When Intersex People are Collateral Damage in Transphobic Battles

As intersex people, we have to deal with a host of issues because our bodies lie between the socially-expected bodily norms of male and female. Our bodies are treated as disordered, as problems to be solved by the medical profession. Doctors and people on the street alike treat intersexuality as freakish and fascinating, both intriguing and repellent.  Our bodies are surgically altered without our consent as children, and we must live with the lifelong aftereffects of limited sensation and ongoing genital atypicality. We are taught to view our differences as shameful and to keep them secret. Very often we hesitate to enter romantic relationships, fearing rejection because our bodies challenge the very ideas of heterosexuality and homosexuality through which most people understand themselves. We may be pursued, however, by sexual fetishists.

It's a lot to deal with, for many of us.  And then, on top of the challenges we're already facing, we find ourselves targeted by people who don't even recognize we exist: transphobic activists.

Today, trans gender people are making some social progress in securing protection from discrimination--but they face resistance. A central tactic of those who oppose trans gender rights in the U.S. is to propose legislation prohibiting trans people from using particular gendered facilities such as bathrooms, changing rooms, or locker rooms. Those proposing the legislation argue that the new law will protect  (cis) women and children from being harassed, attacked by sexual predators, or made to feel unsafe or uncomfortable.  Now, we should note a couple of things--first of all, proposed laws like these are aimed at trans women and girls--not even trans men, let alone intersex people. Those drafting the legislation clearly aren't imagining the situation in which an intersex teen using a school locker room is greeted by uncomfortable stares, or imagining that a trans man using a men's bathroom will make cis men flee the facility in fear. The proposed laws are transmisogynist: aimed at trans women, who are framed as "really men" who are some sort of sexual perverts. Secondly, sexual harassment and assault are already illegal, in bathrooms or elsewhere, so the only thing the proposed legislation actually accomplishes is to transform informal policing of the ideology of the sex/gender binary into formal policing. Those whose bodies don't clearly conform to expectations for what a woman's body is "supposed" to look like now become literal criminals.

But the drafters of transphobic bathroom laws run into a problem. People police binary sex/gender norms all the time, but they do so informally. The drafters have to come up with objective language to put into their proposed legislation.  Early efforts banning people from using bathrooms tended to require a person challenged upon entering a gendered bathroom to show ID with that gender listed on it. Of course, as part of the process of gender transition, large numbers of trans people have the gender listed on their driver's license or other ID changed. So the transphobic activists proposing these laws switched to using language of "birth certificate sex." But in some states, people who medically gender transition are able to change the sex listed on their birth certificate.

And that's why recent proposed bathroom-exclusionary language has moved to requiring people who use gendered facilities to have a matching "biological sex at birth" or even matching binary genotype of XX or XY.

Now, all forms of sex-policing bathroom bills, while aimed at trans people, are bad for at least some intersex people who are ipso gender (that is, who identify with the binary sex they were assigned at birth). An intersex person may be assigned female at birth, and identify as a woman, but have substantial amounts of bodily and facial hair, leading her to have to deal with a lot of sex and gender policing. Such an individual is likely to face many of the same issues of bias and outrage that visibly trans women encounter when they try to use women's bathrooms.

But the bills making it illegal to use a single-sex bathroom unless one was born with the anatomy expected for people of that sex basically declare it illegal for intersex people--by definition born with bodies that are neither male nor female--to use gendered bathrooms at all.

Further, the Texas law basing bathroom use on genotype specifically states, "If the individual's gender [sic] established at the individual's birth is not the same as the individual's gender [sic] established by the individual's chromosomes," that their gender for bathroom-use purposes would be determined by chromosomes. Just think about what this means for, say, a woman with CAIS, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. She is born with female-typical external genitalia and assigned female at birth. She's raised as a girl and identifies as one.  At puberty she develops breasts, but no menstrual cycle, and it's only when tests are done to determine why that she finds out she has XY chromosomes, no uterus, and internal testes (whose testosterone her body cannot respond to). The Texas law tells her she must use the men's room, because her Y chromosome trumps her physical appearance, genitalia, birth certificate, sex of rearing and gender identity.  This law is telling her she is "really" a man.  If she uses a women's room, it's a class-A misdemeanor for which she could get a year in jail. And if her employer finds out she has CAIS--something that her medical records reveal--well, then, if he lets her repeatedly use the women's bathroom at work, then he is committing a felony, punishable by two years in jail and a $10,000 fine.

So what should we as intersex people do about this?

It's very unlikely that we are the intended targets of these proposed laws--we're just collateral damage. Some may argue that few ipso gender intersex people look androgynous enough to trigger enforcement--that nobody's going to call the cops on us.  But some of us *are* physically androgynous and genitally different and regularly have to cope with gender-policing. Furthermore, it's now becoming popular to have provisions in bathroom-panic legislation that either put employers and facility owners at risk of fines, like the Texas law, or give third parties who see a person of the "wrong sex" in the bathroom, locker room, etc. the right to sue the school or business and get guaranteed recompense. For example, high school students in Kentucky who see a student whose sex is "incorrect" in the bathroom or locker room would be entitled to sue the school for $2500 for each time they catch the student in the facility.

Imagine what could happen to an intersex high school child in Kentucky who has a visible genital difference under a scheme in which classmates could earn $2500 each time they complained they saw their "incorrect" genitals.

These proposed laws give people a financial incentive to scrutinize our intersex bodily differences and to report them to authorities. They give employers and businesses a financial incentive to increase their sex and gender policing, lest they face a fine.  They are a bad thing for us.

Now, one solution some might propose would be to educate transphobic legislators about the difference between intersexuality and transsexuality. We could ask that the laws being proposed include exemptions for people born intersex, based on the presumption that if transphobic lawmakers understood what intersexuality is, they would express sympathy rather than bigotry toward us.

I think not only is this naively optimistic, but that it would be a terrible mistake.

Now, I acknowledge that relations between the intersex and trans communities are not always the best.  I validate the complaints of many intersex people that trans people are quick to use evidence of our existence to try to break down the ideology of immutable binary sex/gender--but slow to act as allies, and understand our community's needs, and include us appropriately in their antidiscrimination regulatory proposals.

But I believe we must consider trans issues to be our issues.  Firstly, because the portion of the intersex community that gender transitions is much higher than the proportion of nonintersex people who gender transition. There are a lot of intersex trans folks--like myself, like my spouse--who are active in the intersex community.

Beyond that, it's rational for us to stand side by side with nonintersex trans folks in battles like these precisely because we are impacted just as they are. So many people in our society think intersex people are trans people that transphobia constantly impacts us, even those of us who are ipso gender rather than trans.  We are fighting against our own mistreatment.

Ultimately, I believe that even those of us who, pragmatically speaking, are likely never to be personally impacted by bathroom-panic laws--because our bodies and genitals and birth certificates and chromosomes and gender identities all fortunately align and our intersex differences are not visible--all of us should stand against transphobic laws. We should do so as ethical human beings, opposed to all inequality and bias, not just those forms of bigotry that negatively impact us personally.

Now, all that said, I need to have a word with our trans allies, with whom I hope our community will stand. And that is: please, nonintersex trans people out there, don't try to use us without including us. Though we're taking collateral damage, we're not the primary targets in the bathroom wars.  If you think that femme CAIS women would make great mouthpieces for delivering talking points about how cruelly these laws would impact "innocent" women like them (and I've seen the calls and requests), fine.  But don't use members of our community or the very idea of intersexuality as a way to win your battles--without making an equal effort to fight for our rights, especially the right of intersex people to be free of unconsented-to surgery.

With all these things said--intersex and trans siblings, let's stand together against sex and gender policing laws.