We've Always Been Here

I exist.

When is the last time somebody told you that there is not such thing. . . as you?

OK, perhaps that's not an experience you've had, but I encounter it periodically. This morning I had a frustrating experience with a person who insisted that intersexuality is a myth. He was certain that sex dyadism was an unassailable natural fact--that people and animals come in two flavors, male and female. In his mind, hermaphrodites and centaurs and dragons were equally mythic creatures, and equally likely to be waiting in line at the store with him.

Really, what this guy objected to was my appearance, which is androgynously masculine. He wanted me to "make up my mind." Basically, he objected to genderqueering on the grounds that gender identities must be dyadic because bodies are sexually dyadic. When I pointed out that I am actually intersex, he dismissed me as making a deluded, faddish assertion. He compared me to a furry, and dissed me and furries together as crazy folk possessed by a trendy madness. He told me to "grow up."

How would you respond to that? Am I expected to walk around with an MRI in my pocket? I've already posted how people don't get to do a pants check on me.

I choose to respond less personally, with empirical data, scientific and historical. Though in truth, when people are religiously attached to a belief in sex dyadism, all the empirical evidence in the world may fail to convince them to let go of their dogma. That was the case in my conversation this morning. Still, others may listen, so I share some data you can use should you find yourself in a position like the one I was in today.

The Divine Androgyne

Many--perhaps most--world religions incorporate divine androgyny. This reflects the presence of intersexuality in the collective unconsciousness. Angels in Judeo-Christian tradition are neither male nor female. In Greek mythology, the child of Hermes (the jock god) and Aphrodite (prom queen goddess of love) was Hermaphrodite, as seen in the image attached to this post. The ancient Egyptian god/dess of the Nile was Hapi, whose breasts and phallus were depicted as constantly flowing with fertility, like the Nile itself.

Some intersex advocates are uncomfortable discussing intersex deities in the world pantheon, because they feel it links us with fantasy. But mythos is based in fact--sometimes psychological, and sometimes material. It can be very useful. Psychologically, it can give us validation, and materially, it gives us clues to the historical past. After all, Homer's city of Troy was considered mythic until archeologist Heinrich Schliemann took the Illiad seriously and located and excavated Troy's ruins.

What the myths of the world show us is that intersexuality did not signify barren disorder, as it does to Western doctors today. It signified perfection (for the Judeo-Christian), beauty (for the Greeks), creation (for the Egyptians).

Cultural Traditions

More important from the empirical position of "proof" of our eternal presence are the cultural traditions that societies have all over the world for giving social roles to the intersex. For example, I'm Jewish. Jewish religious practice is traditionally highly sexed and gendered--males are circumcised on the 8th day of life, females must immerse in a mikvah after completing a menstrual cycle. What then of intersex children? The gemara instructs that intersex children (and animals) are given two additional gender titles, androgyne and tumtum. A Jewish child whose genitalia include both a clitorophallus and an invagination is an androgyne, and must follow all of the rules applying to males and females. A child without significant external genitalia is tumtum and is exempted from all gendered rules.

Intersex people have been born into all cultures throughout history, so there are many traditions for giving them a place in society. As intersexuality has been erased by modern medicine, the meaning of these traditions has often shifted or been forgotten. For example, Native American traditions for giving a socially valuable place to the two-spirited are now typically understood as relating to lesbian, gay, or transgendered individuals, while the home they gave to intersex children is largely forgotton. The Hawai'ian role of mahu is another example. Today, the word "mahu" is often assumed to mean crossdresser, and has taken on a derogatory edge, like "fag." But in Hawai'ian tradition, intersex children were deemed mahu, and it was an important social role. Individuals who were mahu memorized oral traditions, were instructors of the revered hula, and were consulted when infants were named.

Scientific Evidence

It seems ridiculous to present scientific evidence that intersex conditions exist--rather like gathering scientific evidence that some people are born with red hair, or that animals of all sorts have albino offspring at times. But for convincing those who demand such evidence, some facts.

Intersexuality is common in pigs. The people of Vanuatu revered intersex pigs, and carved their likeness, genitalia and all, onto statuary and bowls. British farming tradition was less appreciative. Intersex livestock were called freemartins, and in some localities killed at birth. In the U.S., where the most revered animals are our domestic pets, intersex is studied by veterinarians in cats and dogs. Intersex conditions have been studied by scientsts in goats, in primates, in mice, in horses, in smallmouth bass . . . in fact, just about any animal you can name.

The Moral of the Story

Intersex happens. It always has happened; it's hardly some new discovery or "fad." In fact, the fad in the historical story is the recent medical erasure of intersex people, our surgical alteration, and the attachment of shame to our bodies. We've been made so invisible that most people in Western nations aren't even aware we exist, and can voice the myth that we are mythic right to our faces. Let's hope that this fad passes soon.

Intersected, Transsected: The Intersex / Trans Nexus

A troubled alliance

Intersex and trans people share some deep common experiences. Yet we often find ourselves prickling at comments made by people in the "other camp." As an intersex person assigned female at birth and transitioning to legal male status, I consider myself both intersex and trans, and I'd like to speak to what both groups share, and what divides them. Divides us.

Commonalities

The most fundamental thing intersex and trans folk share is that we suffer because we belie the ideology that dimorphic genitals determine gender. This is the belief that people are born with one of two possible genital configurations, and that gender identity is inevitably bound to this genital configuration. Penis = "it's a boy!"; vulva = "it's a girl!"  This is an ideology so basic that most people in our Western society rarely if ever question it. Then we intersex and trans people come along and call a fundamental belief into question. Genitals come in a spectrum of possible flavors. Gender identities are not determined by genitals. We are girls born with penises, or androgynes born with vulvae, or boys born with both testes and a vagina. And we make people nervous.

Freaking people out when it comes to sex and gender turns out to have serious consequences. We evoke shock and horror, distate and tittering, fetishistic dehumanizing desires. People fail to treat us as. . . people. Doctors poke and prod us, employers find excuses not to hire us, and idiots bash us. So: we share a common enemy. We suffer from the enforcement of the ideology that dyadic genitals determine gender.

Another thing intersex and trans people share is that we have a difficult relationship with doctors who have power over our lives. For people with intersex conditions, this often starts at birth, when doctors label us as defective and in need of surgical "correction." We are subjected to sex assignment and "corrective" surgeries without our consent. Then many of us grow up not identifying with our sexes of assignment, and join with our trans siblings in facing gatekeeping from the other side. People who identify with a gender that does not match our sex of assigmnent often want to alter our bodies, to reduce feelings of tension, and to get other people to recognize our deep internal sense of self. And we face a lot of hurdles. Medical insurance generally doesn't cover sex transition services--and they are expensive. Worse, to get access to them we have to run a gauntlet of medical gatekeepers. We need psychologists and doctors to grant us access to the hormones and surgery we want, and they make it hard for us, very hard. At every step we may find ourselves confronting, if not outright bigotry, a strange assumption that to want to do what we want to do, we must be mad. We have Gender Identity Disorder, considered a mental illness. Gatekeepers act as if we might well be utter psychos, and need to be tested, cautioned, challenged, as if anyone decides to face discrimination and violence on a whim.

Another thing trans and intersex people share is the way in which we are sexualized in a society with both Puritan and Dionysian strains. This is complex enough to rate its own post, so I'll set it aside for now.

Tensions: Intersex Complaints

Something that makes a lot of intersex people grouchy is encountering trans folk who think we have it easy. There's a belief some trans people hold that doctors and people on the street are understanding of intersex people's needs. More particularly, these trans people think that if they had an intersex diagnosis, they'd get easy access to medical transition services, and have their transition honored by employers, schools, the DMV, and other institutions.

But this is not the case. Doctors and families make decisions on behalf of infants with visible sex variance, and having subjected us to surgery without consent, they don't want to hear that we're ungrateful. As for schools and employers and DMVs, we have the same relationship to them if we want to undo a sex assignment that trans folk do when they seek sex reassignment.  Intersex people are not "fast-tracked" in medical or legal gender transitions.  Our transitions are not paid for by insurance--only those medical procedures that would make our bodies conform to our assigned sexes are covered.  In fact, intersex people can face higher hurdles in dealing with diagnostic gatekeeping, as the GID diagnosis used by psychologists to green-light a transition is understood by some as excluding intersex people.

Nobody wants to hear their suffering dismissed. Intersex people feel hurt when trans people treat living with intersex status as a walk in the park. It is true that *some* doctors and families and coworkers are more comfortable treating intersex people as tragic victims than they are when they look at trans people and see them as having "chosen" to be freaks. But it's not true of others.  And it doesn't make accessing transition services any easier.  Furthermore, treating intersex people as "lucky" glosses over all that intersex kids often suffer in childhood, with multiple surgeries, humiliation, and familial silence.

Another thing that bugs intersex people is when trans people try to latch onto intersexuality as a way to explain their identities. This is especially common among people just coming out of the closet. Trans folk who've been living in denial and are reaching the point where they can't bear it any longer often search the internet, find one of the few intersex support sites, and start posting about how they must be intersex: "I must have some intersex hormone imbalance--I hate sports and cry easily." "People have told me my clitoris looks kind of big and I want to have sex with girls, so I must be intersexed." It makes it hard for intersex people to use the boards at times. Interfolk get tired of explaining the difference between intersex conditions, sexual orientation, and gender dysphoria to nonintersex people who are looking for an explanation for trans identities..

Tensions: Trans Complaints

Trans people are less likely to feel irritated by intersex people's actions, because they usually aren't aware of meeting any. Intesexed people are instructed from youth to go stealth, and we're often invisible. But there are legitimate gripes that trans people can have with intersex folks.

Intersex people can be transphobic.  Intersex adults who identify with their sex of rearing and don't want anyone to question its legitimacy can reject people of any bodily configuration who are interested in transitioning. Intersex people who want to transition can consider their need more justifiable than the need of trans people born with more normative genitalia. This is wrongheaded, wronghearted.

Just as genderqueer intersex folks get irritated by trans people who hold to highly dyadic, sex-sterotyped gender ideologies, genderqueer trans folk can find stereotypical dyadic gender presentations from intersex people very disappointing. They feel that if anyone should be enlightened about the force of gender-regressive ideology, it should be intersex people. And I can certainly understand why genderqueer trans people, suffering the slings and arrows of social bias against androgyny, would want intersex people to identify outside the gender dyad. But genderqueer trans people should have empathy for the fact that the majority of intersex people do identify with a binary gender category. Given the extraordinary pressure intersex people are under to genderconform--from the medical profession, their families, even intersex advocates, above and beyond the social pressure everyone faces--genderconforming presentations are unsurprising. And everybody's gender identity deserves respect, whether it aligns with sex of rearing, against it, or ourside the binary.

Alliances

As an intersex person who is transitioning, I see clear common cause between inter- and trans folk. Many intersex people deal with transition, and live as a bridge between the inter-cis and the nonintersex trans community. Those I've just termed the inter-cis--people with intersex conditions who identify with the sex assigned to them at birth--could gain support and community if they'd come out of the closet and identify as siblings of people who sex transition. Intersex advocates could gain the support of a large pool of trans people and work together on a general campaign for the individual right to choose to use or avoid medical intervention in sex characteristics ("My body, my sex, my right!"). Trans people could gain allies whose very existence undermines the genitals-determine-gender ideology that binds people.

There are issues to address. Intersex transphobia and trans jealousy of mythic intersex advantages in transition are both highly problematic. But our commonalities far outweigh our differences, and we should be allies.

Intersex Roadshow: A Personal Introduction

Intersex by birth, honest by choice.

I'm Cary, and my sex is neither male nor female; I'm intersexed. I was born that way. Because my nonstandard set of parts included an ovotestis, which is a gonad that's in between an ovary and a testis, I'm classified medically as a "true hermaphrodite." But doctors don't get to decide who I am.

I'll explain more about the sorts of bodies that get one classified as intersex in a later post. I'll also go into more detail about how we get treated by doctors, institutions, families, and people on the street. The simple story is this: we live in a society that acts as if there are two sexed flavors of people--male and female--but reality is more complicated and more interesting. Intersexed people are all around you, though often you'd never notice us. We live in a culture that treats intersex status as shameful, and most of us born this way have been told all our lives to hide it. I'm not hiding anymore.

I am not defective. I am not disordered.

It is a simple fact of nature that sex is not dyadic, not black-and-white, not limited to two categories. Real bodies come in a rainbow of possibilities. But our medical establishment today insists on allowing for only two, male or female. Intersex conditions are deemed "birth defects" that must be "corrected" surgically, as soon as possible--even though the surgery leaves us with scarred genitals that don't look typical and have limited or no sensation. The idea is that somehow the surgery will make us have "normal" identities as men or women, and that this is vital for everyone's wellbeing.

The power of the medical establishment is so great that what limited intersexed advocacy there is focuses on doctors. The aims of advocacy are basically two: one, to stop infant genital surgery, and two, to get access to medical resources to undo earlier medical interventions. To try to reach these goals, our advocates have been forced into bizarre postures. Again, I'll explain more in a later post, but in brief, doctors dismissed intersex advocates' calls to end infant genital surgery, saying, "What?! You want to keep us from doing surgery so these poor infants will grow up to be some third-sex intersexed freaks? Never!" To placate the doctors, these advocates said, "Oh no! We just want to delay surgery a bit, but we'd never want people to grow up to be unsexed freaks! In fact, we'll never use the name 'intersexed' again. We're just people with Disorders of Sexual Development who are a bit miffed because you cut off the parts we wanted, so please give us more surgery and hormones so we can be normal men and women living with well-managed DSDs."

Well, I am not defective. I am not disordered. I am an intersexed person. And if both doctors and people who speak in my name recoil in horror when I say that I don't indentify as a man or as a woman, too bad for them.

United we stand.

A couple of years ago, something happened to me that changed my life: I met my partner, Beta. I was doing research on embodiment in virtual worlds and was interviewing people with gendertransgressive avatars. In the course of interviewing Beta, I found myself in the presence of someone smart and appealling. . . and openly intersexed. As I've said, most intersexed people have been well-schooled in stealth, so this was a rare treat. One of the joys of having Beta in my life is how things that seemed implausible in isolation became possible in tandem. Like coming out, and being honest about my birth status, or using neutral pronouns (like the pronoun "ze" instead of "he" or "she"). Like being able to assert my masculine gender identity, my intersex sex status, and a femme flair to my style of gender expression all at once, unapologetically.

Lots of people live genderqueer lives, though it' not easy for anyone, given the gender role policing commonplace in American society. Oddly enough, though, it's particularly hard for an intersex person to step outside the confines of dyadic gender, and it wasn't until Beta entered my life and lent me hir support that I was really able to do it myself.

Don't fence me in.

Something that really frustrates me is hearing advocates tell the world that "real people with DSDs" almost always identify as male or female and conform to gender norms. They say that exploitative academics want to use the idea of intersex to subvert gender, against the wishes of "real people with DSDs." They say, "Of course we have nothing against transgendered people who don't want to go all the way and like confusing others with their odd gender presentations, but really. . . people with DSDs are usually quite happy with normal male and female labels."

I was female-assigned, female-reared. I never identified as a "real woman" and wanted out of that box, but it just seemed implausible for me to do anything about it. When you're facing not only the usual transphobia, but the voice of Intersex Authority saying you shouldn't attempt to escape the dyadic gender boxes, it's hard. All I can say is that when I finally, finally came out, it was such an extraordinary relief.

So, I'm an academic, and I do think acknowledging intersexuality presents a strong critique of dyadic gender ideology. I'm not going to keep quiet about that just because it freaks out doctors with regressive gender beliefs. I am profoundly concerned that those doctors are performing lifealtering cosmetic genital surgery on unconsenting infants, but I don't think my keeping silent and closeted helps matters.

The intersex roadshow. . .

What I think will help is just the opposite. I want to take my intersex, androgynously masculine, gendertransitive self public. I want to talk about things I've been thinking about for many years, personally and academically. I want to reach out to my intersex sibs, and to genderqueer folk, and to thoughtful, interested people of every stripe. Hence this blog . . . Hope you enjoy.