Came across this infographic during some google image searching and I'm still kind of a state of despair about it because it's not just offensively wrong about what intersex is, it was used to teach university students about queer issues:
Alt text: LGBTQIA+ are defined one by one. Intersex is defined erroneously as "These are people who were born with genital organs of both sexes (male and female). It is a genetic condition."
It's one thing for your rando perisex person to be getting this wrong on social media. It's another thing entirely when it's professionals getting this wrong in an educational setting. 😩 And that this infographic appears in a peer-reviewed publication. 😩
It's even worse to know the students that were taught with this infographic were medical students, who will be the ones traumatizing intersex people for decades to come 😩
It's so wrong in so many different ways:
Intersex is not limited to people with genital differences. Most intersex people have intersex variations that are not apparent at birth, with puberty being the most common time of life for variations to present. Many people find out in adulthood having no outward physical differences.
Of the intersex people with genital differences, they do not have two sets of genitals. Most genital differences are still recognizably female or male (e.g. spadias), and those who have ambiguous genitals have one set.
Intersex is not "male parts + female parts" or even "intermediate male/female parts", it is an umbrella term for anybody whose primary/secondary sex characteristics don't line up with what is expected for male and female bodies. Some intersex variations make women look more feminine, or make men look more masculine.
Defining intersex by genital differences doesn't just exclude most intersex people, it also sets the tone that we are defined by our genitals. To be publicly intersex is to have non-stop DMs about your genitals. This sort of framing sets up openly intersex people for invasive questions and harassment, and it keeps large numbers of intersex people from coming out.
Many intersex variations do not have a known genetic basis. Many intersex variations are caused by exposure to certain hormonal levels in the womb. Certain medications when taken during pregnancy can trigger intersex variations.
While bodily variation is necessary for being intersex, the social experience of stigma, discrimination, isolation, hyper-medicalization, and hyper-sexualization are all just as much a part of being intersex.
📣 Perisex allies: this is shit you can stop. When you see other perisex people parrot this sort of misinformation, correct them. Direct them to look up resources written by actually intersex people.
Here are some starter resources to give:
Intersex explained by Hans Lindahl
Media and style guide by IHRA
FAQ by intersex-support
A recent post I did compiling information for trans people who want to be better intersex allies
We need a Fat Man Fab Five made of fictional characters. Uncle Iroh for life advice, Senshi for nutrition, idk about the others this post is a work in progress
One thing I've unfortunately learned from gardening, hiking and wildlife ID groups on Facebook is that the average person has no idea that "invasive" specifically means when something non-native is ecologically harmful. A whole whole lot of people think it literally just means a "pest" in any context at all, so I catch people in the USA describing our own hornworms, poison oak, even raccoons as "invasive." They just hear news stories about "invasive wildlife" and that it's damaging something and all they think is "oh, this term means when an animal or plant inconveniences me and is hard to get rid of."
I can fully see how that mental connection works and it's really not all their fault. The word does not on its own really tell you how it's meant to be used. That, and a lot of people just don't understand the difference between what matters for the ecosystem and what digs up their store bought unnatural flower cultivars.
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