Banning Biological Reality is Ridiculous!

 What could be more ludicrous than declaring biology to be against the law?

Over the past few months, since Trump was inaugurated again, information has been disappeared by the administration. Datasets have been taken down, historical images removed from archives, websites have been removed or revised, research defunded, and books have been purged from libraries. In just one example, the United States Naval Academy--a college--has removed 381 books from its library thus far, having been so directed by Pete Hegseth, our current Secretary of Defense. Hegseth may be incompetent at actual military leadership, spilling secrets on Signal, but he's great at imposing his ideology that the military should be the preserve of cis straight white men. . .

The books removed include studies on the KKK and lynching, on women in the Holocaust, on trans issues, on 19th century masculinity, on slavery. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird sings was removed. All of these were framed as violating federal executive orders on "DEI" or "gender ideology," and thus figuratively to be burned.

You know what else was removed? Books on intersex statuses. Intersex statuses are inborn, and are found in all animal species-- humans and dogs and songbirds and mice and tropical fish. This is how nature works: sex is way more complicated and interesting than some singsong child's story!

But on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order written by Project 2025 authors--radical Christian nationalists--titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." The media reporting on this was shallow. (So much media reporting now is shallow, because there's so much chaos going on that nobody can keep up.) The EO was framed as an anti-trans statement, often with some discussion of popular opposition to the participation of trans women in sports. Then the story sank in the flood of developing news.

But that EO continues to have a powerful impact, being the basis of a huge, ongoing wave of purges of books and research projects and federal employees. So you should know what the EO declares to be law under President Trump. The EO states that is that there is no such thing as gender, only biological sex. And biological sex is stated to be a binary of male and female that is set at conception.

Thus, the EO does not just declare that people cannot gender transition, that nonbinary gender identity does not exist, that trans people must be detransitioned on their passports, that schools and prisons and scientific studies etc. etc. must not recognize gender transitions, and all the other transphobic discrimination it requires. It also declares that intersex statuses do not exist.

This is ridiculous and bizarre! You can no more erase the fact that intersex babies are born all the time than you can erase that curly-haired babes are born all the time by making a proclamation. The authors' vision of physical sex--that at the moment of conception, we're all either XX or XY, which will determine which of two gonads we develop, which in turn will determine what our genitals look like, is that singsong child's myth. Some embryos are XXY, some are XXYY, some are XX/XY. Some embryos that are XX develop into fetuses that look typically male, with phallus and testes. Some that are XY develop into fetuses that look typically female, with vulvas. Fetuses of any genotype can develop intermediate ovotestes. Fetuses of any genotype can develop intermediate genital configurations. That's how biology works!

But the EO declares this biology to be intolerable, to be ideology, to violate the Trump-declared reality of the singsong children's myth. And the federal government is taking action to impose this inversion of biology and ideology on the nation--for example, by banning books on intersex from the US. Naval Academy library.

All book bans are evil. But banning books on biology as "denying biological reality" has the cherry on top of being ridiculous.

What If We Treated White Femme Celebrities Like Caster Semenya?

South African track star Caster Semenya has been barred from competing in her races in the Olympics because her body naturally produces higher levels of testosterone than is considered typical for women. Oh, but this is not discrimination, says the International Association of Athletics Federations, because she is welcome to compete in the men's races instead!

I've written at length before about why policing women's naturally-produced testosterone levels and banning them for being intersex is both morally wrong and nonsensical. Testosterone is not a magic elixir of male superiority--that's a ridiculous myth. And even if we imagined that it were, all Olympic athletes have atypical bodies. Swimmer Michael Phelps, world recordholder of 28 Olympic medals, has been the subject of lots of reporting celebrating him as a "mutant." (He is double-jointed, with very unusual body proportions, huge lungs, and muscles that only produce half the amount of lactic acid when exercising than normal.)

But let's not go over all that again. I want to address another issue: that the women being singled out, tested, and excluded for having high testosterone are vastly disproportionately women of color from the global south who are perceived as "too masculine." And often, it is feminine white women competitors who have demanded that they be tested. "Experts" relied upon in Semeya's case have used explicitly racist imagery in their presentations of her as posing some sort of threat to "normal" feminine white women competitors.

It seems pretty glaring that the reason Caster Semenya is being policed so intensely is that she is a queer black woman who is strong and muscular, and not interesting in performing femininity with long hair or nails for the comfort of certain others. And by "certain others," I mean all those policing bodily binary sex and gender expectations: misogynists who deem athleticism in women to be unattractive, and bigots like homophobes, transphobes, and those who deem intersex bodies horrifying.

So let's think about the outcome in a different context. Instead of strong brown athletes, let's look at women who are white feminine celebrities. Let's imagine that before we let them take women's roles in movies or television shows, we tested their natural levels of testosterone.

All of the women I've shown here would fail, because they all have high testosterone caused by PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome. Each of them has spoken to the media about it. Emma Thompson has talked about her struggles with infertility related to PCOS; Sasha Pieterse has explained that PCOS caused her to gain weight; Daisy Ridley has shared with fans that she battles PCOS-related acne; and Jillian Michaels has talked about her path to adoption after years of attempting to conceive despite her PCOS.

Each of these celebrities has a natural testosterone level outside the norm for women. Why then do we not classify them as having "hyperandogenism," as we do women excluded from athletic competitions? Why, because they are paragons of white femininity in the public eye! Daisy Ridley did acquire a misogynist hate-following from men who were angry at her Star Wars character Rey. But they were angry because they didn't want a "girl" to be the hero Jedi, they wanted a masculine white man. Jillian Michaels might have gotten a backlash because she has a strong, muscular body--something we associate with high testosterone. But she performs the role of the feminine personal trainer, and spent years policing the bodies of fat people on The Biggest Loser, so she got a pass. Sasha Pieterse was widely mocked and trolled in social media about her body--but this was fat-shaming, not policing femininity. Like many people with higher levels of testosterone, she found out that what this made her was fat, not "buffed," and her curvy body never triggered the stereotypes that high testosterone must make you butch.

So, these celebrities with atypical hormones have not faced the testosterone police yet--but imagine if they did. Imagine if some group started challenging women celebrities, claiming that some were bad role models, or taking acting roles away from "real" women, because they had "male" levels of testosterone, which gave them an unfair advantage. Those making this claim could back it up with a wide array of empirical evidence: actors who are men are given more speaking parts in movies; they are paid more; directors are much more likely to be men. They could claim men have a natural advantage due to testosterone giving them more assertiveness and "drive," making them by nature more compelling actors, more competent directors, and naturally running the entertainment industry.

Yes, that would seem obviously bizarre and nonsensical. But people used to make just this argument; it's simply no longer accepted. We no longer buy the old scientific studies, controversial but widely believed in their day, that it is their high testosterone that causes men to dominate politics, business, academia and the arts.

So imagine that each of these celebrities were treated like Caster Semenya, or Duttee Chand, or Maximila Imali, or Evangeline Makena, and had the same experience as these strong brown athletes. They would be excluded due to naturally high levels of testosterone, shamed, and presented as "cheaters." They would be framed as not really women, despite having been assigned female at birth, raised as girls, and identifying as women today. And they would be highly unlikely to feel comforted by being told they were free to try out for men's roles.

If you think it would be nuts to tell Victoria Bechkam or Emma Thompson that they are not really women because they have high T, then you should think the same about Caster Semenya.

The Department of Inhumanity and Ideological Services

A memo was recently leaked from the Department of Health and Human Services. In it, the HHS defines sex as a binary determined by chromosomes (presumed to come in only two forms, XX or XY), and states that sex cannot be changed.

The memo has caused outrage, because its goal is to define gender transition out of existence. Its aim is to discriminate against trans people, declaring them to be deluded or deceptive, their lived genders irrelevant. In so doing, it ignores the conclusions of every mainstream medical and psychological association, which is a bizarre position for a department supposedly aimed at recognizing and supporting medical treatment paradigms to take. Unrecognized as yet is how this proposed policy would also work to shatter the lives of intersex people. As is so often the case, intersex people's lives and needs go unrecognized, so in this post I will try counter that.

First, we need to understand where this memo is coming from. The Director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights is currently Roger Severino. He used to work for the Heritage Foundation. He has no special knowledge of medical issues--he was hired by the Trump administration to please conservative Christian groups. He is an advocate of conversion therapy for LGBT people. He says being LGBT is "against biology." He believes in a radical conservative Christian ideology that states that patriarchy, heterosexuality, and cisgenderism are compelled by the Bible and nature, and that Christians are forbidden from tolerating gender egalitarianism or LGBT people. Unsurprisingly if very sadly, rather than doing his job as Director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights, which is to see that the medical needs of all people, as understood by the medical profession, are met, he is seeking to impose his ideology. Rather than fostering humanity and human services, he seeks to advance discrimination and a radically conservative ideology of sex and gender.

What's especially insidious is that this extremist political position is not being proposed for debate--not that human rights recognized by the UN and international community should be debatable. But by inserting its bigoted assertion--that sex is a binary determined by chromosomes that cannot be challenged or changed--into the HHS definition, radical conservative Christian ideology is disguised as scientific fact. This is a common tactic today in that segment of the far American right that seeks to dismiss scientific consensus. They find some person of supposed authority who will ignore what the vast majority of experts affirm to be true, and present the assertions of that person as "disproving" the voice of the vast majority--this is very evident when we look at their approach to defying the national and international consensus of climate scientists.

In this case, the action is even more radical. The idea is to have the institution created to protect people's rights to health simply declare gender transition invalid. Many Americans will be unaware of the politicization of what is supposed to be a scientific body. They will believe that the medical profession actually opposes recognition of trans people's identities based on scientific study. Therefore, they will believe they need feel no guilt when gender policing people, and discriminating against those whose appearance strikes them as insufficiently conforming to binary sex and gender expectations.

As an intersex person who has gender transitioned, I can attest that if this proposed policy becomes law, trans people--some of whom are intersex--will suffer greatly. This is the aim of the radical conservative Christians who have been given an outsized voice by the Trump Administration. I have lived a decade in my identified gender as a man. My wife, an intersex woman, started her gender transition over two decades ago, as soon as she turned 18 and could control her own medical destiny. These decades of our lives, our gender identities, and the understandings of our friends, families and colleagues would all be declared lies. Humiliating us by misgendering us would be proclaimed "healthy." Discrimination against us would be declared justified.

But many more people than just trans people would suffer. The majority of intersex people in the U.S. today do not gender transition. But all of us have been fighting for social acceptance, for an end to infant genital surgeries that rob us of the capacity for sexual sensation, and against the stigmatizing and concealment of physical sex variance. Our battle as intersex people has been for recognition of the sex spectrum, and for respecting our physical sex diversity.

Think what will happen to us now. Consider, for example, those of us who have complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, born with female-typical genitalia but XY chromosomes. Virtually all people with XY, CAIS are assigned female at birth and are raised as girls--but suddenly, they'd be declared men. This would disrupt not only their lives, but those of their parents, their spouses, their neighbors and friends. Or consider all the children born with intermediate genitalia. Doctors have forced surgeries onto so many, basing their decision on factors like gonads, or surgical convenience. Suddenly, many intersex people would find that the surgeries forced on them took away the parts of their bodies that the new HHS policy declares to be the ones that should have been kept under the new chromosomal standard. This will compound their trauma--and perhaps lead to a further round of unwanted surgical interventions.

For those of us intersex people whose chromosomes are XX or XY, this new policy would counter all of our efforts to push back against forcing sex reassignment surgeries onto us, mutilating our genitals. Instead, the policy would declare that these are not sex reassignment surgeries at all, because our penises are "false penises," our vaginae "fake." And for those of us who have one of the many other sex genotypes this policy fails to recognize--XXY, XYY, Xo, XX/XY, etc.--ironically, even if our bodies have appeared typical enough that we've escaped surgical mutilation or social stigma, suddenly, we become the "true intersex," our lived genders falsified, leading to confusion, discrimination and shame.

The intersex community's central goal for many years has been to put an end to nonconsensual infant genital reconstructions. And our best bet for seeing this happen has been to educate parents--to let them know that intersex status is fairly common and in no way a tragedy, so long as children have the respect and support of their communities. This HHS policy would undo our good work in parental education by declaring to parents that what we've been telling them is false. The HHS policy says that only binary sex can be recognized, physical sex variance is intolerable, and "corrective" surgery a necessity. This is a tragedy for our community.

The deepest irony here is that we as intersex people have bodies that prove that this proposed HHS policy is, to be blunt, complete BS. Sex is not a binary--empirically speaking, it is a spectrum. If you look at world societies over history, most have recognized more than two sexes. This is not because until the modern West appeared with its binary gender ideology, everyone was deluded--it's because there have always been intersex people. The capacity to attempt to erase us surgically is only a century old, and other societies dealt with us very differently--by recognizing and accommodating us. Sadly, binary gender ideology is so passionately adhered to in our society that most Americans are unaware of both this world history of diversity in social sex categories, and of the prevalence of intersex people today.

And what this proposed inhuman policy does is attempt to codify that ignorance, declaring binary sex ideology the law of the land. The aim is to trample upon trans people--but the victims will include intersex folks, and empirical truth.

Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists and Intersex Experience

Recently I spent several days in a public internet group for "gender critical" people, after a few intersex friends voiced some positive things about this line of thinking.  Feminists who call themselves "gender critical" are a controversial bunch, but their critique of the term "cis gender" had caught the interest of some intersex people I respect.  The term "cis gender" is an awkward one to use in the context of intersex people, which was the subject of my last blog post.  So I wanted to approach this branch of feminism with an open mind, and see if there was theorizing or political advocacy I could use in my intersex work.  The group I joined promised respectful listening to people of varying beliefs, and banned personal attacks, so I had high hopes.

My hopes, I'm afraid, were naive.  The group turned out to be completely dominated by "TERFs," trans-exclusionary radical feminists, and when it came to intersex topics, not people I would consider good allies in the least.  So, since I know there are other intersex advocates who've presented "gender critical" politics in a positive light, I wanted to write a post about why I consider this a bad idea.

First, since I suspect that a good number of readers may be unfamiliar with the terms "gender critical" and "TERF," I will present an overview of the beliefs involved, in the form of a handy numbered-list primer.

A TERF Primer

1.  Calling themselves "radfems" or "gender-critical feminists," and named TERFs by radical-feminist-identified people who are not transphobic, these are cis women who oppose the inclusion of trans women in feminist organizations, women's spaces, and female facilities.  TERFs do not describe themselves as cis women, however, but as women-born-women, natal women, or (unmodified) women.  They assert that the terms "TERF" and "cis" are slurs.  Generally they just refer to one another in discussions as "feminists" and as "women," as if anyone who is a feminist would agree with all that they say, and as if their female status should go unmarked, as the normative or "real" female status.

2.  Trans-exclusionary radical feminists believe that sex is a natural binary, innate and immutable: men have penises, women have vaginas and uteri.  They note that gender is a relationship of power, in which men seek to control women's uteri, reproductive capacities and lives.  The ultimate expression of this patriarchy is the use of the penis to rape.  As a result, "gender critical feminists" make the strong claim that anyone who denies that sex is a binary and that genitals determine gender is ignoring the terrorizing of (natal/cis) women by rapists.

3.  TERFs argue that sex cannot be changed: trans women are really and eternally men, and trans men are really and eternally women.  Identifying with a gender that doesn't match one's genitals is a delusion or mental illness.  The phrase "gender critical" denotes being critical of (or more bluntly, rejecting) the concept of gender identity--most especially the fundamental precept of trans gender advocacy, which is that when gender identity and legal sex conflict, this provides pragmatic and ethical justification for a change of legal sex.

4.  TERFs deny that they are transphobic, and say they have compassion for men under the delusion that they are women, which they present as equivalent to believing one is really a horse or a space alien.  Dysphoria with one's body, they point out, is not a special characteristic of trans people, but a near-universal, and the solution is to accept one's body.  Accepting one's body means accepting that one cannot call oneself a woman while having a penis.  (Nor can sex be altered through genital reconstructive surgery , which is a radical mutilation to no purpose, as genes can't be changed and binary sex is essential.  But in most of the discussion threads I read, it was assumed that trans women all have penises, making them dangerous, as penises are rape weapons.  In fact, I've never read the word "penis" so often outside of a urology blog.)

5.  TERFs are not just binary sex essentialists, they also have a theory of gender socialization.  Their vision of gender socialization is bleak: boys are socialized to dominate, control, and rape women; girls are socialized to submit to this and embrace their oppressors and call this "femininity."  Clearly this is bad, and feminism is a movement of (natal/cis) women that teaches women to recognize and resist this programming.  Men, however, are presented as inevitably and eternally shaped by their socialization into patriarchy, as it advantages them.  Trans women are men, and while they may claim they do not enjoy being treated as men, this just illustrates their blindness to their own privilege.  Trans women are inevitably socialized to try to control "natal" women, as evidenced by their belief they should be able to force cis women into supporting their gender delusion and treating them as sisters.

6.  Thus, this conclusion about trans people: trans women are confused men, fetishists of the feminine, who are prompted by their male socialization to seek to control women--in this case, due to their delusion that they are women, to control feminism and women-born-women's spaces.  Trans men are less of a problem, since they pose no threat to anyone, lacking both penises and socialization into the role of the oppressor.  Trans men are just sad: women who don't understand that it's ok to be a butch woman or a lesbian, victims of Stockholm syndrome identifying with their oppressor.  Women who are deluded into thinking they are men should be pitied and exhorted to return to the fold.  But men who delude themselves that they are women are a serious problem.  They must be stopped: with exclusionary policies, taking back feminism from a trans-obsessed trend; by fighting antidiscrimination clauses that would let trans women and girls use women's bathrooms; through telling the world that supporting trans children in their identities is child abuse.

7.  Feminists who are trans allies and transfeminists counter each of these points.  They state that sex is not a natural binary, but naturally a spectrum (i.e., intersexuality happens).  They point out that many cis women lack uteri, yet are still considered women by everyone, even TERFs.  They note that gender socialization is complex and variable, that it is shaped by the gender with which one identifies, and that acknowledging both these facts is in no way a denial of the reality of patriarchy.  They assert that it is important, however, to acknowledge the intersectional nature of marginalization and privilege, and speak not just of patriarchy but of kyriarchy, taking into account race, age, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, and other dimensions along which power is distributed.  And one of these dimensions is the axis of cis privilege and trans marginalization.  Trans women--particularly those who are poor, of color, and/or have a disability--suffer huge levels of social stigma, violence, employment discrimination, etc.  Cis women need to acknowledge that while they are marginalized as women, they are privileged as cis people.

8.  TERFs respond to trans allies with anger.  They say trans allies are dupes, following a trend that counters basic logic, biology, nature, and the English language when they accept the idea that a person with a penis can be called female.  (Quoting the dictionary is popular to "prove" that genitals determine gender.)  They discount all the statistics about violence against trans women (and to a lesser extent trans men) as manufactured and overstated.  They assert that a woman can never oppress a man, and trans women actually being men, "natal" women cannot oppress them.  The TERFs repudiate being termed cis gender, equating the term "cis" with gender-conforming and unenlightened femininity, and regularly linking it to the violent phrase "die cis scum," which they assert is the core sentiment of men who think they are women, as if trans women's goal is to kill off all cis feminists so that trans women can have every feminist organization that exists all to themselves.  Finally, they equate acknowledging cis privilege with asserting a belief that women are not oppressed.

Intersex People and "Gender Critical" Politics

It's clear that I view TERFs, in a word, as bigots.  Their mission is to discriminate against and exclude a marginalized group.  I hoped I might encounter something less stark and more nuanced in the "gender critical"internet discussion group I joined, since some other intersex advocates have had some positive things to say.  But that's not what happened, and a couple of days spent reading and attempting to have conversations left me feeling depressed and sullied.  There were a few positive moments, but they were vastly outweighed by slogging through a lot of LOLing about how stupid a person must be to think they can call themselves female when they were born with a penis.

So, my first question is, why have a few intersex friends had anything good to say about TERFs?  I think I can point to a few things.

1.  The phrase "gender critical" sounds appealing.  My intersex friends are critical of the way sex and gender are understood and enforced in the contemporary West, since this involves unconsented-to surgery performed on intersex infants' genitalia with lifelong ramifications that can be quite negative (loss of genital sensation, loss of fertility, loss of a source of natural sex hormones, and sometimes assignment to a sex with which the child does not grow up to identify).  A group that says they critique gender from a feminist perspective certainly sounds like it would make a reasonable ally.

2.  Intersex people are often uncomfortable with the application of the terms "cis" and "trans" to intersex experience.  The terms apply very poorly because they presume that physical sex is binary (even if gender identities may be nonbinary).  That is, if a person is born genitally intermediate, surgically assigned female, and grows up to identify as a woman, is she "trans gender" because she was surgically genitally altered to become female, or "cis gender" because she identifies with the sex she was assigned at birth?  Either term winds up misrepresenting something about her experience.  (I've suggested the term "ipso gender" in my last post as an alternative.)  In any case, TERFs reject the term cis gender, and this may appeal to an intersex person frustrated with this terminology.

3.  In recent months, there have been a series of "mainstream" articles and online posts in which TERFs' positions have been sympathetically expressed.  For example, one article mentioned by an intersex friend critiqued the term "cis privilege" by caricaturing it as meaning "having a female body is a privilege."  Clearly this is false: because of patriarchy, female bodies are sexualized, framed as weak, and subjected to surveillance.  Tons of cis women don't enjoy getting periods or feeling constantly at risk of an unwanted pregnancy.  Having a female body is not a privilege--but it is also not how trans advocates define cis privilege at all.  Trans people actually define cis privilege as "the benefits one derives from being seen as a 'real' and 'natural' member of one's identified sex" (lack of public scrutiny of one's primary and secondary sex characteristics, being able to use a public bathroom with relative ease, having an ID that matches one's identity, etc.).  Nor do trans people deny, as the linked article claims, that cis people also suffer from gender policing.  Someone who identifies as a woman yet who is very butch can suffer from bathroom panic, and a male-identified person who is quite feminine may face a great deal of street harassment.  That is why trans advocates always fight for laws banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity or gender expression.  But if you read the linked article and took it at face value--why, the arguments of trans women sound regressive and ludicrous and enforcing of binary gender stereotypes.  Trans women are telling "natal" women their privilege is to enjoy being pretty and silent and submissive and having lots of babies, says the author!  If that were true, transfeminists really would be revealed to be patriarchal oppressors in disguise.  Only. . . it's not true.  It's a false characterization on par with saying that "feminists are man-haters."

OK, now we have some ideas about why intersex people might think that "gender critical" camp could be reasonable allies for intersex people.  The next question to address is what did I actually find TERFs to say about intersex issues when they were raised in group discussions?  Clearly the "gender crits" aren't trans allies, but are they nonetheless intersex ones?

The first thing I really want to acknowledge is that it's not all bad.  A couple of points came up where "gender critical" positions did align with intersex advocates'.  Most centrally, since TERFs believe that the "natural" sexed body should be accepted rather than medically altered, a good number of commenters were opposed to performing genital surgery on intersex infants, seeing it as mutilation.   That's a good thing.  And secondly, when I posted about Dutee Chand, an athlete who has been excluded from international sports due to sex-policing of her natural levels of testosterone, I found that at least in situations in which a person was born with vulva, raised as a girl, and has XX chromosomes, the TERF posters believed she should be allowed to compete in women's sports despite having testosterone levels that were considered "male."  Also good!

Well, those positions sound heartening!  Why then do I say that the "gender critical" partisans are not good allies for the intersex community?  Because of these numerous other positions of theirs:

1.  There was a total consensus among the trans-exclusionary feminists that sex is naturally a binary.  The fact that people are born sexually intermediate was somehow said not to undermine this assertion, because intersexuality was presented as a disorder, and, I was informed, "you can't take a disorder and call it a sex."  All intersex people were held to have a true binary sex.  While doctors shouldn't perform cosmetic genital surgery, TERFs asserted they should examine the infant and assign them to the correct binary sex on their birth certificates.  I was told that the correct sex would be based on capacity to reproduce in the "very rare" situations in which that would be possible without surgery, and otherwise on genes.

2.  Removing sex-markers from birth certificates generally, or making a preliminary sex marker amendable at will at maturity to M, F, or a nonbinary category--as suggested by intersex advocates--were thus framed as crazy.  It could confuse the child into believing they are members of a third sex, while "real" intersex people identify as women or men, discussants claimed.  It was presumed to be bad for intersex children, while encouraging trans genderqueer fantasies.  Since TERFs see gender identity as a sort of delusion or myth, the idea that families and society should allow the child to mature to develop and assert their own gender identity (male, female, or something else) is basically incomprehensible. 

3.  Nobody on the site at the time I was on it seemed aware what the result of the sex assignment scheme they described would be.  For example, people with CAIS, born with typical vulvae and developing female secondary sex characteristics at puberty if unaltered by gonadectomy, would be understood as permanently and naturally male, being infertile and having XY chromosomes.  Yet CAIS is often not diagnosed until late childhood or puberty, so either CAIS teens would be forced into gender transitions--a process the "gender crits" frame as impossible--or the TERFs would have to accept XY women.  Meanwhile, people born with a phallus fully masculinized by CAH would be permanently assigned female based on having XX chromosomes, while left surgically unaltered.  Given that the most central tenet of TERF politics is that a person with a penis cannot be female, this is a particularly strange outcome.

4.  I was surprised to find myself repeatedly informed that "intersexuality is a derail" when I raised concerns in conversations.  One reason for this is that being born intersex was framed as vanishingly rare.  Basically this argument held that half the population is made up of "natal women" under threat from men trans-deluded into thinking they have a right to enter women's spaces, while intersex issues only impact a handful of people, and concerns about a minor edge case shouldn't come to dominate a discussion about masses of women-born-women.

5.  The main reason I was told that TERF group members were "far beyond the point of reasonable frustration or tolerance for the intersex derail in conversations about gender identity" is that it was supposedly "only ever brought into conversations" as a distractor by men (that is, trans women) trying to deny the reality that genitals determine immutable binary gender, that "natal" women are oppressed rather than privileged, and that trans women are privileged rather than oppressed.  The fact that I, who am intersex and not a trans woman, was the person raising intersex issues was glossed over.   Intersexuality is presented as a straw man issue beloved by trans women.

6.  Another thing I was told is that most people claiming to be intersex are actually trans gender pretenders.  Now, I as an intersex advocate have spoken before about there being an issue of "intersex wannabes"out there, a problem for our community when they present physically-impossible stories--such as having been born with a full set of female reproductive organs and a full set of male ones--that contribute to disinformation.  But I do not appreciate being told that most people who say they are intersex are liars, and that the "tiny minority" of people who actually are intersex are being used by these men-who-caricature-women, proof that real intersex people should revile trans people.  I can make my own determinations about the true prevalence of intersex status, and who is supporting or exploiting me.  Not to mention that asserting that most people who identify as intersex are in fact lying itself contributes to disinformation about our community.

7.  The main situation in which intersex concerns were actually treated as relevant was in the context of discussions of trans-identified children.  (A particularly overwrought conversation in the group discussed an article which bore the blaring title "Toddler Aged 3 Assessed for Sex Change at London Clinic," which actually just reported that a 3-year-old was assessed for gender identity issues, not that the child was offered any sort of hormonal or surgical treatment.)  A claim made in the discussions of trans-identified children was that for parents to "indulge" this "fantasy" by bringing them to a clinic to be diagnosed, changing the pronoun they used to refer to the child, and/or having the gender marker on their ID changed was analogous to forcing genital surgery on intersex children, and thus a human rights violation that should be banned.  I don't see an analogy at all, but rather an inversion: forced genital surgery performed on infants violates their autonomy, while validating a child in their gender identity supports the child's autonomy.  I see TERFs appropriating intersex concerns about unconsented-to genital surgery to advance their goals.

So: I followed a recent suggestion that "gender critical" politics might be useful to intersex people, and spent several days reading posts and participating in a group for "gender critical" partisans.  What I found was something that left an awful taste in my mouth: a lot of transmisogyny, a denial of the lived reality of trans people of all genders, and an insistence on an immutable sex binarism that frames intersex people as disordered.  I was told that most people who say they are intersex are trans pretenders, using a tiny minority to advance their nefarious goal of insisting that gender identity should be respected and genitals treated as nobody's business other than the person bearing them and their intimate partners.  And I found the intersex community's concerns being co-opted to vilify parents who support their children in identifying with a gender other than that on their birth certificates.

They may call themselves by the intriguing moniker "gender critical," but I believe these trans-exclusionary feminists make very poor allies for the intersex community.

Testosterone and the Sex Policing of Athletes' Bodies

New policies for Olympic and other international athletes set an upper limit to the amount of testosterone considered "normal" for a woman, and require those women who have natural levels of T that are higher than this to have medical interventions to lower their levels. If the women are found to be intersex, these interventions include surgical removal of their gonads, and (though this has NO relation to testosterone production) surgical reduction of their clitorises if these are deemed "enlarged."

This is just crazy. Some facts: first, levels of testosterone vary a lot. Tests of elite athletes show that about 17% of male athletes have testosterone in the "female range" and 14% of female athletes have testosterone in the "male range." Secondly, there is no direct correlation between levels of T and athletic performance; that's simplistic and nearly magical thinking. And third, it makes no sense to define the range of "normal" T levels for women very narrowly (15 - 70 ng/dL) and for men very broadly (300 -1,000 ng/dL), in essence saying that there's no such thing as a natural level of testosterone too high in a man, but there is such a thing for a woman.

Bodies vary a great deal. Why do we focus obsessively on policing the sexed body of athletes, rather than on other "abnormalities?" Basketball players are abnormally tall, which actually does enhance their performance. Many gymnasts are double-jointed and abnormally flexible. In fact, most any sport rewards people with atypical bodies, and we *celebrate* that. But when it comes to sex variance, a variation that is associated with high performance more in fantasy than in fact is suddenly subject to extreme bodily policing, and that's just wrong.