex blog posts about the term “cisgender” reminded me that it’s high time we talk about how current cisgender rhetoric facilitates intersex erasure. But wait, how does it do that? you might be asking. I thought cisgender was the new rage in progressive gender terminology? Well, let me explain.

For those of you new to the term, when I first found myself looking up “cisgender” (with a group of trans* folks at a 2009 New Year’s Eve party), wikipedia defined it as, “describing gender identity where individuals’ experiences of their own gender matches that of their sex at birth.” (FYI, before “cisgender” emerged, people would just say “non-trans*” to describe that experience.)

The framing of all non-trans*, presumably gender-normative, people as cisgender allows one to talk about “cisgender privilege”, which means, basically, the benefits experienced by people that fit into the social gender norms attributed to their biological sex. It’s the difference, for example, between being born into a female body & growing up to look & feel like Angelina Jolie, versus being born into a female body & growing up to feel and look (or want to look) like The Rock. People whose gender identity and expression conforms to the norms attributed to their biological sex face less challenges than those whose gender identity and expressions doesn’t.

But if you are born intersex, this doesn’t actually apply to you because there are no gender norms attributed to your biological sex as society doesn’t even acknowledge that it exists. Indeed, as “cis” means “on this side of”, and “trans” means, “on the other side of”, those of us who are not on either side of this binary framework of sex are inherently excluded from cisgender rhetoric. And note, we didn’t used to be, back when people simply said “trans*” or “non-trans*”.

While it is useful to distinguish between gender-normative and gender-variant people, the term cisgender only successfully does so if you pretend that intersex people and other gender variant folks don’t exist. For example, where do butch lesbians who proudly identify as female fit into the equation? Technically they’re cisgender, not trans*, because they identify as their biological sex, but they don’t experience cisgender privilege. I can think of a lot of males in the same boat. They’re not trans*but they’re not really cisgender either, according to “cisgender privilege” rhetoric. They fall into a grey zone that the term’s proponents did not take into account, which I call the gender binary blind spot.

As an intersex person with a natal “body/identity match”, I too fall into this gender binary blind spot. I noticed it the minute I announced, at the aforementioned New Year’s Eve party, “So I guess I would be cisgender then, because I was born intersex and I feel intersex.” Some people seemed bothered by my statement, because it troubles the intended use of the term cisgender, and specifically “cisgender privilege”.

You see, like butch lesbians, although I have the classic cisgender body/identity match, and am thus not trans*, I’m also not gender-normative. I’m cisgender, yet I do not experience “cisgender privilege”, but the opposite: the fact that I was born intersex immediately put me at a grave disadvantage in terms of gender. For no matter how “normatively gendered” an intersex person may grow up to look and/or identify, we are often immediately vulnerable, at birth, to non-consensual, medically unnecessary, cosmetic genital surgeries (a.k.a. Intersex Genital Mutilation/IGM).

In addition, unlike others whose bodies and gender identities “match”, when intersex people experience this alignment it can result in problems similar to gender dysphoria. For example, I struggled for well over a decade with deep confusion around my gender identity – not, like most, because it doesn’t match my body, but because it does! This is because of the fact that growing up feeling intersex in a male-female only world so unwelcoming of intersex people that modern society has tried to systematically eliminate us is challenging, and identifying and living openly as intersex is extremely difficult. Indeed, in today’s cultural climate, simply being born intersex is viewed as subversive.

The challenges to the application of cisgender rhetoric are resolved if intersex people (as well as other gender variant folks) identify as trans*, but intersex people have yet to be acknowledged by society at large because of how our existence troubles deeply rooted cultural beliefs about biological sex, gender and sexuality. Thus defining ourselves as trans* before our existence is generally understood and acknowledged simply serves to exacerbate our social invisibility. In addition, on a personal level, after years spent overcoming intersexphobia in order to truly embrace my non-binary identity, I want to revel in, rather than redefine, it.

If we are endeavoring towards an accurate, equanimous view of sex and gender, gender studies rhetoric shouldincorporate the reality of all gender variant people rather than erase it. However, I noticed at some point following that New Year’s Eve party that the definition of cisgender had changed in a way that further erased, rather than acknowledged, the intersex community. Today, wikipedia defines the term cisgender as used to, “describe related types of gender identity where individuals’ experiences of their own gender match the sex they were assigned at birth.”

The issues of intersex erasure in this current cisgender definition are twofold. 1. The term diminishes awareness of the gender disadvantage that intersex people experience, via IGM, as compared to those born with male or female bodies. 2. The term linguistically denies intersex people the possibility provided to others of experiencing a cisgender body/identity match, thus placing intersex people in an innately unequal position, as compared to those born male or female.

1. Obfuscation of Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM)

Many have discussed and some, such as intersex academics Morgan Holmes and Cary Gabriel Costello, have written about the fact that intersex people who were assigned male or female at birth and feel like men or women as adults do not experience cisgender privilege. As Costello, who is also a trans* and intersex blogger, explains in a recent post to The Intersex Roadshow, “Intersex children are born neither male nor female, but are forced into a binary sex category by a contemporary social ideology that says this is mandatory. Many are then subjected to infant sex assignment surgery to try to make their bodies conform to their assigned sex…. Just because a person grows up to identify with the sex they were assigned at birth does not mean they will feel surgeries they were subjected to were appropriate. Loss of potential fertility and loss of capacity for sexual sensation are prices that they may not consider worth the result of a somewhat-more-sex-conforming body….” http://intersexroadshow.blogspot.com/2014/08/cis-gender-trans-gender-and-intersex.html

However, the “sex assigned at birth” definition positions intersex folks who identify with the sex assigned to them at birth as cisgender, and thus recipients of cisgender privilege, despite the fact that they have typically undergone IGM, or at the very least been at risk to it. In contrast, under the original ”sex at birth” definition of cisgender, intersex people who grow up to identify as men or women are deemed trans*, because they do not experience a body/identity match. While this avoids the linguistic conflict of defining people as cisgender who do not experience cisgender privilege, the approach coercively assigns gender – in this case trans* gender identity – which is inherently problematic.

2. Obfuscation of intersex biological sex variation and non-binary intersex identity

By replacing the words “sex at birth” in the original definition with “sex assigned at birth”, intersex bodies are disappeared, replaced by the male or female ones assigned to us. Intersex people such as myself no longer experience a body/identity match because our bodies have been eradicated in favor of our “sex assigned at birth”, which is never intersex. (Note: as of November 1, 2013, intersex babies have been acknowledged in Germany — though not as “intersex”, but simply as a blank. If an intersex baby cannot be easily determined to be male or female, it can not be legally assigned as such on it’s birth certificate, unless a male or female body is surgically assigned via IGM. I examine these and other problems with the new German law in a separate essay, here. http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2013/11/06/op-ed-germany’s-third-gender-law-fails-equality.)

Ironically, the phrase “sex assigned at birth” comes directly from intersex activists, who have been using it for over two decades (intersex advocacy groups first emerged in the late ‘80’s in Australia and the U.K.) to refer to the sex that was surgically imposed on their bodies as infants. In the cisgender definition however, the phrase is employed for contrary means. Rather than being used to illustrate that some people are originally intersex at birth, not the male or female sex that is ‘assigned’ to them, the wording obfuscates intersex biological sex variance by utilizing only legally validated, male and female sex categories to define gender identity.

Due to deeply rooted cultural beliefs that biological sex consists of only “male” and “female”, the law acknowledges only women and men as citizens in almost all nations (Australia, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and, questionably, Germany, remain the exceptions). This in turn supports the medical establishment’s efforts to surgically eliminate intersex traits, and thus people, from society. These efforts are in effect a gendercide, and have been denounced as torture and acknowledged to be a human rights abuse.

Marginalized populations have historically had to assert their need for legal rights and acknowledgement, and today intersex people are in the formative stages of this process. It is thus deeply problematic that cisgender rhetoric utilizes the same two-sex legal system that promotes intersex gendercide.

Why should we define gender identity according to a faulty legal system, one that has only recently, in some locations, acknowledged LGBT people as equal citizens?Intersex people deserve the same right as trans* people to be acknowledged within gender studies and LGBT rhetoric as who we are before attaining legal validation. Thus if we create terms that define people whose identities match their bodies at birth as cisgender, then intersex people should be allowed the same right to identify as such that all other humans are afforded, rather than denied the possibility because we are not born male or female.

However, according to the “sex assigned at birth” definition, I am no longer cisgender but transgender, and this bothers me because I’m tired of societal efforts to redefine intersex people as something other than what we are. I am gender-variant, not because I have transitioned from one socially sanctioned body and/or identity to another, but rather because I have embraced being born with a body and identity that falls outside of these erroneously binary sex and gender norms. Thus, the term transgender does not describe who and what I am. I want to be accurately identified as intersex, rather than redefined as — or hidden within — a different population, for the same reasons that trans* people and others want to be defined as the gender they are: it feels good. Also, acknowledging intersex people is also a crucial step in ending Interex Genital Mutilation (IGM).

Under an inclusive linguistic framework, the question is not how do intersex people fit into cisgender rhetoric, but rather, why are we promoting false, binary conceptions of sex and gender by linguistically erasing, rather than acknowledging, the existence of intersex biological sex variation?

Fortunately some, like Costello, are making efforts towards inclusion. After a conversation in which we discussed these issues, he included an afterward to the aforementioned blog post which proposes an alternative that allows intersex people like myself, who experience a body/identity match, the equal opportunity to identify as cisgender. “If we were to add the term “ipso gender” to trans and cis gender, we could perhaps describe intersex experience more accurately. A cis gender intersex person would be one with an intermediate gender identity, since that “matches” their birth sex. An ipso gender intersex person would identify with the binary sex they were medically assigned (the social sex substituted for their intersex birth status being the same as their identified sex). And a trans gender intersex person would be one who identifies with the binary sex other than the one they were assigned by doctors.”

I find the addition of “ipso gender” an interesting solution. It speaks to the unique distinction between intersex people whose gender identity matches their assigned sex, and non-intersex people with this experience. It also, as stated above, deems intersex people capable of the same body/ gender identity match as everyone else. However, as Costello himself notes, it still does not resolve the challenges that intersex people pose to successfully discussing “cisgender privilege”, which I outlined earlier.

Conclusion:

The linguistic failures of the term “cisgender” illustrate the problems inherent in employing an erroneously binary biological sex and gender model to describe humans. In addition, the term’s employment of “sex assigned at birth” rhetoric obfuscates the existence of intersex biological sex variance (and thus, intersex people), as well as Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM). I thus suggest the terms “trans*” and “non-trans*” as a means of distinguishing between people who grow up with a gender identity that matches their biological sex at birth and those who don’t, as they’re accurate, they don’t coercively assign gender identity, and, as additional perk, they utilize a trans-affirming, trans-centric linguistic framework by defining all who are not trans* as “non-trans*” (just as all people of color were originally deemed “non-white” in a white-centric linguistic framework).

In addition, when distinguishing between people who experience gender privilege and those who don’t, I suggest the use of the terms “gender-normative” and “gender-variant”, as they too are accurate and don’t coercively assign gender identity. Using “gender normative/variant” terminology, butch lesbians can accurately be described as “gender variant”, for example, when examining gender privilege, rather than being recast as either cisgender or trans*. In trying to build a world that respects individuals’ right to identify their own gender, whatever it may be, it is critical that we use terminology that enables everyone to do so.

©Hida Viloria. August 18, 2014.

#intersex #cisgener #cis #gender identity #non-binary gender #intersex gender #intersex cisgender #gender studies rhetoric

[intersexandout]

The Gender that Dare Not Speak its Name

One of the icons of the queer community once said, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” I’m talking about the Western world’s first gay diva, the one and only, Oscar Wilde, whose wise words make me feel much better about missing last week’s blog post (as well as the “Wednesday” target this week, etc., etc., lol).

For those of you who (shockingly), may be unfamiliar with Wilde, he was a witty socialite and successful, respected writer back in the late 1800’s, who was basically tried and convicted of being gay (the official charges were “sodomy” and  “gross indecency”), and sentenced to two years hard labor. The trial left him bankrupt, and life in prison was so hard on him, that he died penniless, just three years after his release, at the age of only 46.

That Wilde, a renowned devotee of aesthetics (the study of art and beauty), ended his days in such a way – by mainly his own doing – is a striking example of the paradoxical nature of life. Before the trial, he was at the height of his career, having become one of England’s most successful playwrights, and he could have continued enjoying his success, and his lovers. But he decided to fight instead (and please forgive me if you know all about what I’m about to explain).

You see Wilde was not the one originally brought to trial for being gay. To the contrary, it was he who sued the father of his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel, because the father had called him a “sodomite”. (FYI, “sodomite” was derogatory, 1800’s speak for “gay”, and when I say Wilde’s love was “young”, I don’t mean underage: Douglas was sixteen years younger than Wilde, but a student at Oxford when they met.)

In order to avoid a two-year sentence, the accused had to prove that his description of Wilde was accurate, which he did during the notorious trial. It’s fascinating to think about why Wilde didn’t let the accusation slide –- given that it was true – but in any case, the fact that he went on the offensive instead is why I called him a diva.

And here’s where the paradox really thickens: had Wilde not been such a diva, he would’ve personally avoided prison, destitution and an early death, but the world would have been worse off for it. For it was his highly publicized trial that brought homosexuality under the global spotlight, for all to see. When asked by the judge what the line, “the love that dare not speak its name” meant (from a poem by Douglas, his lover), Wilde answered:

“The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare…. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “the love that dare not speak its name,” and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it…. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”

After a lifetime of enjoying luxury, pleasure, and success, Wilde placed the nail in his own coffin by defending homosexuality. Instead of denouncing, or at least denying, his behavior to save his ass, as one might expect from someone whose self-professed values had nothing to do with political self-sacrifice, he stood behind who and what he was, despite intense disapproval, and ended up doing time for it. That, my friends, is a badass.

But speaking of “the love that dare not speak its name”, today, intersex people are in the same position. We are “the gender that dare not speak its name”.  (And just to be clear, when I say “gender”, I mean it in the way that gender is used to refer to people, and is used synonymously with “sex” in many contexts, like in U.S. law, where “gender” is what goes on identification documents.)

Just as there was no easy way to refer to "gay" people in Wilde´s day, `there’s no easy way to refer to someone that’s not male or female today. People don’t know how to “speak our name”, literally. You can say, “he’s nice man,” or, “she’s a nice woman,” but what do you say for an intersex person? You can say just that, I guess – “they’re a nice intersex person”– but it doesn’t have the same ring you know? That’s because the words “man” and “woman” are nouns but “intersex” isn’t.

We can, and very often do, use “intersex women” or “intersex men” to describe ourselves, and it works great, just like “gay men” does.  In fact, many intersex people prefer that, because it keeps intersex people positioned within the masculine/feminine binary, which they identify with. It doesn’t frame us some kind of third sex or third gender or something.

The problem is we kind of are a third gender. I mean that’s the crux of our biggest human rights issue right? We are violated -- in the form of nonconsensual infant surgeries known as Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM) --- precisely because we are not male or female, the two current genders. And yes, I know better than most that we’re not a third sex per se, because biological sex is a continuum and if we wanted to accurately label it there would be tons of different sexes.

But gender is a social construct (we can argue biological sex is too, but it’s complicated and too long to do here), and all things being equal, if we created the gender identity terms, “man” for males, and “woman” for females, we should have also created a term for those who are not male or female. Oh wait! We did: hermaphrodite.  But a prominent psychologist by the name of John Money thought it would be better to stick with men and women and eliminate that gender category altogether, and he convinced the medical establishment to try and do that by surgically eliminating intersex bodies.

For a brief period we were coming out and proclaiming that’s what we are – hermaphrodites – but then some outspoken intersex folks in the United States declared “hermaphrodite” un-pc, so many of us stopped using it. And there it is, the major paradox. We need recognition in order to say, “This is what we are and we deserve equal treatment”, but the “this” that we are is still so disdained that we’re afraid to put ourselves under the spotlight by claiming it (just look at what happened to Wilde, after all).

Most of us position ourselves within the accepted binary construct of “men” and “women”, but the world sees us as otherwise anyway, and tries to “fix us” into normal men or women. And while we’ve been saying “don’t fix us” for over two decades, if we don’t proclaim that we are something other than the two current options, and that we should be accepted as that - like Wilde did around sexual orientation– then why would the powers that be think they should leave us in our non-binary state? (See what I mean?)

The bottom line is that while many intersex people end up looking and feeling like typical males or females/men or women, some of us don’t. Also, some of us don’t need medical tests to diagnose our otherwise undetectable differences because our bodies are visibly and obviously a blend of male and female, just like the old classic label suggests. What should we call ourselves? Shouldn’t we have a name? Isn’t invisibility a huge part of the problem, allowing our harms to go unaddressed, and our erasure to continue?

In the past we had “hermaphrodites”, and I personally wish the label hadn’t been bashed because, just like “men” and “women”, it’s a noun, and it’s the label most people are already familiar with. In fact, on a personal basis, I still often use it if I tell someone I’m intersex and they don’t know what that means, because it’s the fastest way to give them an accurate sense of what I’m talking about.

Since a lot of people apparently found the word insulting though, and the greater community doesn’t use it, some of us sometimes use “herm” as a reclaimed, shorter version. I wrote another blog about this, about wanting to use “herm”, but since then I’ve had all these women – specifically women that I’ve been romantically involved with – tell me they hate “herm”.  And when I ask myself if I want to adopt a label that my lovers hate, the answer, perhaps sadly (not badass enough?), is no. So back to the drawing board I go.

In his 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde wrote, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” I’m with Wilde when it comes to marginalized people. I don’t have the answers (well, I do have one potential solution I’ve been toying with, but that’s for another blog), all I’m saying is, it’s a problem. And its nature is paradoxical. We need visibility but we dare not speak our name.  Not like other folks can and do. Hmmm….

#intersex #intersex visibility #intersex gender #oscarwilde #darenotspeakitsname

[intersexandout]

The Importance of Allies

(Originally posted at: http://hidaviloria.com/the-importance-of-allies/) So I went to a baseball game for the first time in about 35 years yesterday, because the person who invited me is so cool she inspired some formerly nonexistent interest, and I actually had a great time! (Such a great time that this blog is being posted on Thursday, rather than the typical Wednesday, lol.) To be honest though, the game’s not the only reason my post is late: I stayed up late Tuesday night finishing what was meant to be Wednesday’s post, but I decided to scrap it upon waking up because a more inspiring topic came to mind: allies. People who are violating others must be pressured in order for violations to end. As African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass so wisely said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” However, in order for oppression to end, the pressure cannot come solely from those who are being oppressed, which is precisely why allies are so crucial. There’s endless examples, but I’ll just quickly share an obvious one: Nazis who were sending people to concentration camps didn’t stop just because of protests that they didn’t want to go there. Also, Jews, LGBTQIA people (and yes, there are accounts of horrible medical experiments being performed on intersex people as well as others during the Holocaust), and all the various groups being persecuted couldn’t stop the Nazis on their own. It took global effort by others to make the violations end. Similarly, having people that are not intersex themselves talk about the fact that we deserve equal human rights is a critical step to ending our discrimination. We’ve been pointing out the atrocity of intersex genital mutilation for decades, but in typical fashion, the people who harm us downplay the destructiveness of their actions and the validity of our complaints. “Oh, you say that medically unnecessary infant genital surgery left you feeling psychologically scarred and unable to experience sexual sensation? Well, trust me, you would have been worse off if we’d left you as you were.” (That’s actually what one intersex person I know experienced when she shared her experience with her doctor, and I’ve heard lots of similar stories.) Like all marginalized groups, we can’t end the atrocities committed against us alone. Our oppressors, like others’, aren’t interested in accommodating our wants and needs because that would interfere with what they personally stand to gain from the actions we’re objecting to. They’ll have to keep being pressured by others to change their behavior. This is why I’ve been feeling blessed lately to have fabulous allies popping out of the woodwork. I say “fabulous” because not only are they smart, compassionate and committed to making the world a better place, they’re also just fun, creative people who’ve become my friends. The woman I went to the baseball game with, for example, Maria Nieto, is one of these. She’s the author of the novel Pig Behind the Bear (http://pigbehindthebear.com/site/), which won the International Latino Book Award, the Independent Publisher Silver Medal, and is about to pick up another award who’s name I forget. She’s also a biology professor, and I’ve spoken to several of her classes, each time better than the last. Having allies who both point to intersex people’s situation and give us a platform to share our experiences is invaluable. In the past, folks would write or speak about intersex people without taking the time to know us and learn what we want, or treating us as objects they are studying and/or “treating” with no real volition of our own. While this still goes on, it’s starting to change, and it’s beautiful to witness. On that note, I’ll share a link to a radio interview of mine about what the global intersex advocacy community wants, that aired this past Monday: https://soundcloud.com/prideonscreen/imru-show-140616. The interview begins 34:20 minutes in, FYI, and it’s a perfect example of this inclusive, respectful behavior towards intersex people. Vash Boddie, the radio host, journalist and producer who interviewed me (on IMRU Radio in LA), is a humanist who has huge desire to help attain equality for intersex people -- despite the fact that he’s not intersex! You can tell just by listening to him that he not only wants to end oppression, but that he deeply values the contribution that intersex people’s inclusion in society has to offer. I’m grateful to be able to say that I’ve met many others allies like him, and I would love to list them all here, but I would have to go back decades, and some of their full names from way back escape me, but I would hate to leave anyone out…. So, I’ll just suffice it to send a big THANK YOU to all of you who have been allies over the years! Taking the time to talk to intersex people about who we are, and what we want and need, and then doing something to actually help us achieve our goals, is exemplary in a culture in which the majority of people have done the opposite. Considering the fact that most people don’t even know who we are, much less our struggle being a popular human rights cause, you are truly pioneers!!!

#intersex #intersex allies #IMRU Radio #Maria Nieto #Vash Boddie #Hida Viloria

[intersexandout]

Just another frivolous, glittery gender observation

Originally posted on http://hidaviloria.com/just-another-frivolous-glittery-gender-observation/ Given my newfound commitment to weekly Wednesday blogging , not every blog will be a well thought out exploration of topics deeply intergral to being intersex. Some weeks’ posts are bound to be just the random, shallow but hopefully funny musings of your typical intersex chick next door. I think this is one of them. My friend Llano Blue, writer, performer, and creator of the fabulous new site Glitterus Wolfus just had this to say, “I am attracted, not necessarily sexually, to a wide range of people,” and, surprisingly, his comment made me realize that I’m actually kind of the opposite. Other than sexually speaking, I’m not necessarily attracted to a wide range of people. There, I said, it, my frivolous, glittery observation of the month. PS – I just found out that I’m very “quirky alone”, and it’s funny, and perfect and exciting. But more on that later....

#intersx #intersex chick next door #quirky alone #glitterus wolfus #glittery gender

[intersexandout]

The Third Sex: Then, Now, Never

I’ll never forget seeing the cover of a 1950’s lesbian novel called The Third Sex. It’d been made into a postcard, and was on sale at one of those touristy gay stores in Manhattan’s West Village. The cover was alarmist, calling homosexuality “society’s greatest curse”, and featuring a picture of two women about to make illicit love. But it wasn’t just the sexy pic and taboo tone that made my hands reach for my wallet to buy the card: the words “the third sex” equally intrigued me. I wasn’t able to articulate it yet, but I knew that I had a physical difference that made me different from other girls. Yet I wasn’t a boy either, and had never wanted to be. I was something else altogether, which I didn’t understand or have a name for. When our minds don’t have a way to categorize new information, we’ll either invent something or just try to ignore it. Queers have historically been great at both. For example, way before the LGBTQIA community existed, we still had our own names for ourselves, in addition to the ones thrust upon us. And conversely, “the closet” has always been there for any and all queers who can’t deal with having a non-mainstream identity. What, you love members of the same sex? Don't worry, no need to make it into a big deal (or a deal at all). I was like this before I learned about “intersex” in 1995. What? My body looks more like that hermaphrodite statue than the ones of men and women? Weird, but no need to make it into a big deal…. I lacked the language to define myself to the outer world, but I did have ways that I secretly identified in the privacy of my own mind. And to my surprise, some of the intersex folks I’ve met over the years had the very same ones! Back when we were all roaming around a presumably male/female-only world, without a publicly recognized label, we sometimes thought of ourselves as “mutants” or “aliens”. These terms were obviously inaccurate and a huge exaggeration -- just like describing gays and lesbians as a third sex. But this is what happens when you live in a culture where being you is socially unacceptable and unacknowledged: you become something else. Today, as more and more folks become aware that intersex people exist, the question sometimes rises: aren’t we, in fact, a third sex, since we aren’t either male or female? It seems that way on the surface, but when you actually know and/or learn about intersex people, you realize that we make up a huge range of people with very different physical traits. Intersex people’s bodies range from very female looking, to very male looking, to everything in between, so defining us all as the same sex isn’t remotely accurate or useful. This is one of the reasons that the organization I’m chairperson of, OII (the Organisation Intersex International), has officially opposed the creation of a third sex since it was founded ten years ago. In addition, the intersex advocates who participated at last year’s Third International Intersex Forum, the only global gathering of intersex activists, also oppose the creation of a third sex. Another reason why creating a “third sex” isn’t practical is that we don’t define people by “biological sex” anymore. In much of the world, it’s become very clear to anyone who’s paying attention that the biological sex traits people are born with don’t dictate what their gender will be. So while a “gender” is still listed on birth certificates (and FYI “gender” is used to signify biological sex in U.S. law), people can and do change this if they grow up to be something else. Most adults in the U.S. are allowed to legally identify as the gender they feel, regardless of what bodies they’re born with, and I think that’s a good thing. But I say “most” because people who don’t feel either male or female don't have this right. The United States and society as a whole needs a gender category for adults who don’t feel either male or female, like the “X” that is now available to non-binary adults in Australia. It’s important however to be clear that creating a third gender category is about allowing folks with non-binary genders -- most of whom are not intersex, FYI, but genderqueer, gender fluid, two-spirit, trans*, etc... -- to accurately identify themselves. It's not about creating a third sex. Intersex people are living proof that biological sex is a huge spectrum of possibilities, and that trying to create precise definitions and categories isn’t scientifically accurate or beneficial.

#intersex #genderqueer #third sex #third gender #non-binary gender #X gender category

[intersexandout]

Who do you think you are: intersex and appropriation

I was recently interviewed by the awesome Vash Boddie of IMRU radio in L.A., the county’s longest running LGBTI radio station (airdate T.B.A.). At one point, he said, “everyone’s a little intersex”, and it got me thinking: who can call themselves intersex? It’s a relevant question because, believe it or not, there’s a fair amount of intersex appropriation going on these days.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of cultural appropriation, which wikipedia defines as “the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group”. There’s tons of ways this happens, and tons of opinions about it. Intersex people are sometimes subjected to something similar but one step beyond: identity appropriation.

Identity appropriation can be defined as, “the adoption of membership into a group by members of a different group”. It doesn’t happen that often, but a familiar example could be when white people say they’re Native American, perhaps to apply for a scholarship, because they have one percent native blood.

An example of intersex appropriation is what I experienced at a genderqueer group I attended. Someone asked if it was possible for them to be intersex, even though they weren’t born that way. The reasoning was: if you start transitioning from female to male, but decide you want to stay in the middle, are you now intersex? Can you call yourself that?

I understood their line of thought, but I explained that being intersex, or a hermaphrodite, as we were previously known, has been defined, since time immemorial, as something one is born. I also explained that the fact that we’re born this way is deeply integral to our culture and experiences as a people.

A good analogy is found in the fantastic Native American blog My culture is not a Trend. As the author states: “… folks who are Indigenous, Asian, or African were murdered because they looked and dressed different, because they were “other” than white, and because their cultures were deemed as “uncivilized” (which, was often a claim used to legitimize their colonisation). You have the agency to “try on” those cultures, whereas other groups of people were forced to adopt another culture (while still being discriminated against  because regardless of how they speak or what they wear, they still aren’t the right skin color).”

Intersex people have been forced to adopt the binary sex system – often via intersex genital mutilation as infants. Most of us didn’t experience the privilege of growing up to choose our gender with our sensitive, sexual body parts intact in case we want to use them as adults. So while the idea of being intersex may seem cool or fitting to some – and I agree that, ideally, it is – the reality is more similar to the one shared in the aforementioned blog. “Being a Native comes with a history of decidedly un-trendy events, such as… the eradication of entire tribes of people….”

Intersex people have also undergone attempts to eradicate us, and we are still socially marginalized citizens with no legal recognition or protection from discrimination (Australia is the only exception). Because of this lack of equal rights and protections, attempts to surgically eliminate “intersex” people by making us into “normal boys or girls” are still going on – when we’re far too young to fight them off.

But what about intersex people who didn’t get operated on?, you may be asking. I wasn’t, for example, but that just means I had other experiences specific to growing up in a body that’s not typically male or female. My fellow intersex blogger Claudia Astorino’s fabulous essay about what it was like not menstruating when all the other girls were, is a great example (athough it’s specific to her form of intersex, FYI, as some of us do menstruate).

The thing that bummed me out about my personal experience with intersex appropriation was that, after I’d explained how it’s harder to fight discrimination if people are confused about who and what we are, someone else in the group still said, “I think you can say you’re intersex, go for it!” She didn’t care at all that redefining and appropriating intersex is not what we want.

I was a bit hurt, to be honest, but this dynamic is nothing new, particularly when it comes to extremely marginalized communities. Just like Native Americans, most people can get away with talking about us and appropriating our culture and even our identities without having to deal with one us in the room. I’m glad this time I was in the room, because I know some of the people in the group did hear and care about my concerns.

I had an analogous experience to the person asking the question when, thirteen years ago, I got extension braids and even black people thought I was black. I know it may seem hard to believe, but my suspicions were confirmed when a new friend, who was black and had met me with braids, saw me after I’d taken them out and shouted, “Oh my god, you’re not black! I started talking to you because I thought you were….”

Fascinating as it was seeing where I got more or less love, I never even imagined it’d be okay for me to call myself black. Even if I were to continue being perceived as black for the rest of my life, there’s a whole African American cultural experience that I didn’t grow up with. And while I began to experience certain aspects during my brief time passing, it’s not the same as having my formative identity shaped by being black in a culture that privileges people with light skin. For this reason, I feel it would be disrespectful to African Americans to suddenly claim their identity-- especially as my life's work isn't devoted to ending racism, just as the folks I've seen calling themselves intersex are not working to end the many forms of intersexphobia, such as Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM) .

In the end, I know people are free to say whatever they want, and appropriate whatever they want, but I urge folks to consider the consequences. You might decide that respecting a marginalized community’s needs and wishes is the better way to go. :)

#intersex #cultural appropriation #intersex appropriation #intersex identity #vash boddie #claudia astorino

[intersexandout]

"1. Hermaphrodite is inaccurate: humans don’t have both fully functioning sets of male and female organs, like Hermaphroditus in the Greek myth we were named after. My rebuttal: Tons of labels are inaccurate. White people are not the color white, gays are not all “cheerful”, and most lesbians are not residents of the Greek island of Lesbos." I couldn't even tell you why, but this made me roar with laughter. Great, interesting, informative blog *applause*

thank you so much -- glad I made you laugh. :)

[intersexandout]

How Now Pro Noun?

Nowadays, the preferred-gender-pronoun question comes up quickly when I speak about being intersex. I see it as a positive indication that we’re moving beyond Intersex 101, and folks are starting to wonder what we’re actually like, as people. I tell them that, just like non-intersex people, we have a wide range of gender identities and use all different pronouns to describe ourselves.

Personally speaking, my pronoun issues began in 1997, when I first realized my limitations with “he” and “she”. After a lifetime of living unquestionably as a “she”, for a whole year — since I’d stopped wearing makeup, women’s clothes, and doing all those little things girls do to make themselves pretty�� people had been regularly referring to me as “he” or “sir”.

At first I corrected everyone because I wanted to expand their ideas of what women could look like. After a few months though, it became a pain, so I stopped. I missed being able to just get to where I was going without administering lessons in gender diversity, you know? Speaking of gender diversity, I’d also learned the year before that “intersex” is the word to describe the physical difference I’d long been aware of. After letting the realization sink in, making people say “she” didn’t feel entirely accurate anymore.

I realized that I’d be best served by something that defined me as neither man nor woman, but what I am and felt: intersex and genderqueer. (In case that word is new to you, “genderqueer” describes people who don’t feel like men or women, but rather, in between, both, or neither. It wasn’t in use yet back then, but it’s the best current word to describe how I felt.) So a friend and I brainstormed about a new pronoun for me. I suggested “ve”, but nixed it when she told me it reminded her of aliens because of a science fiction series “V” that we’d watched in high school. She then suggested “ze”, which I liked as well. Little did we know (remember, this was pre-google), that at right around that same moment a paper was published (in the fall of ’97) titled, “Ze, Zer, Mer”, in the APA (American Philosophy Association) Newsletters.

I was very amused to just recently realize that the author of this paper was unaware that people like me exist— on planet Earth anyway. As the opening sentence states: “…there are no singular pronouns in the English language that are commonly used without regard to gender to refer to humans, androgynous creatures (such as we find in science fiction and perhaps will find in fact on other planets), and persons without a gender…”. (Btw, I like the paper and find it very forward-thinking, I just couldn’t resist sharing such comical evidence of the fact that very few people knew about intersex folks back then.)

While I’m not from another planet, I sure felt like I was using ze back then. No one I knew or had even heard of in San Francisco’s notoriously cutting-edge gender scene was using “ze”, and I only did so in certain settings, on and off, until 2001. I remember the end because there was an event I read at where I used “ze” in my bio, and read a poem about third gender pronouns titled, “Viva Ze Revolution” (which in retrospect, was pretty bad, lol).

Today, “ze” is used quite often by genderqueer folks, but the option that’s gaining the most traction is the singular “they”, ”them” and ”their”. It makes sense, given that we’ve already been using this when we don’t know a person’s gender. For example, “I don’t know anything about the professor, but they’re coming to visit and I have to pick them up from the station.” But back to 2001….

I stopped my foray into gender-neutral pronoun use for three reasons: 1. going it alone sucked; 2. call me overly nice, but I didn’t feel like making all the people in my life – most of whom had known me for at least ten years – change their deeply engrained use of the English language to accommodate me; and, most importantly, 3. I started feeling and looking like a “she” again.

I’ve long said my gender identity is “gender fluid”, which for me means that it vacillates back and forth like the ocean tides, from feminine to masculine to both, neither or in between. I feel all genders, so I don’t really care what pronoun people use for me. These days, I mostly get “she” (which I’m totally happy with as an old school feminist), the occasional “he”, and even an occasional “they” or “ze”, given that I’m so out as intersex. But regardless of what people call me, I don’t bother to correct them, because none of these pronouns feel off or insulting.

In my ideal world, pronoun use wouldn’t be an issue: English would have one pronoun for all humans (like spoken Cantonese and Mandarin). Some people have created this for English as well, like author Marge Piercy in her 1979 novel Women on the Edge of Time, in which people in 2137 use “per” for all persons.

I love this genderless single pronoun approach, as it doesn’t force me to choose. For while “ze” and “they/them” are deemed gender “neutral”, their use implies that one doesn’t identify as “he” or “she”, which specifies a gender. However, avoiding gender identification by having a single pronoun for all humans doesn’t really work unless all humans use it.

Truth is, while for most people (including most intersex people), having others use the right pronoun to describe them is very important, since it’s not for me, I basically can’t be bothered to change the one I was raised with. And with my current to-do-list, I don’t feel quite up to dismantling our deeply embedded linguistic system of gender identification by pushing for one human pronoun for all. At least not right now. Maybe I’m just lazy. ☺

#intersex #PGP #pronouns #gender-neutral pronouns #intersex pronouns #Marge Piercy #Hida Viloria

[intersexandout]

Advocating Equality

Hi everyone! Since this is my personal blog, I thought I’d apologize for and share that the reason it’s taken me SO long to write something new is that my mom passed away this year. Being a sensitive, emotional type, and her death being unexpected, it knocked me for a loop. And then another. And another. Now however, I feel her spirit very much alive and living through me, inspiring my work. It’s not something I realized before, because my mother was not an activist and was never even happy about my being one until, thankfully, the very month before she died. But nevertheless, she’s one of my biggest inspirations because she’s the one who first taught me that all humans are equal. Was she critical of certain behaviors? Hell yeah! But she never indicated to me that anyone was less than anyone else just because of the way they’d been born. It’s such a simple message really, but one that has eluded much of humanity. My latest essay in the Advocate examines this phenomenon by looking at the historic attempts to pathologize the LGBTI community, and how this is still impacting intersex people. http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/05/14/op-ed-whats-name-intersex-and-identity When I shared this topic with a friend last night, who is not an activist or particularly political, she said, “But it’s [being intersex] just a natural variation right? Why would people call it a disorder?” She went on to say that she found it bizarre that things like gratuitous violence are accepted in our culture, but some have such a hard time accepting that not everyone is born male or female. She, like many others, gets the message: there is no need to deem those who are different from “the norm” as inferior. While there are many reasons why the pathologizaton of intersex people persists– some of which I explore in my Advocate essay – I think it’s important to remember what history has taught us. Just because something is being permitted to happen today doesn’t mean that it’s right. And if it’s confusing to distinguish between what’s okay, and what’s considered acceptable today but will be considered bigoted or a downright human rights atrocity in the future, just keep that simple message in mind. If your words or actions are based on the belief that a group of people is somehow inferior, whether you live to see it or not, you’ll have been on the wrong side of history. Thanks for reading! :)

#intersex #intersex equality #intersex The Advocate #intersex human rights #intersex DSD #intersex identity #intersex Hida Viloria

[intersexandout]

Celebrating Intersex Day of Remembrance

            November 8th is Intersex Day of Remembrance, aka Intersex Solidarity Day, a day to remember our intersex elders, past and present. The date was chosen because Herculine Barbin was born on November 8th, 1838. Her memoirs were found post-mortem and published in 1978 under the title Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite.

Barbin’s life came to a tragic end after she was discovered to be intersex upon going to the doctor as an adult. She was tried in court, legally reclassified as male and forced to live as one, and committed suicide soon afterwards. While the end of Herculine’s life was painful, in chronicling it she gave voice to what it was like to be an intersex person at the time, and the plight intersex people faced if discovered to be such in a society wedded to enforcing the idea that only males and females, as we typically define them, exist.

Personally, Barbin’s story means a lot to me. It’s the first account of an intersex person I ever came across --other than hearing about the Greek God/dess Hermaphroditus as a kid -- and it happened because strangely enough (or not strangely at all, depending on how you look at life) I came across her memoirs in the summer of 1987, in a box of free books at the end of my freshman year at Wesleyan University.

I was immediately drawn to the book, and read it with furtive curiosity, feeling that her experience – before her difference was discovered – was similar to my own. She grew up in a convent surrounded by girls, and very aware that she was romantically attracted to them. Later, in high school, she fell in love with her closest friend – just as I did in Catholic high school – and they shared beautiful passionate nights together. It was a confusing but beautiful time for them, and I cherished reading about someone else that shared this mysterious physical difference that gave her and her love such unexpected pleasure.    

Although I wasn’t sure if I was, like Herculine, a “hermaphrodite”, I could definitely relate. Later, when I confirmed that intersex was the name ofr my difference, I felt unending gratitude that I was born in a time and place where my life didn’t have to end like Barbin’s. It gave me even more resolve to come out as intersex, unlike those who could not safely do so.  

Today, I honor Barbin’s birthday, remembering how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go to change the legacy that her life story left behind, and I'm grateful for everyone working to make the world safe for people to be openly intersex. Thank you!!! :)

#intersex #intersex day of remembrance #intersex solidarity day #herculine barbin

[intersexandout]

Why Intersex Germans Aren't Crazy About Germany's New Third Gender Law

Germany’s new third gender law becomes effective today, and has been hailed as a groundbreaking advancement for intersex people, but every intersex advocacy organization in Germany is opposed to it. Why? The answer is simple: the new law places intersex babies at risk for increased discrimination.

According to the law:

PStG § 22 Abs. 3: “(3) If the child can be assigned to neither the female nor the male sex, then the child has to be entered into the register of births without such a specification.”

As OII Europe, the European affiliate of the Organisation Intersex International (OII), elaborates, “Who determines that a child “can be assigned to neither the female nor the male sex”? According to current practice: only medicine. The power to define what sex is and who is assigned to which gender remains intact with the new regulation.”

So doctors, not parents, will make the decision whether to label an intersex baby “indeterminate”, and while parents do have the option of leaving their baby indeterminate or having them labeled male or female, the only way to attain a male or female designation is to employ so called “normalizing” genital surgeries which have been found to be so harmful that the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture (para. 76.77.) has condemned them.This is in contrast to the situation prior to the law, and in most countries today, where parents decide along with their physicians whether to label intersex babies male or female.

But isn’t giving intersex babies an indeterminate status until they're old enough to decide which sex they want to live as a good thing, you may be asking. In an ideal world free from discrimination: yes; but Germany, like most countries, has not banned “normalizing” surgeries, does not educate its citizens about the existence of intersex people, and does not offer intersex people legal protection from discrimination or even provisions for basic facilities such as rest rooms. While some parents may feel equipped to confront this, and will be open-minded enough to do so, many advocates fear they will be the minority. Instead, as Ins Kromminga, President of OII Germany, stated to me via email, the new law will likely pressure most parents to opt for “normalizing” surgeries “…even faster, since what parent wants to have no gender marker on their child with no other regulation that would protect this non-status?”

German and German speaking intersex advocacy organizations OII Germany, Zwischengeschlecht, and Intersexuelle Menschen (also known as the Federation of Intersex People in Germany) all agree that the law will place parents in a difficult position which may promote increased surgical violations against intersex babies. As OII Europe reports, “The risk of stigmatization would indeed be very large. Therefore… the new provisions could encourage the (potential) parents and doctors even more to avoid an “ambiguous” child at any cost (through abortion, prenatal “treatment” or so-called disambiguating [a.k.a. “normalizing”] surgical and / or hormonal interventions).”

Other members of the LGBTI community such as gays and lesbians have long stated that, like intersex people, they are born the way they are. Just imagine, however, if there was a way to detect this at birth, and that a law was enacted which forced doctors to label babies gay or lesbian on their birth certificates. Would this be helpful to them or their families? Would such a law even be viewed as ethical, given the bullying which gay and lesbian children already face without having their sexual orientation publicly declared on their IDs?

This is exactly the situation created by Germany’s new law. In fact, it makes intersex children even more vulnerable to discrimination than those in the analogy above, as Silvan Agius, policy director at ILGA Europe, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and intersex rights group, explains."Schools have toilets for boys and toilets for girls. Where will the intermediate child go? …The law doesn't change that. It does not immediately create a space for intersex people to be themselves."

Given all this, it’s easy to see why intersex advocates in Germany do not see the new “options” as such a positive development. The ethical solution is to give intersex babies labels that afford them the rights and protections that all babies have, and allow us to make our own decisions about whether to irreversibly alter our bodies.  As OII-USA states, “… we believe that in most of today’s environments children would be challenged by not being identified as boys or girls. Thus, we recommend that intersex children be raised as males or females, with the awareness that, like all people, they may grow up to identify as a different sex.”

Some intersex adults, including myself, desire a legal designation other than male or female – which was successfully lobbied for by OII Australia and others in Australia recently. This is our prerogative, and it creates a visible identity for intersex youth to step into, if they wish, just as early lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* activists paved the way for LGBT youth today. However, as with other members of the LGBTI community, this should be the individual’s choice, not something forcibly imposed on us, especially as vulnerable babies.

Intersex people across the globe have long agreed and declared that non-consensual cosmetic genital surgeries are a human rights violation. What we desperately need and most want are laws that ban the practice that is irreversibly harming intersex babies every day -- not ones that ban babies from being given socially viable labels unless parents use the practice to attain them. 

[1] http://oiieurope.org/bluff-package-for-inter-leaving-sex-entry-open-is-not-an-option/

[2] http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session22/A.HRC.22.53_English.pdf

[3] http://oii.org.au/23183/germany-third-gender-birth-certificates/

[4] http://www.expatica.com/de/news/german-news/Germany-to-allow-third-gender-option-at-birth_277293.html

[5] http://oii-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Your-Beautiful-Child.pdf

[6] http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/m-f-or-x-third-gender-now-official/story-fnet0gt3-1226663485211

#German't third gender law #Germany third gender #third gender #Intersex Germany #intersex

[intersexandout]

Cosmetic Genital Surgery/Sex Reassignment of Intersex Babies is wrong: Case Closed

A few weeks ago, I testified as an expert witness on the television show Caso Cerrado (translation: Case Closed). It’s kind of like People’s Court but in Spanish, and is the first television show on a Spanish language station to have been nominated for an Emmy.

I was kind of terrified because the “case” would determine whether or not an actual intersex baby’s genitals got cut up. The mother was suing her husband, the father, for not granting permission to have their two-month-old’s clitoris surgically reduced -- the same surgery that’s called female genital mutilation and outlawed in the U.S. when performed on African baby girls. The one I’m very happy to have escaped.

Even though it wasn’t an actual court case, but an arbitration that wouldn’t set legal precedent, the family was real and would have to abide by whatever the arbitrator ruled. Yikes. I was grateful for the opportunity to influence the outcome, but horrified because I had no idea which way the decision would go: acceptance of this baby, or acceptance of what some of us call intersex genital mutilation.

The show hasn’t aired yet, so without giving away details I’ll just say I was thrilled with the outcome. The arbitrator, Cuban attorney Ana Maria Polo, was clearly well-educated on all sides of the topic, and understood the discriminatory nature of the arguments for surgery. It was a huge relief, and a sign of how far awareness about intersex people has come.

I’m hoping results will be similar in the current South Carolina Court case in which the parents of an intersex boy -- who was operated on before they adopted him-- are suing the state and the doctors involved.[1] The federal court denied motions to dismiss the case, concluding that M.C.’s medically unnecessary surgeries could be unconstitutional.[2] M.C, as he’s known in the press, was born intersex, with ambiguous genitalia, and his doctors decided that he should be surgically reconstructed to have a typical male or female body. They chose female, and recommended the necessary surgeries to officials from the state Department of Social Services, M.C.'s legal guardians at the time, without informing them of the medical and psychological risks involved, or that the surgery was medically unnecessary.

The doctors’ failure to provide adequate informed consent is part of why the lawsuit is possible. Fortunately, there are now resources available that doctors can share with parents of intersex newborns, such as Your Beautiful Child: Information for Parents[3] (available free online), to provide the necessary information that was not shared in this case. But sadly for M.C., his caretakers at the time were not privy to this and went along with the doctors’ recommendations. And while many are shocked by the case, it’s typical of what intersex people in first world nations have been being subjected to for over half a century, since the practice was pioneered in the U.S.. Adults subjected to these practices as infants and children have been informing medical doctors and experts of the harms they suffered as a result for over twenty years – privately, in academia and in popular mainstream media -- but doctors haven’t wanted to change their practices to address these follow-up reports.[4]

Maybe they’ll listen to others though. The U.N. recently recognized the irreversible physical harms and psychological harms caused by non-consensual genital surgeries on intersex babies, condemning the practice this past February.[5] M.C.’s parents too, the Crawfords, have come out in support of not only their son – who they knew was intersex when they adopted him -- but of intersex people in general.

In a video released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the organizations handling the case along with Advocates for Informed Choice[6] and two law firms, Pamela Crawford says, “By performing this needless surgery, the state and the doctors told M.C. that he was not acceptable or loveable the way he was born. They disfigured him because they could not accept him for who he was – not because he needed any surgery.”[7]

M.C., who’s now eight, identifies as a boy, and asks about the parts he would have had without the surgery. While the damage done to him can never be repaired, the Crawfords have taken on the lawsuit to try to put an end to these abuses. As Pam Crawford said, “I would given anything for this not to have been done to our child. I don't want it to happen to anymore kids."[8]

I don’t either.  Changing intersex babies’ genitals without their consent is wrong, regardless of whether medical experts dub them deficient or “abnormal”. As I pointed out once to a doctor that used this word, we don’t call children who are atypically intelligent or attractive “abnormal”, much less operate on them to remove their variance from the norm. Calling intersex traits abnormal is prejudiced and stigmatizing enough, but using prejudice to justify eliminating physical traits you don’t like -- without consent or medical necessity -- is a form of discrimination frighteningly similar to eugenics.

    [1] http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/groundbreaking-splc-lawsuit-accuses-south-carolina-doctors-and-hospitals-of-unnece#.UZMv7aKG3Ro

[2] http://aiclegal.org/aic-announces-important-first-victory-in-mc-case/

[3] http://oii-usa.org/1404/information-for-parents-2/

  [4] http://zwischengeschlecht.org/public/Open-Letter_9th-Joint-Meeting_2013_draft_b.pdf

[5] http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/reproductive_rights/2013/02/un-issues-condemnations-of-surgeries-on-intersex-children.html

[6] http://aiclegal.org/

[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qH4P5PtC4w&feature=youtu.be

[8] Ibid..