#intersex history

[queerasfact]

Intersex Awareness Day

Today is Intersex Awareness Day! Intersex people are born with sex characteristics that don’t meet medical and social norms for female or male bodies. You can learn a little more about what this means here.

Intersex Awareness Day is celebrated every October 26, commemorating the first recorded public protest by intersex people in North America, which took place in 1996.

Led by activists Morgan Holmes and Max Beck, a group of intersex people and their trans allies gathered outside the American Academy of Pediatrics annual convention to protest the non-consensual and medically unneccesary procedures often performed on intersex children to “normalise” their bodies. They spoke in particular about the importance of listening to intersex people in making decisions about their own bodies. As Max said at the time:

“I’m here representing over one hundred fifty intersexals [sic] throughout North America. One hundred fifty intersexuals are saying: Please! Listen! You doctors, you pediatric endocrinologists and urologists treating intersexuals, you nurses interacting with intersexuals and their families, listen to us! We understand intersexuality, not because we have studied the medical literature—although many of us have—not because we have performed surgeries, but because we have been grappling with intersexuality every day of our lives.”

The activists held a banner which read “Hermaphrodites with Attitude”; as Morgan explains, it was “a caustically cheeky title that refused to be ploughed under into shame at finding the term “hermaphrodite” or “pseudo-hermaphrodite” in all of our medical records.”

You can read Morgan Holmes’s account of the protest it here, and Max Beck’s here.

(Note that while intersex people do not necessarily consider themselves queer, queer and intersex communities have a lot of shared history, and, as in 1996, have often worked together to combat the narrow expectations of binary sex and gender imposed on them by society.)

[Image: Protestors in Boston, 1996, holding a banner which reads “Hermaphrodites with Attitude”, and a sign reading “Keep your scalpels off intersexed [sic] kids”]

#intersex awareness day #intersex history #intersex

[intersex-support]

hello! i newly figured out i am intersex, however i haven't been able to find much content talking about intersex experience, history or community, when i first realized i was queer originally i found a lot of content like that and found it helpful, and i was wondering if there's any recommendations you might be willing to give about any content on being intersex or intersex creators who you think people should know about!

Hey!

This ask honestly made me really happy, because when I was searching for people and resources to share with you, I realized how much stuff has been created in the past 5 years. When I was diagnosed as intersex, I felt like there was so much less stuff than there even is now, so it makes me really happy to know there is more stuff, even if it's still hard to find.

Some of the things I've put on this list are outdated or might include perspectives that I don't completely love, but might include important historical context. It is also a very US centric and English language centric resource, although I have linked to organizations in other countries and would love if people added on recommendations to intersex resources in a variety of languages. As always, take what resonates with you and leave behind the rest!

Books:

Cripping Intersex by Celeste E Orr

Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex by Elizabeth Reis

XOXY: A Memoir by Kimberly Zieselman

Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) by Thea Hillman

In September, Alicia Weigel is releasing her memoir Inverse Cowgirl.

In August, Pidgeon Pagonis is releasing their memoir, Nobody Needs to Know.

Fiction books:

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Intersex #ownvoices books, collated by Bogi Takács

Films:

Every Body directed by Julie Cohen is in theaters right now, and will eventually be on streaming services.

Ponyboi directed by River Gallo

Intersexion directed by Grant Lahood

Articles + misc:

Hermaphrodites with Attitude newsletter-content note for h slur and some other outdated language. Very important history though <3

Jazz Legend Little Jimmy Scott Is a Cornerstone of Black Intersex History by Sean Saifa Wall

What it's like to be a Black intersex woman by Tatenda Ngwaru

9 Young People on How They Found Out They Are Intersex by Hans Lindhal

Teen Vogue's series of intersex interviews

After years of protest, a top hospital ended intersex surgeries. For activists, it took a deep toll by Kate Sosin

Intersex Awareness Day: A Demonstration that Inspired a Movement

Normalizing intersex: Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics

Music-Ana Roxanne

Youth&I-intersex youth zine

Juliana Huxtable-Visual Art

Youtube channels:

Emilord-videos about AIS and surgery.

Jubilee Intersex video

Hans Lindhal-videos on a wide variety of intersex topics.

What's It Like To Be Intersex? | Minutes With | UNILAD

What It's Like To Be Intersex As/Is

Pass the Mic: Intercepting Injustice with Sean Saifa Wall

Intersex Organizations:

Link to org list

People/orgs to follow:

Sean Saifa Wall

Alicia Weigel

River Gallo

Hans Lindhal

Fàájì/funk

Jahni

Justin Tsang

Intersex Awareness (fabulous direct action organizing in the US-keep an eye out cause we're gonna do more this year!)

Liat Feller

Jubilee

Crystal Hendricks

Mari Wrobi

Intersex people, please feel free to add on more resources, art, writing, and people that you like!!

#actuallyintersex #intersex #intersex resources #intersex positivity #intersex history #intersex books

[groovyfags]

Happy Intersex awareness day! I found this a bit ago, but here is the entire collection of Hermaphrodites With Attitude, an intersex newsletter that ran starting in 1994 until 2005.

The newsletter features intersex people from all over talking about their lives. There is a lot focused on the medical treatment of intersex people at the time, but there is also information about rallies and protests, news, and people talking about their lives!

#intersex history #intersex #intersexuality #intersex awareness day #hermaphrodite #tw hermaphrodite

[androgynealienfemme]

“The Female Husband and Male Wife”- Mar. 21, 1868

#the transgender archives #transgender history #intersex history #lgbt history #trans man #trans woman #intersex man #intersex woman #lgbtq+ #transgender man

[useless-catalanfacts]

Florenci Pla Meseguer "La Pastora", intersex antifascist hero

One of the most famous maquis (guerrilla fighters against Franco's dictatorship) is Florenci Pla Maseguer.

(thank you @neonbutchery for the suggestion)

He was born in a farmhouse in Vallibona, in the rural mountains in north of the Valencian Country, in 1917. His body did not fit the categories of either male nor female, so his family were left with the choice of what sex to register him as. His parents decided to register him as female so that he could avoid the mandatory military service.

He grew up in the farmhouse being a shepherd, and never went to school as was usual at the time for the rural working class. When he reached puberty, he developed male secondary sex characteristics.

When the fascists did a coup d'état in 1936, sparking the Spanish Civil War, he wanted offered himself as a volunteer to fight in the republican (=antifascist) army, and he thought that this way he would get officially registered as a man, but couldn't.

He kept dressing as a woman until he was 30 years old, but always felt a man. In his words (originally in Catalan in this interview in El Temps from 1988):

Interviewer: What did you think of your sexual condition? Did it cause you any worries?

Florenci: Problems...? Mainly because of the beard. They said I was half man and half woman, but I never felt a woman. I still remember the first time I dreamed I had an affair with a woman, when I was 13 (...)

I: Have you always felt a man?

F: Always, and I have always liked men's jobs and being registered as a man. In fact, when I walked the flock I carried a sarró [=a kind of bag], like men, and not a basket like women.

He kept wearing women's clothes until he was 30, when he joined the maquis. By then, it was 1947; the fascists had won the war in 1939 and, as a result, Spain and its occupied territories were ruled by Franco's fascist dictatorship, which persecuted the political dissidence, the national minorities (such as Catalans-Valencians) and their languages, and everyone who didn't fit the strict normative and nationalcatholic morale, prominently LGBTQI+ people and women who didn't limit themselves to the roles that the patriarchal society considered fit. The maquis were the armed resistance.

I: How did you change the flock for the maquis?

F: Since I lived in the mountains, I had sometimes talked to them. On a snowy night, three maquis took refuge in a house that was only inhabited in summer -El Cabanil- but one of them ran away -one who was from Morella- and everywhere he went, he spread the word, he snitched it. And the Civil Guard [=the regime's military police] followed their clue until they found them and burned the house down, because they were resisting. The next morning, they arrested El Cabanil's owner and I got nervous because I worked for him, and I decided to escape out of fear of being killed.

I: Was it because of the fear of reprisals or for the humiliations to which the Civil Guard put you through?

F: Yes, that determined it, too. That was on the morning of the same day they burned down El Cabanil, and it was "teniente Mangas" [="lieutenant" Mangas, which he says in Spanish], six guards and two militiamen, one from Torremiró and the other one from Herbesset.

I: And what did they do to you exactly?

F: They were curious to know how could a shepherd girl be half man and half woman. I had sold thrushes to the militiamen, and they told the Civil Guard about my anomaly. Teniente Mangas ignored all rules and made me take off my clothes, until their curiosity was fulfilled. And when they were done, they said "bueno, a hacer bondad" ["well, behave" in Spanish, as a way to say goodbye]. And I felt so much rage, so much helplessness. (...) I joined [the guerrilla] and I dressed as a man. There, I was a man like any other.

From then on, he lived as a man and named himself Florenci, though he was known with other nicknames like "Durruti" (after the famous anarchist leader) and, most famously "La Pastora" (the shepherd).

He ended up living in Andorra, but a journalist for the Spanish tabloid El Caso published about him, attributing to him the crimes committed by other maquis, even ones that he had never met. For this reason, La Pastora became famous in all of Spain and the police intensified the search. The Andorran police turned him in to the Spanish police in 1960, accusing him of robbery, banditry and terrorism. He was judged twice for the same crimes: a tribunal sentenced him to 40 years of prison and the other one sentenced him to death and later changed it to 30 years of prison.

He spent 17 years in prison. First, in a women's prison where the women (and him) had to wear very tight miniskirts. He was later moved to a men's jail, where the case was further investigated. The detective saw that there was no proof and that the story didn't match up, so it was impossible that Florenci had committed these crimes. He was freed with a pardon in 1977 and the detective officially registered him as a man.

Despite the slander published by the press, when he came back to his hometown Vallibona, everyone came down to the village from their farmhouses to greet him. He died in 2004, at 86 years old.

Nowadays, Florenci "La Pastora" is by far one of the most famous maquis, if not the single most famous one. He is talked about in songs, books and documentaries, and has become an icon of the antifascist resistance.

#història #país valencià #florenci pla meseguer #la pastora #uselesslgbtfacts #maquis #history #intersex #intersex history #queer history #queer #lgbt history #lgbtq #lgbtq history #antifascist #working class history #antifascism #guerrilla #20th century history

[felixwhetsel]

THE PARATROOPER WHO TURNED STRIPPER AFTER JUMPING BEHIND ENEMY LINES IN EUROPE, GI HAS SEX OPERATION, TURNS INTO WOMAN AND DISPLAYS 'HER' FIGURE TO CURIOUS BURLESQUE AUDIENCES BY DAN CHRISTOPHER Back in 1943, a lithe young figure pulled a rip-cord after dropping from a big Army plane and danced in the air, dangling from a parachute. There was a war in Europe and Robert Rees, a many-times decorated paratrooper, was jumping into enemy soil. Now 12 years later, the same figure does a considerable amount of dancing in a different setting. Instead of a ripcord, a G-string is now involved. And now the figure belongs to a young lady named Tamara Rees whose transition from paratrooper to stripper is one of the strangest chapters in the numerous sex-change operations in recent years. Unlike some others who have changed sex in a flurry of international publicity, Tamara describes herself as "a person who always was a woman and who has finally found the means of fitting properly into my own sex." Raised as a boy, then a man, Tamara never was either.

She was one of the tragic group called hermaphrodites, belonging physically to both sexes, but mentally only to one.

"It wasn't until three years ago that I had full medical proof of my conditions," Tamara explains. "I was what is technically called a pseudo-hermaphrodite. There is a person who appears to belong to one sex on the surface, but who actually has the interior physical characteristics of another."

After a sex operation in Europe, Tamara returned to the States and went into burlesque on a dare from friends.

"It was after I had done some lectures on psychology and sex that the idea occurred," Tamara relates. "I had appeared at the University of California and later before some private and American Legion groups to lecture.

"Then a friend talked me into appearing at the Alameda Theater, a dolly house in Sacramento. Believe me when I say that it was a real bump and grind education."

(continued in reblog)

#tamara rees #trans history #queer history #intersex history #transgender #history #trans woman #when the hell did tumblr introduce a character limit?????? #fuck that shit #history posting

[intersexbookclub]

Summary: Chapter 4 of Critical Intersex

For many of us, Chapter 4 of Critical Intersex (2009) turned out to be a particularly rich source of information about intersex history. So I (Elizabeth) have decided to give a fairly detailed summary of the chapter because I think it’s important to get that info out there. I’m gonna give a little bit of commentary as I go, and then a summary of our book club discussion of the chapter.

The chapter is titled “(Un)Queering identity: the biosocial production of intersex/DSD” by Alyson K. Spurgas. It is a history of ISNA, the Intersex Society of North America, and how it went from being a force for intersex liberation to selling out the movement in favour of medicalization. (See here for summary of the other chapters we read of the book!)

Our high level reactions:

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): Until I read chapter 4, I didn't really realise how reactionary “DSD” was. It hadn't been clear to me how much it was a response to the beginning of an organized intersex advocacy movement in the United States.

Michelle (@scifimagpie): I could feel the fury in the writer's tone. It was a real barn burner.

Also Michelle: the fuckin' respectability politics of DSD really got under my skin, as a term! I know the importance, as a queer person, of not forcing people to ID as queer, but this was a lot.

Introducing the chapter

The introduction sets the tone by talking about how in the Victorian era there was a historical shift from intersex being a religious/juridical issue to a pathology, and how this was intensified in the 1950s with John Money’s invention of the optimal gender rearing model. 

Spurgas briefly discusses how the OGR model is harmful to intersex people, and how it iatrogenically produces sexual dysfunction and gender dysphoria. “Iatrogenic” means caused by medicine; iatrogenesis is the production of disease or other side-effects as a result of medical intervention.

This sets scene for why in the early 1990s, Cheryl Chase and other intersex activists founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA). It had started as a support group, and morphed significantly over its lifetime. ISNA closed up shop in 2008.

Initially, ISNA was what we’d now call interliberationist. They were anti-pathologization. Their stance was that intersexuality is not itself pathological and the wellbeing of intersex people is endangered by medical intervention. They organized around the abolition of surgical intervention. They also created fora like Hermaphrodites With Attitude for the deconstruction of bodies/sexes/genders and development of an intersex identity that was inherently queer. 

The early ISNA activists explicitly aligned intersexuality in solidarity with LGB and transgender organizing. There was a belief that similar to LGBT organizing, once intersex people got enough visibility and consciousness-raising, people would “come out” in greater numbers (p100).

By the end of the 90s, however, many intersex people were actively rejecting being seen as queer and as political subjects/actors. The organization had become instead aligned with surgeons and clinicians, had replaced “intersex” with “DSD” in their language.

By the time ISNA disbanded in 2008 they had leaned in hard on a so-called “pragmatic” / “harm reduction” model / “children’s rights perspective”. The view was that since infants in Western countries are “born medical subjects as it is” (p100)

Where did DSD come from? 

In 2005, the term “disorders of sexual differentiation” had been recently coined in an article by Alice Dreger, Cheryl Chase, “and three other clinicians associated with the ISNA… [so as] to ‘label the condition rather than the person’” (p101). Dreger et al thought that intersex was “not medically accurate” (p101) and that the goal should be effective nomenclature to “sort patients into diagnostically meaningful groups” (p101).

Dreger et al argued that the term intersex “attracts the interest of a large number of people whose interest is based on a sexual fetish and people who suffer from delusions about their own medical histories” (Dreger et al quoted on p101)

Per Spurgas, Dreger et al had an explicit agenda of “distancing intersex activism from queer and transgressive sex/gender politics and instead in supporting Western medical productions of intersexuality” (p102). In other words: they were intermedicalists.

According to Dreger et al, an alignment with medicine is strategically important because intersex people often require medical attention, and hence need to be legible to clinicians. “For those in favor of the transition to DSD, intersex is first and foremost a disorder requiring medical treatment” (p102)

Later in 2005 there was a “Intersex Consensus Meeting” organized by a society of paediatricians and endocrinologists. Fifty “experts” were assembled from ten countries (p101)... with a grand total of two actually intersex people in attendance (Cheryl Chase and Barbara Thomas, from XY-Frauen). 

At the meeting, they agreed to adopt the term DSD along with a “‘patient-centred’ and ‘evidence-based’ treatment protocol” to replace the OGR treatment model (p101)

In 2006, a consortium of American clinicians and bioethicists was formed and created clinical guidelines for treating DSDs. They defined DSD quite narrowly: if your gonads or genitals don’t match your gender, or you have a sex chromosome anomaly. So no hormonal variations like hyperandrogenism allowed.

The pro-DSD movement: it was mostly doctors

Spurgas quotes the consortium: “note that the term ‘intersex’ is avoided here because of its imprecision” (p102) - our highlight. There’s a lot of doctors hating on intersex for being a category of political organizing that gets encoded as the category is “imprecise” 👀

Spurgas gets into how the doctors dressed up their re-pathologization of intersex as “patient centred” (p103) - remember this is being led by doctors, not patients, and any intersex inclusion was tokenistic. (Elizabeth: it was amazing how much bs this was.)

As Spurgas puts it, the pro-DSD movement “represents an abandonment of the desire for a pan-intersexual/queer identity and an embrace of the complete medicalization of intersex… the intersex individual is now to be understood fundamentally as a patient” (p103)

Around the same time some paediatricians almost came close to publicly advocating against infant genital mutilation by denouoncing some infant surgeries. Spurgas notes they recommended “that intersex individuals be subjected (or self-subject) to extensive psychological/psychiatric, hormonal, steroidal and other medical” interventions for the rest of their lives (p103).

This call to instead focus on non-surgical medical interventions then got amplified by other clinicians and intermedicalist intersex advocacy organizations.

The push for non-surgical pathologization hence wound up as a sort of “compromise” path - it satisfied the intermedicalists and anti-queer intersex activists, and had the allure of collaborating with doctors to end infant surgeries. (Note: It is 2024 and infant surgeries are still a thing 😡.)

The pro-DSD camp within the intersex community

Spurgas then goes on to get into the discursive politics of DSD. There’s some definite transphobia in the push for “people with DSDs are simply men and women who happen to have congenital birth conditions” (p104). (Summarizer’s note: this language is still employed by anti-trans activists.)

The pro-DSD camp claimed that it was ��a logical step in the ‘evolution in thinking’” 💩 and that it would be a more “humane” treatment model (p105) 💩

Also that “parents and doctors are not going to want to give a child a label with a politicized meaning” (p104) which really gives the game away doesn’t it? Intersex people have started raising consciousness, demanding their rights, and asserting they are not broken, so now the poor doctors can’t use the label as a diagnosis. 🤮

Spurgas quotes Emi Koyama, an intermedicalist who emphasized how “most intersex people identify as ‘perfectly ordinary, heterosexual, non-trans men and women’” (p104) along with a whole bunch of other quotes that are obviously queerphobic. Note from Elizabeth: I’m not gonna repeat it all because it’s gross. In my kindest reading of this section, it reads like gender dysphoria for being mistaken as genderqueer, but instead of that being a source of solidarity with genderqueers it is used as a form of dual closure (when a minority group goes out of its way to oppress a more marginalized group in order to try and get acceptance with the majority group).

Koyama and Dreger were explicitly anti-trans, and viewed intergender type stuff as “a ‘trans co-optation’ of intersex identity” (p105) 🤮

Most intersex people resisted “DSD” from its creation

On page 106, Spurgas shifts to talking about how a lot intersex people were resistant to the DSD shift. Organization Intersex International (OII) and Bodies Like Ours (BLO) were highly critical of the shift! 💛 BLO in particular noted that 80-90% of their website users were against the DSD term. Note from Elizabeth: indeed, every survey I’ve seen on the subject has been overwhelmingly against DSD - a 2015 IHRA survey found only 3% of intersex Australians favoured the DSD term.

Proponents of “intersex” over “DSD” testified to it being depathologizing. They called out the medicalization as such: that it serves to reinforce that “intersex people don’t exist” (David Cameron, p107), that it is damaging to be “told they have a disorder” (Esther Leidolf, p107), that there is “a purposeful conflation of treatment for ‘health reasons’ and ‘cosmetic reasons’ (Curtis Hinkle, p107), and that it’s being pushed mainly by perisex people as a reactionary, assimilationist endeavour (ibid).

Interliberationism never went away - intersex people kept pushing for 🌈 queer solidarity 🌈 and depathologization - even though ISNA, the largest intersex advocacy organization, had abandoned this position.

Spurgas describes how a lot of criticism of DSD came from non-Anglophone intersex groups, that the term is even worse in a lot of languages - it connotes “disturbed” in German and has an ambiguity with pedophilia and fetishism in French (p111).

The DSD push was basically entirely USA-based, with little international consultation (p111). Spurgas briefly addresses the imperialism inherent in the “DSD” term on pages 118/119.

Other noteworthy positions in the DSD debate

Spurgas gives a well-deserved shout out to the doctors who opposed the push to DSD, who mostly came from psychiatry and opposed it on the grounds that the pathologization would be psychologically damaging and that intersex patients “have taken comfort (and in many cases, pride) in their (pan-)intersex identity” (p108) 🌈 - Elizabeth: yay, psychiatrists doing their job! 

Interestingly, both sides of the DSD issue apparently have invoked disability studies/rights for their side: Koyama claimed DSD would herald the beginning of a disability rights based era of intersex activism (p109) while anti-DSDers noted the importance in disability rights in moving away from pathologization (p109).

Those who didn’t like DSD but who saw a strategic purpose for it argued it would “preser[ve] the psychic comfort of parents”, that there is basically a necessity to coddle the parents of intersex children in order to protect the children from their parents. (p110) 

Some proposed less pathologizing alternatives like “variations of sex development” and “divergence of sex development” (p110)

The DSD treatment model and the intersex treadmill

Remember all intersex groups were united that sex assignment surgery on infants needs to be abolished. The DSD framework that was sold as a shift away from surgical intervention, but it never actually eradicated it as an option (p112).  Indeed, it keeps ambiguous the difference between medically necessary surgical intervention and culturally desired cosmetic surgery (p112). (Note from Elizabeth: funny how *this* ambiguity is acceptable to doctors.)

What DSD really changed was a shift from “fixing” the child with surgery to instead providing “lifelong ‘management’ to continue passing” (p112), resulting in more medical intervention, such as through hormonal and behavioural therapies to “[keep] it in remission” (p113).

Cheryl Chase coined the “intersex treadmill’: the never-ending drive to fit within a normative sex category (p113), which Spurgas deploys to talk about the proliferation of “lifelong treatments” and how it creates the need for constant surveillance of intersex bodies (p114). Medical specialization adds to the proliferation, as one needs increasingly more specialists who have increasingly narrow specialties.

There’s a cruel irony in how the DSD model pushes for lifelong psychiatric and psychological care of intersex patients so as to attend to the PTSD that is caused by medical intervention. (p115) It pushes a capitalistic model where as much money can be milked as possible out of intersex patients (p116).

The DSD treatment model, if it encourages patients to find community at all, hence pushes condition-specific medical support groups rather than pan-intersex advocacy groups (p115)

Other stuff in the chapter

Spurgas does more Foucault-ing at the end of the chapter. Highlight: “The intersex/DSD body is a site of biosocial contestation over which ways of knowing not only truth of sex, but the truth of the self, are fought. Both intelligibility and tangible resources are the prizes accorded to the winner(s) of the battle over truth of sex” (p117)

There’s some stuff on the patient-as-consumer that didn’t really land with anybody at the book club meeting - we’re mostly Canadians and the idea of patient-as-consumer isn’t relatable. Ei noted it isn’t even that relatable from their position as an American.

***

Having now summarized the chapter, here's a summary of our discussion at book club...

Opening reactions

Michelle (M): the way the main lady involved became medicalized really made my heart sink, reading that.

Elizabeth (E): I do remember some discussion of intersex people in the 90s, and it never really grew in the way that other queer identities did! This has kind of helped for me to understand what the fuck happened here.

E: It was definitely a very insightful reading on that part, while being absolutely outraging. I didn't know, but I guess I wasn't surprised at how pivotal US-centrism was. The author was talking about "North American centric" though but always meant the United States!!! Canada was just not part of this! They even make mention of Quebec as separate and one of the opposing regions. I was like, What are you doing here, America? You are not the entirety of our continent!!!

E: The feedback from non-Anglophone intersex advocates that DSD does not translate was something that I was like, "Yes!" For me, when I read the French term - that sounded like something that would include vaginismus, erectile dysfunction - it sounds far more general and negative.

M: the fuckin' respectability politics of DSD really got under my skin, as a term! I know the importance, as a queer person, of not forcing people to ID as queer, but this was a lot.

E: it was very assimilationist in a way that was very upsetting. I knew intellectually that this was going on. There was such a distinct advocacy push for that. The coddling of parents and doctors at the expense of intersex people was such a theme of this chapter, in a way that was very upsetting. They started out with this goal of intersex liberation, and instead, wound up coddling parents and doctors.

Solidarities

M: I feel like there's a real ableist parallel to the autism movement here… It dovetails with how the autism movement was like, "Aww, we're sorry about your emotionless monster baby! This must be so hard for you [parents]!" And it felt like "aw, it's okay, we'll fix your baby so they can interface with heterosexuality!" [Note: both of us are neurodivergent]

E: A lot of intersexism is a fear that you're going to have a queer child, both in terms of orientation and gender.

E: You cannot have intersex liberation without putting an end to homophobia and transphobia.

M: We're such natural allies there!

E: I understand that there are these very dysphoric ipsogender or cisgender people, who don't want to be mistaken as trans, but like it or not, their rights are linked to trans people! When I encounter these people, I don't know how to convey, "whether you like it or not, you're not going to get more rights by doing everything you can to be as distant as possible."

M: it reminds me of the movements by some younger queers to adhere to respectability politics.

E: Oh no. There are younger queers who want respectability politics????

M: well, some younger queers are very reactionary about neopronouns and kink at pride. they don't always know the difference between representation and "imposing" kinks on others. In a way, it reminds me of the more intentional rejection of queer weirdos, or queerdos, if you will, by republican gays.

E: I feel like a lot of anti-queerdom that comes out of the ipso and cisgender intersex community reads as very dysphoric to me. That needs to be acknowledged as gender dysphoria.

M: That resonates to me. When I heard about my own androgen imbalance, I was like, "does that mean I'm not a real woman?" And now I would happily say "fuck that question," but we do need an empathy and sensitivity for that experience. Though not tolerance for people who invalidate others, to be honest.

E: The term "iatrogensis" was new to me. The term refers to a disease caused or aggravated by medical intervention.

M: So like a surgical complication, or gender dysphoria caused by improper medical counselling!

The DSD debate

ei: i think the "disorder" discussion is really interesting. in my opinion, if someone feels their intersex condition is a disorder they have every right to label it that way, but if someone does not feel the same they have every right to reject the disorder label. personally i use the label "condition". i don't agree with forcing labels on anyone or stripping them away from anyone either.

M: for me, it felt like a cautionary tale about which labels to accept.

ei: i'm all around very tired of people label policing others and making blanket statements such as "all people who are this have to use this label”... i also use variation sometimes, i tend to go back and forth between variation and condition. I think it's a delicate balance between being sensitive to people's label preferences vs making space for other definitions/communities.

We then spoke about language for a bunch of communities (Black people, non-binary people) for a while

E: one thing that was very harrowing for me about this chapter is that while there was this push to end coercive infant surgery, they basically ceded all of the ground on "interventions" happening from puberty onward. And as someone who has had to fight off coercive medical interventions in puberty, I have a lot of trauma about violent enforcement of femininity and the medical establishment.

ei: i completely agree that it's psychologically harmful tbh…. i was assigned male at birth and my doctors want me to start testosterone to make me more like a perisex male. which is extremely counterproductive because i'm literally transfem and have expressed this many times

Doctors Doing Harm

M: for me, the validation of how doctors can be harmful in this chapter meant a lot.

E: something that surprised me and made me happy was that there were some psychiatrists who spoke out against the DSD label. As someone who routinely hears a lot of anti-psychiatry stuff - because there's a lot of good reason to be skeptical of psychiatry, as a discipline - it was just nice to see some psychiatrists on the right side of things, doing right by their patients. Psychiatrists were making the argument that DSD would be psychologically harmful to a lot of intersex people.

ei: like. being told that something so inherently you, so inherently linked to your identity and sense of self, is a disorder of sexual development, something to be fixed and corrected. that has to be so harmful

ei: like i won't lie i do have a lot of severe trauma surrounding the way i've been treated due to being intersex. but so much of my negative experiences are repetitive smaller things. Like the way people treat me like my only purpose is to teach them about intersex people …. either that or they get really creepy and gross. I’m lucky in that i'm not visibly intersex, so i do have the privilege of choosing who knows. but there's a reason why i usually don't tell people irl.

M: intersex and autism have overlap again about how like, minor presentation can be? As opposed to the sort of monstrous presentation [Carnival barker impression] "Come see the sensational half-man, half-woman! Behold the h-------dite!" And like - the way nonverbal people are also treated feels relevant to that, because that's how autism is often treated, like a freakshow and a pity party for the parents? And it's so dehumanizing. And as someone who might potentially have a nonverbal child, because my wife is expecting and my husband and she both have ADHD - I'm just very fed up with ableism and the perception of monstrosity.

Overall, this was a chapter that had a lot to talk about! See here for our discussion of Chapters 5-7 from the same volume.

#intersex #intersex studies #queer theory #gender studies #actually intersex #intersex rights #intersex activism #intersex books #book reviews #book summaries #paper summaries #lit review #critical intersex #intersex history

[like-this-post-if-you]

Like this post if you are intersex

#intersex #actually intersex #intersex community #intersex lesbian #intersex history #intersex awareness #intersex rights #intersex transfem #intersex transmasc

[factoidfactory]

Random Fact #6,493

"The god of Christians, Jews, and Muslims made only two genders" is not a sound claim even if we were to assume for the sake of argument that God exists and created genders.

Israelite society had several genders, not just two.

Ay’lonit [איילונית]

A person who is identified as “woman” at birth but develops “man” characteristics at puberty and is infertile. 

There are 80 references to this gender in the Mishna and Talmud and 40 in the classical midrash and Jewish law codes.

Androgynos [אנדרוגינוס] (Ancient Israel, from at least 1st century CE to 16th century CE)

A person who has both “male” and “female” sexual characteristics. 

There are 149 references to the gender in the Mishna and Talmud and a whopping 350 mentions in classical midrash and Jewish law codes.

Saris [סריס:] (Ancient Israel)

A person who is identified as a “man” at birth but develops “woman” characteristics at puberty and/or is lacking a penis. 

A saris can be “naturally” a saris (saris hamah), or become one through human intervention (saris adam). 

There are 156 references to this gender in mishna and the Talmud and 379 in classical midrash and Jewish law codes.

Tumtum [טומטום] (Ancient Israel)

A person whose sexual characteristics are indeterminate or obscured.

According to Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Mada, Avoda Zara, 12, 4 Tumtum is not a separate gender exactly, but rather a state of doubt about what gender a person is (kind of like a Schrödinger’s gender?).

#did you know #christianity #judaism #islam #random facts #random fact #little known fact #random factoid #random factoids #yes really #history facts #israelites #third genders #trans history #intersex history #lgbt history #religion #transgender #jewish culture #jewish history #abrahamic religions #god of abraham #god of israel #gender stuff #queer history

[yourdailyqueer]

Ewa Kłobukowska

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Straight

DOB: 1 October 1946  

Ethnicity: White - Polish

Occupation: Olympic sprinter

Note 1: Kłobukowska set three world records, one in the 100 m and two in the 4×100 m relay. Kłobukowska was at one point considered to be the fastest woman in the world.

Note 2: Is Intersex

#Ewa Kłobukowska #Ewa Klobukowska #intersex history #intersexuality #lgbtqia #female #1946 #white #polish #olympian #athlete #sprinter #intersex

[discworldwitches]

i know the theory of evolution has been used to justify eugenics but what do you mean it's tied to pseudoscience (besides pop science and racist understandings of it)? and like, what are the actual alternatives then?

evolution as in the actual phenomenon cannot & does not affirm the idea that certain ways of being, behaviours, bodies, etc. are “degenerate” or “primitive” but the theory can and was applied in this pseudoscientific way (ie social darwinism). so what i am referring to is pseudoscientific applications of evolution such as “race science” (which we referred to racial pseudoscience or race pseudoscience in some of my upper level classes in my degree).

i wrote a whole big reply but i went back to steven angelides and he explains it best.

note, bisexual was initially coined (krafft-ebing. 1886) to refer to intersex individuals and bisexuality was referred to as “psychic h*rmaphroditism” (cw for use of h slur)

The newly emerging registers of sex/gender and sexuality were inextricably entwined through the hegemonic discourse of evolutionary theory. Determined to reorder dominant social hierarchies, scientists explained deviations of normative being and behavior in terms of a hetero-teleological scale of evolutionary development. Blacks, homosexuals, children, and women were situated at lower points on this scale than white heterosexual men, not able (or not yet able) to reach the highest stage of (hu)man evolution. The category of bisexuality played a central role in this linear model, and thus in the epistemological configuration of the category of sexuality (Angelides, 2001). The human differences of race, age, gender and sexuality were thought to be the effect of a specific temporal and spatial relation to what evolutionists and sexologists referred to as primordial hermaphroditism or embryological bisexuality. Believed to be the earliest form of human ancestry, primordial hermaphroditism, or bisexuality, as Frank Sulloway (1979, p. 179) points out, became the evolutionists “missing bisexual link.” This was confirmed by recapitulation theory, which posited that the human embryo repeated “in its own life history the life history of the race, passing through the lower forms of its ancestors on its way to maturity” (Russett, 1989, p. 50). In other words, as Charles Darwin (1927 [1871], p. 525) posited, every individual “bears rudiments of various accessory parts, appertaining to the reproductive system, which properly belong[s] to the opposite sex.” This meant that blacks, women, children and homosexuals were thought to be the effect of an unsuccessful evolution, closer to, or retaining many more elements of, the originary (pre-historic) bisexuality of the human race and individual embryo. Put differently, an individual’s distance from this state of primordial bisexuality dictated the degree of one’s evolutionary advancement. Within this framework, therefore, the axes of race, age, gender and sexuality were defined and aligned by their very relation to bisexuality.

However, bisexuality posed a problem for sexological discourse. In the attempt to catalogue human sexual behavior, sexologists were con- fronted with the dilemma of containing its variant forms within the nascent and rigid oppositional categories of hetero- and homosexuality. After all, even in his 1897 publication, Sexual Inversion, Havelock Ellis (1897, p. 133) acknowledged the “person who is organically twisted into a shape that is more fitted for the exercise of the inverted than of the normal sexual impulse, or else equally fitted for both” (emphasis added). Similarly, Krafft-Ebing (1965, pp. 373-385) had identified what he called “psychical hermaphroditism.” Yet, sexology was unable to account for bisexuality as a form of sexuality. For instance, on the one hand, Ellis (1928 [1901], p. 88) claimed that “[t]here would seem to be a broad and simple grouping of all sexually functioning persons into three comprehensive divisions: the heterosexual, the bisexual, and the homosexual.” Yet, on the other hand, he affirmed like Krafft-Ebing, that “[m]ost of the bisexual prefer their own sex . . . [and that this] would seem to indicate that the bisexuals may really be inverts.” “In any case,” stated Ellis (1928 [1901], p. 278), “bisexuality merges imperceptibly into simple inversion.”

The difficulty for sexologists constrained by a linear logic of temporal succession was how to reconcile bisexuality as at one and the same time a biological cause (embryological bisexuality) and a psychological effect (bisexual identity). Ultimately, bisexuality as a form of sexuality or identity had to be refused in the present tense.5 That is to say that bisexuality always had to be somewhere else–in the embryo, the sphere of human prehistory–or something else–either really heterosexual or homosexual. It could never be a stable sexual identity in the here and now otherwise the epistemological integrity of the very categories of man, woman, heterosexual and homosexual would be thrown into doubt (Angelides, 2001).

steve angelides, historicizing bisexuality p. 130-132

@librarycards tagging u bc this relates to ur tags

#bisexuality #bi history #biphobia #intersex #h slur - #intersex history

[thee-radio-host-is-a-kookaburra]

it makes me sad that Thomas/ine Hall isn't more well known

#max squawks #intersex history #bigender history #queer history #thomas/ine hall #thomas hall #thomasine hall #intersex #bigender

[intersex-awareness]

(via As an Intersex Child, I Was Told I Didn’t Exist)

Marleen has androgen insensitivity syndrome. She was born with the typical male XY chromosomes, but her insensitivity to male Androgen hormones meant that eventually, she physically grew into a woman. The condition is known as Swyer Syndrome. Outwardly female, the condition is often also marked by internal “streak gonads”, which given the high risk for malignancy should be surgically removed. 46XY Intersex is sometimes referred to as “male pseudo-hermaphroditism”. Marleen's younger years were defined by secrecy. Now, she's going (very) public. Marleen is a Dutch dancer and a playwright. She is also intersex. Intersex people have internal and external sex characteristics – like hormones,  genitals, ovaries and testes – which vary from the normative definition  of “man” or “woman”. Statistics vary, but it’s estimated that between one in 2,000 to 4,500 babies are born intersex.

Source: Vice Magazine

#intersex #intersex history #intersex awareness #sywer syndrome #46xy intersex

[androgynealienfemme]

Mar. 17, 1882

#the transgender archives #the trans archives #transgender archives #transgender history #trans history #lgbt history #lgbtq #lgbt #transgender #intersex #intersex history #American history #American queer history #American trans history #American intersex history

[useless-catalanfacts]

Earlier I posted about the intersex antifascist hero Florenci Pla Meseguer, known as "La Pastora".

Here's a song about him: Pastora, by the Catalan folk-rock band Ebri Knight.

Lyrics in Catalan and translation to English:

Al poble sóc la pastora, entre camins i carrers Però enmig de la rosada i els boscos feréstecs sóc una ombra més

In the town I'm the shepherd woman, between paths and streets, But among the dew and the wild forests I'm a shadow like any other

El meu nom sempre canvia entre les veus de la gent Sóc allà on ningú em troba, sóc fort com la flama i lliure com el vent

My name always changes in people's voices I'm there where nobody can find me, I'm strong as a flame and free as the wind

Ja no hi sóc però tremolen les branques Quan em senten llençar trets al cel Ja no hi sóc però neixo cada vespre En cada mirada on brillen els estels

I'm not there anymore but the branches shiver When they hear me shoot at the sky I'm not there anymore but I'm reborn every evening In every glance where the stars shine.

Sóc un ocell sense gàbia, sóc un vaixell sense rumb Bandoler de paraules, pastora de lluites fetes entre el fum

I'm a cageless bird, I'm a courseless ship Bandit of words, shepherd of fights made among the smoke.

Sóc l'alba i la matinada, sóc tots els móns oblidats Sóc les llargues petjades que tornen a viure de l'etern combat

I'm the sunrise and the early morning, I'm all the forgotten worlds I'm the eternal combat's long footsteps that come back to life

Ja no hi sóc però tremolen les branques Quan em senten llençar trets al cel Ja no hi sóc però neixo cada vespre En cada mirada on brillen els estels

I'm not there anymore but the branches shiver When they hear me shoot at the sky I'm not there anymore but I'm reborn every evening In every glance where the stars shine.

Vindran altres guerres, vindran altres anys I els dies de sempre se'ns faran estranys Vindran primaveres, hiverns i tardors Farem noves forces de les velles pors

Other wars will come, other years will come And the old days will become strange Springs, winters and autumns will come We'll make new strengths out of the old fears.

Ja no hi sóc però tremolen les branques Quan em senten llençar trets al cel Ja no hi sóc però neixo cada vespre En cada mirada on brillen els estels

I'm not there anymore but the branches shiver When they hear me shoot at the sky I'm not there anymore but I'm reborn every evening In every glance where the stars shine.

#música #arts #ebri knight #florenci pla meseguer #florencio pla meseguer #la pastora #uselesslgbtfacts #intersex #queer #lgbt #pride #pride music #folk rock #world music #history #intersex history #music rec #catalan #Spotify

[intersexfairy]

was Jennie June (from Autobiography of an Androgyne) an intersex person? or is it wrong to apply this contemporaneous term to someone when it wasn't a word yet? idk if it would apply either way btw

i have never read that so i have no idea, but we do apply the term intersex to people of the past at times... an example is Herculine Barbin, whose birthday we use to make Intersex Day of Rememberance.

i feel like for intersexness, applying a contemporary term is a little different from other queer identities. for a long time (and still today) our variations were given stigmatizing and binary names.. we took on the term intersex to empower ourselves, defy the binary, and normalize our existence - past and present. also intersex is intersex.. there isn't really many other ways to interpret it.

i dont know if im getting the point across well here, other intersex people feel free to add on, or correct me if im wrong about anything

#asks #anon #interasks #intersex #intersexuality #intersexness #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqia #lgbtq+ #lgbt+ #lgbtqia+ #queer #queer history #lgbt history #intersex history