Discussion summary: Trans-Intersex studies
On 2023-09-29 we met to discuss our first foray into academic intersex studies! We read three chapters from Transgender and intersex: Theoretical, practical, and artistic perspectives, edited by Stefan Horlacher (2016).
Overall reactions:
Dimitri: I liked there were perspectives I don't normally think about or see
Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): I found the Costello chapter really useful because I've wondered why there isn't more trans and intersex connections and this explained it for me
Michelle (@scifimagpie): it tapped into and articulated a larger strain in the queer community “the people who want to have a gender” vs “the people who want to destroy gender, there is a fundamental struggle in that can only be dealt with through tolerance and acceptance
vic: multiple chapters make clear that intersex is made by doctors. This thing happens when you give birth and you don't know what to do and conveniently there’s someone confidently giving you a (usually really bad) answer… we're foisting off this thing that doctors aren't trained to deal with it properly plus have medical arrogance
Connections to Disability Studies
Though the book was intended to get intersex studies and trans studies in dialogue, we made many connections to disability studies throughout the discussion.
Elizabeth: The book talks about the dynamic that the doctors are the ones who socially construct intersex, which is similar to how doctors contribute to the social construction of disability.
Elizabeth: And also how in our society, when it comes to who is listened to most on disability/intersex, doctors come first, followed by parents, and it's those of us actually affected who come last (disability/intersex)
Michelle: it was interesting to see the arguments against eugenic abortion… The amount of eugenicist propaganda that's still around in our society, the text addressing the fact that people would abort an intersex foetus didn't surprise me but did alarm me
Elizabeth: Coming from disability studies I felt the question of who is/isn't intersex isn't actually a productive question, in DS we posed those questions for a minute before realizing it's not productive, to instead focus on ableism
Dimitri spoke about the idea of seeing your body as a garden that you tend to, rather than a machine to be fixed, and how it’s been a helpful framing
Michelle: one thing about accepting my intersex identity is that my body isn't broken for having a hormonal imbalance and it's just a way of being
The social and medical models of disability were invoked by Costello in chapter 4, to show contrasting models of intersex (social vs medical) and transness (social vs medical).
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Chapter 1: Introduction by Stefan Horlacher, Pages 1-27.
This chapter gave a brief overview of the state of trans studies and intersex studies, and the motivation for putting these two research areas into dialogue.
We didn’t talk much about this chapter.
Elizabeth: I personally learnt a new word, repronormativity, from this chapter! Per Wiktionary, it refers to the “assumption that all humans want to have children, especially within the context of a monogamous heterosexual relationship”
vic rather aptly described it as “so GERMAN”
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Chapter 4: Intersex and Trans* Communities: Commonalities and Tensions by Cary Gabriel Costello, Pages 83-113
This chapter reports on a sociological study of trans and intersex communities on Second Life, noting commonalities as well as tensions between and within the communities.
Everybody found this the easiest chapter of the three to read lol 😅
vic: “I really appreciated the breadth of voices that were included. The author clearly has an argument, but still lets people speak. Like with the person who said ‘I'm not intersex’ and the author was like ‘this could come from fragile masculinity’, it was neat.”
Costello’s conceptual framework
To understand both intersex and trans communities, Costello employs a framework which differentiates a:
Medical framework, in which being intersex/trans is framed as “as a biological problem: a physical lack, superfluity, or malfunction” (p98). While Costello doesn’t use the word “truscum”, this is how many of us are used to referring to people who understand transness through this lens.
Identity framework, in which being intersex/trans is “framed as social in nature: social stigma is directed toward those who are in some way physically variant.”
An important insight of this study was that to understand the relationship between the trans and intersex communities, you have to realize there are four communities at play, not two:
Medical framework trans people (truscum)
Identity framework trans people
Medical framework intersex people
Identity framework intersex people (who are the only ones who use DSD)
And as Dimitri summarized, “the tensions [between the communities] arise in the disorder framework, a lot of the problems lie in the disorder framework, and it's pretty important to make that separation”
In Costello’s study, anti-trans sentiment was linked to the intersex-as-disorder framework
Costello writes about how the majority of intersex people are trained from birth to employ the disorder framework, which can easily result in anti-trans sentiment. Many intersex people are raised in a way where the slightest gender deviance is punished, and feel threatened by gender deviance.
Multiple people noted how the intersex participant “Anna” from Costello’s study had misplaced anger at trans people, that it’s unfair to blame trans people for trans fetish porn when trans people have such difficulty getting conventional employment, and that the demand by cis & perisex people is more at issue
Elizabeth: so many intersex people are told they're intersex by a doctor and that they're disordered and the doctor will fix them so they're not given any community because the doctor is like "I'll fix you" and people are just used to the disorder framework because that's what they've only ever seen.
vic: Yeah, being born visibly intersex getting framed as a medical emergency
Elizabeth: really liked the dig that the shame of the parent comes above everything else
Dimitri: many parents don't know what's going on when their intersex baby is born and they're kinda pressured into the surgeries… the parents might have veered to a more neutral stance on their own, maybe they have some hesitance about having a kid being different, that the surgeries are such a pile-on by everyone around them.... the parents of the kids need their own support, what do the parents need or could have had to make them not make those choices
Similarly, intersexism from trans people was linked to the trans-as-disorder framework
Costello discusses how many disorder-framework trans participants made statements along the lines of wanting to be intersex, or have an “intersex variation of the mind”, mistakenly thinking that this means they may be entitled to free gender affirming therapy (it actually makes it harder to access gender affirming therapy).
Costello explains why this sort of sentiment from trans people is poorly received by intersex people: “It alienates intersex people employing the identity framework by working against their mission to recast physical sex variance as diversity rather than disorder. It alienates intersex people employing the disorder framework by implying that trans-identification [...or] gender-confusion should characterize the intersex person. And the stories told by some trans* people employing the disorder framework about having an impossible intersex history angels intersex people of all camps.” (p107)
Michelle: To be intersex is to have a medicalized gender, and how any gender nonconformity is medicalized… it makes sense why so many trans people would cling onto a misunderstanding of intersex
Michelle: the medicalization of being transgender and you need surgery to fix a flaw in your brain, and the medicalization of intersex, they both need an anti-eugenics approach of let people be a little broken/different
Elizabeth: as a disabled intersex person it's been confusing that trans people would want medicalization like they don't know how terribly medicalized ppl are treated, and the chapter helped me realize they are already medicalized and they're trying to get a more "legitimate" medicalization rather than realizing they’re trying to play a rigged game
vic: transness is medicalized, too–the diagnosis is gender dysphoria and the treatment is transitioning. Also transitioning is only seen as a viable treatment because literally everything else doctors did to “cure” trans people didn’t work (they tried *so* many things). Trans people treating medicalization as something that’s desirable sucks, but I feel so deeply for anyone who was put in a place where that seems like their only option–people who feel like their only way forward is to claim things that don't make any sense. They're like “please, I'll do anything, I'll lie out of my ass, help me”. Those poor people!! And, of course, they also cause harm. It's all so sad.
Criticisms of Costello’s chapter:
Elizabeth: I felt a weakness was not talking about the hypervisibility of trans people vs the invisibility of intersex people. Like trans people who have huge platforms to talk about gender stuff and should know better than to perpetuate perinormative ideas about sex.
vic: transmascs tend to really minimize our own difficulties. We're not well studied, and when we are, the data consistently shows we have the worst outcomes of any gender (in things like health, mental health, employment…). Disheartening to see Costello buy into it at times.
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Chapter 5: Transgender and Intersex: Unavoidable Essentialism and the Normative Struggle for Recognition by Sebastian Jansen, Pages 115-140
High level notes
This chapter makes the argument that it’s impractical, if not impossible, to avoid essentialism of some form when theorizing about sex/gender, and so academic gender studies scholars should spend less time trying to avoid essentialism and focus more on improving the material circumstances for intersex, trans & LGBA+ individuals.
vic: I think they were saying that we can't do it because it can't be done without throwing trans & intersex people under the bus
Elizabeth: ch5 was how I realized that in the social [identity] model of intersex where we see intersex as a natural variation it is essentialism and I'm okay with it thanks to this chapter
We all agreed this was a challenging read. As vic put it: “it was very ‘as you know’ and I didn't know”, and that the author was probably nervous about writing it.
Jansen’s chapter got us talking about the nature of gender
Michelle and vic talked about how finding out truth about gender is building houses on shifting sand
Michelle: I liked the stairwell metaphor [that female is one level of a building, male is another level, and there’s a stairwell in between]... I don't like the idea of female and male in opposition, they are categories, you can be both/neither/change
Elizabeth: I did like how ch5 talked about how gender isn't just a thing in your brain, it's made through interactions of people interpreting your gender in interactions and they didn't talk about euphoria and I think gender euphoria is that feeling of people seeing you for the gender you are
Michelle: [Judith Butler’s] gender as conversation reminded me of how art and research are forms of conversation... is gender a form of art?? [we then spent some time talking about this]
Elizabeth: I like the idea that gender should be like hair colour - it's there, you can change/experiment with it, it affects how people see you, but we don't organize society around it and I agree that's a good goal
vic: my gender is contextual - it's different depending on whether in an arts context vs. in interacting with landlord, etc
vic: in War & Peace there are four pages spent describing the beauty of a woman with a moustache–Tolstoy waxes quite poetic about how beautiful & beauty-enhancing her moustache is.
Elizabeth: yeah so many cultures see women's mustaches and/or unibrows as beautiful and hate how current Western culture hates hair
Elizabeth: yeah it's SO RECENT the idea that women shave legs, the Gillette company had saturated the men's market and convinced women that their hair is bad
A main critique of Jansen’s chapter was how it only considered Western perspectives
Elizabeth: ch5 was so Western, based on a mind/body dualism and I wanted there to be a discussion of other cultural constructions, like in cultures without mind/body dualism from what I can tell it's often that trans and intersex are not separated.
We then spent some time talking about different cultural ideas about sex/gender such as Two-Spirit and hijra, and the intense medicalization of transness in Russia
Dimitri described how Russian/Slavic culture is big on repressing any kind of sexuality, and being queer is deeply tied to perversion, which kicked off a discussion of Left Hand of Darkness
Elizabeth: another reason I wanted postcolonial stuff was it'd be useful to have strategic essentialism discussed (Spivak), which seems really relevant to a discussion of essentialism.
Overall we were all glad we got to give our brains some exercise, and we’ll be reading more intersex studies in November! 😅 Join us for a discussion of Holmes’ Critical Intersex on Nov 24.
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As someone who hasn't read the works of radical feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, could you explain what's wrong and what bothers you about biological essentialism? I'm curious about your opinion after reading your post on radfems (and I'd like a perspective that isn't so based on biological gender essentialism, which I honestly have a hard time moving away from because I don't understand other perspectives well). 👀
The problem with biological essentialism is that purports to answer the eternally unanswered question of nature vs nurture in a wholly one-dimensional way - ie, with biological sex as The Single Most Important Aspect Of Personhood, regardless of any other considerations - while simultaneously ignoring the fact that biological sex is not, in fact, a binary proposition. We've learned in recent decades, for instance, that intersex conditions are much more common and wide-ranging than previously thought, not because scientists have arbitrarily changed the definitions of what counts as an intersex condition, but because our understanding of hormones, chromosomes, karyotpying and other physical permutations has expanded sufficiently to merit the shift. So right away, the idea that humanity is composed of Biological Men and Biological Women with absolutely no ambiguities, overlap or middle ground simply isn't true.
Inevitably, though, if you mention this, people with a vested interest in biological essentialism become immediately defensive. They'll start saying things like, oh, but that's only a tiny minority of the population, they're outliers, they don't count, as though their argument doesn't derive its claim to authority from a presumed universality. To use a well-worn example, redheads are also a tiny minority of the population, but that doesn't mean we exclude them when talking about the range of natural human hair colours. But the fact is, even if humans lacked chromosomal diversity beyond XX/XY; even if there were no cases of cis men with internal ovaries or cis women with internal testes or people with ambiguous genitalia - and let's be clear: all of these things exist - the fact is, our individual hormones are in flux throughout our lives.
There are standard ranges for estrogen and testosterone in men and women (which, again, vary according to age and some other factors), but two cis men of the same age and background could still have completely different T-counts, for instance - meaning, even the supposed universal gender factor isn't universal at all. More, while our hormones certainly play a major role in our moods and cognition, so do a ton of other genetic and bodily factors that have nothing to do with the sex we're assigned at birth - and on top of that, there's nurture: the cultural contexts in which we're raised, plus our more individual experiences of living in the world.
One of the most common, everyday (and yet completely bullshit) permutations of biological essentialism comes when parents or would-be parents talk about their reasons for wanting a son or a daughter. Very often, there's a strong play to stereotypical assumptions about shared interests and personalities: I want a son to play football with me, for instance, or: I want a daughter to be my shopping buddy. But even within the most mainstream channels of cishet culture, it's understood that these hopes are not, in fact, grounded in any sort of biological certainty. The dad who wants a sporty son might be just as likely to end up with a bookworm, while the mother who wants a little princess might find herself with a tomboy.
We know this, and our stories know this! For the entirety of human history - for as long as we've been writing about ourselves - we have records of parental disappointment in the failure of this child or that to embody what's expected of them, gender-wise. More than that: if biological essentialism was real - if men were only and ever One Type Of Man, and women were only and ever One Type Of Woman, with recent progressive moments the sole anonymous blip in an otherwise uniform historical standard - then why is there so much disparity and disagreement throughout human history as to what those roles are? The general conception of women espoused in medieval France is thoroughly different to that espoused in pre-colonial Malawi, for instance, and yet we're meant to believe that there's some innate Gender Template guiding all human beings to behave in accordance with a set, immutable biological binary?
And that's before you factor in the broad and fascinating history of trans and nonbinary people throughout history - because despite what TERFs and conservative alarmists have to say on the matter, our records of trans people, and of societies in which various trans and nonbinary identities were widely understood (if not always accepted), are ancient. We know about trans priestesses from thousands of years before Christ; the Talmud has terms describing eight different genders, and those are just two examples. All over the world, all throughout history, different cultures have developed radically different concepts of femininity and masculinity, to say nothing of designations outside of, overlapping with or in between those categories - socially, legally, behaviourally, sexually - and yet we're meant to believe that biology is at all times nudging us towards a set, ideal gender template?
There's a lot more I could say, but ultimately, the point is this: people are different. While some aspects of our personhood are inevitably influenced by genetics, hormones, chromosomes and other biological factors, we're also creatures of culture and change and interpersonal experience. The idea that men and women are fundamentally different, even diametrically opposed, at a biological level - that the major separator in terms of our personalities and interests isn't culture, upbringing and personal taste, but what's between our legs - is just... so reductive, and so inaccurate.
We can absolutely have common experiences on the basis of a shared gender, but gender is not the only possible axis of commonality between two people, let alone the most salient one at all times, and the idea that we're all born on one side of an immutable biological equation that cannot possibly be transcended makes me feel insane. According to modern biological essentialism, intersex, trans and nonbinary people are either monstrous, mistakes or imaginary; all men are fundamentally predisposed to violence, all women are designed for motherhood, and we're meant to just hew to our designated places - which, conveniently, tend to echo a very specific form of Christian ideology, but which in any case manifestly fail to account for how variedly gender has been presented throughout history. It's nuts.
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