#h slur

[satyrradio]

"don't call me perisex" is just yesterday's "don't call me cisgender"

[wtchgrrl]

“tma/tme” “amab genitals” “afab experience” “transintersex” “intersex people are fascinating” “are you amab or afab” “forced surgery/hrt isn’t a thing that has ever happened” “futanari” “you can’t be cis and trans” “biologically nonbinary” “i wish i was a hermaphrodite” “DSD” “cis people with disordered sexual development” “im on t so im intersex now”

[identitty-dickruption]

because this always comes up:

the word hermaphrodite is a slur when used to talk about human beings

it is also inaccurate to describe (most, if not all) intersex people in that way

“true hermaphrodite” is sometimes still used to describe someone with ovotesticular syndrome. it is up to an individual person whether or not they choose to refer to themselves in that way

also ovotesticular syndrome is one of the less common intersex variations

intersex people will sometimes choose to reclaim the word, but many of us prefer not to use it

if you are not intersex stop using the word hermaphrodite to refer to human beings

[skelejon]

Okay so. I see a lot of uninformed people in the intersex tag so here's a little bit of information about being intersex.

We are not 'biologically nonbinary', it's actually fairly rare for us to be assigned X at birth, the majority of us are given an assigned sex.

Intersex is a catch-all for a huge number of variations, so there is no singular 'intersex body', in fact a large number of us do not have ambiguous genitalia.

You cannot transition to become intersex. You can transition to have a mix of sex characteristics. The current most accepted word for this I've seen is Salmacian. Because intersex is an umbrella term for many many variations and conditions, saying this is similar to saying you'd like to transition to being autistic or having EDS.

A lot of us go through medical abuse in childhood, including forced hormone replacement therapy and gender reassignment surgeries, often as infants. I, for example, was forced onto estrogen as a teenager. This is something we are still fighting to make illegal without impacting trans youths access to treatment.

Not every intersex person is trans. Just like everyone else, we can be cis or trans or feel a mix of the two. Some of us are just intersex and aren't interested in further labels.

Being intersex is not really that rare. Most estimates put it about as common as red hair or green eyes. Some estimates even higher.

And finally, because I am genuinely stunned by the amount of people that don't know this. Hermaphrodite is an intersexist slur. You should not be using it if you are not intersex.

That concludes my post. Good faith questions are welcomed, and it's easy to find more information through places like interACT and the (albeit outdated) ISNA website.

[trans-axolotl]

"One of the things about being born with genitals that challenge what is considered normal, is that no one ever tells you that there is anyone like you. You feel completely and utterly alone. Even today, young children are never put in touch with others who are going through the same thing. You are purposely isolated, your difference covered up — and it is horrible.

One day, I met with my writing teacher at her house. Next to my place at the table was a newsletter. Hermaphrodites with Attitude was written across the top. Upon seeing that word, which still had the power to terrify me, written so bold, so proud, I became suddenly unable to speak, even to breathe. Reading the text, I found my story in other people’s words. People I did not even know existed. It was as if my whole life had been lived to reach just this one moment. I took the newsletter home, and for days and days would pick it up in disbelief and hold it to my chest like a talisman.

And so it started, the strength that comes from finding those like you. The words that used to frighten me, make my skin crawl, like gender and hermaphrodite, roll off my tongue easier now. They are beginning to belong to me. I will never find the words of my six-year old self, and that is fitting. Today I have the reasoned and educated voice of a grown woman who knows harm when she sees it and is increasingly growing strong enough to name it and try to stop it. Saying this does not mean I am always brave, because I’m not. Speaking out as an intersexual, as a hermaphrodite, I go forward, but I also still retreat to protect myself. At one moment I may tell a friend my story, talk knowledgeably about it on the phone with a stranger. But then the subject comes up in a room full of people, and I speak in generalities, as if it were something that happens to other people. And I feel that silence between my legs, the place that sets me and my past apart from most other women. But I’m kind to myself when I can’t quite tell the whole truth, as all intersexuals should be. We have lifetimes of shame to overcome and, for most of us, this has been a secret that we have guarded with our lives and at great expense. Coming out as a hermaphrodite has its own precious timing. You can’t peel the chrysalis off a butterfly and expect it to survive any more than we can speak out, or even face our own truth, before we are ready.

If you are intersexed, listen to your heart — slowly you will emerge. It takes commitment and courage, it is frightening, but not nearly as frightening as that monster you created all those years out of your own sweet body. As you tell your story, and tell it again and again, a sort of transformation takes place. You start to speak for all intersex people who have ever lived and are yet to be born. Your intensely personal story drops into the background, and what comes forward is your story as myth, as a kind of transcendent truth. Try to love yourself enough to free your hermaphroditic voice, so we can all claim our lives, and the bodies we deserve to celebrate."

-Finding the Words, Martha Coventry, Chrysalis #12, 1998.

[deergravity]

A satirical article from Issue 1 of Hermaphrodites with Attitude Winter '94

"The reindeer illustrations are by Cassandra Wilkes, a bisexual artist, writer, computer fiend, and the partner of an intersexual."

[trans-axolotl2]

I've been reading Cripping Intersex by Celeste Orr and one concept that I think is absolutely crucial and one of the best resources I've found for understanding my own experiences as an intersex person is the term Compulsory Dyadism.

Dr. Orr coins the term: "I propose the expression 'compulsory dyadism' to describe the instituted cultural mandate that people cannot violate the sex dyad, have intersex traits, or 'house the spectre of intersex' (Sparrow 2013, 29). Said spectre must be, according to the mandate, exorcised. However, trying to definitively cast out the spectre via curative violence always fails. The spectre always returns: a new intersex baby is born; one learns that they have intersex traits in adulthood; and/or medical procedures cannot cast out the spectre fully, as evidenced by life-long medical interventions, routines, or patienthood status. And the effects of compulsory dyadism haunt in the form of disabilities, scars, memories, trauma, and medical regimens (e.g., HRT routines). Compulsory dyadism, therefore, is not simply an event or a set of instituted policies but is an ongoing exorcising process and structure of pathologization, curative violence, erasure, trauma, and oppression." (Orr 19-20).

They continue on in their book to explore compulsory dyadism as it shows up in medical interventions, racializing intersex + sports sex testing, and eugenic and prenatal interventions on intersex fetuses. This term makes so much sense to me and puts words to an experience I've been struggling to comprehend--how can it be that so many endosex* people express such revulsion and fear of intersex bodies and traits, yet at the same time don't even know that intersex people exist? Why is it that people understand when I refer to my body in the terms used by freak shows, call myself a hermaphrodite, remember bearded ladies and laugh at interphobic jokes--yet do not even know that intersex people are as common as redheads? Understanding the term compulsory dyadism elucidates this for me. Endosex people might not comprehend what intersex actually is or know anything about our advocacy, but they do grow up in a cultural environment that indoctrinates them into false ideas about the sex binary and cultivates a fear of anything that lies outside of it.

From birth, compulsory dyadism affects every one of us, whether you're intersex or not. Intersex people carry the heaviest burden and often the most visible wounds that compulsory dyadism inflicts, as shown through often the very literal scars of violent, "curative" surgery, but the whole process of sex assignment at birth is a manifestation of compulsory dyadism. Ideas entrenched in the medical system that assign gender to the hormones testosterone and estrogen although neither of those hormones have anything to do with gender, a society that starts selling hair removal products to girls at puberty, and the historical legacy of things like sexual inversion theory are all manifestations of compulsory dyadism. For intersex people, facing compulsory dyadism often means that we are subjected to curative violence, institutionalized medical malpractice that sometimes includes aspects of ritualized sexual abuse, and means that we are left "haunted by, for instance, traumatic memories, acquires body-mind disabilities, an ability that was taken, or a 'paradoxical nostalgia....for all the futures that were lost' (Fisher 2013,45)." (Orr 26).

Compulsory dyadism works in tandem with concepts like compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality to create mindsets and systems that tie together ideas to suggest that the only "normal" body is a cisgender one that meets capitalist standards of function, is capable of heterosexual sex and reproduction, and has chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, reproductive system, and sex traits that all line up. Part of compulsory dyadism is convincing the public that this is the only way for a body to function, erasing intersex people both by excluding us from public perception and by actively utilizing curative violence as a way to actively erasure intersex traits from our body. Compulsory dyadism works by getting both the endosex and intersex public to buy into the idea that intersex doesn't exist, and if it does exist then it needs to be treated as a freakshow, either exploiting us to put us on display as an aberration or by delegating us to the medical freakshow of experimentation and violence.

Until we all start to fully understand the many, many ways that compulsory dyadism is showing up in our lives, I don't think we're going to be able to achieve true intersex liberation. And in fact, I think many causes are tied into intersex liberation and affected by compulsory dyadism in ways that endosex people don't understand. Take the intense revulsion that some trans people express about the thought of medical transition, for example. Although transitioning does not make people intersex and never will, and the only way to be intersex is to have an intersex variation, I think that compulsory dyadism affects a lot more of that rhetoric than is expressed. The disgust I see some people talking about when they think about medical transition causing them to live in a body that has XX chromosomes, a vagina, but also more hair, a larger clitoris--I think a lot of this rhetoric is born in compulsory dyadism that teaches us to view anything that steps outside the sex dyad with intense fear and violence. I'm thinking about transphobic legislation blocking medical transition and how there's intersex exceptions in almost every one of those bills, and how having an understanding of compulsory dyadism would actually help us understand the ways in which our struggles overlap and choose to build meaningful solidarity, instead of just sitting together by default.

I have so much more to say about this topic, and will probably continue to write about it for a while, but I want to end by just saying: I think this is going to be one of the most important concepts for intersex advocacy going into the next decade. With all due respect and much love to intersex activists both current and present,I think that it's time for a new strategy, not one where we medicalize ourselves and distance ourselves from queer liberation, not one where we sort of just end up as an add on to LGBTQ community by default, not even one where we use a human rights framework, nonprofits, and try to negotiate with the government. I agree with so much of what Dr. Orr says in Cripping Intersex and I think the intersex and/as/is/with disability framework, along with these foundational ideas for understanding our own oppression with the language of compulsory dyadism and curative violence, are providing us with the tools to start laying a foundation for a truly liberatory mode of intersex community building and liberation.

*Endosex means not intersex

Endosex people, please feel free to reblog!

[blubushie]

i think that part of the reason why people confuse/conflate intersexism with transphobia is because most people don't know what being intersex is (which is a direct result of intersexism)

LITERALLY I haven't been able to go on Twitter to look at art because the one time I did ALL of my dashboard was JKR being an intersexism racist and people calling Imane Khelif a man because of her rumoured chromosomes, and other people stepping in to "defend" her by saying she's a hermaphrodite without knowing that's a fucking slur, and other people insisting she's STILL a man despite female genitals and growing up as a girl into a woman, or people defending her as a "woman with a DSD" without knowing that DSD is basically ALSO a slur at this point. We're never intersex, we're "man/woman with a DSD" aka "people doing biological sex Wrong" aka reinforcing the idea that there is something about us that needs to be Fixed in order for us to place in society and this directly contributes to medical abuse toward intersex people ESPECIALLY children. I wanna kill

[ugly-anarchist]

I see way too many posts that are like "this is my OC, they're a hermaphrodite! (I didn't know what else to call them let me know if there's a better word)" And when someone gets mad at them for, ya know, using a slur they're just like "omg I literally said I'd be open to using a different word if there was one, why are you trying to make me seem like a bad person >:("

Idk why this needs to be said but you shouldn't be saying a slur regardless of if you can "think of another word" or not. Intersex people shouldn't have to suffer for your ignorance. Posting your furry OC is not more important than the entire intersex community and our safety. If you can't think of another word then that is a you problem and shouldn't fall on the intersex community to hold your hand and guide you to the options that don't contribute to our fetishization and sexual abuse.

If your only options are "use a slur" and "don't use a slur" then keep your mouth fucking shut.

[satyrradio]

TERFs: oh you poor sexually disordered people being used by tras... we'll accept you tho :)

Intersex ppl: hey don't fucking say we're sexually disordered tf

TERFs: stupid fucking herms i bet you aren't even a real intersex person why don't you just kill yourself

[antarctite]

*is intersexist* “why are you calling me intersexist”

- AGAB is not transfem specific terminology. assigned sex and gender came from, as far as we can date back, the 50’s to discuss how to “fix” us. trying to determine anything about sex or gender from an assignment, especially an intersex person’s assignment, is intersexist. no, you didnt make a term just because you added coercive to the front of it.

- transfem and tranny can be used by anyone, yea. we don’t need to debate this. op, in an effort to defend transfems, is being transmisogynistic! you are invalidating other transfem’s experiences because they don’t fit your specific view of them. even fucking transmisogyny-explained, who was in the “afabs cant be transfem” corner, has a post going over an intersex afab being transfem and that being a valid transfem experience.

you are not “a very relaxed person”, and yes you are policing, fuck off if youre going to treat other transfems like this (and youre obviously being intersexist, but blatantly dont care. because we’re such evil hermaphrodites, of course.)

[hiiragi7]

Saw your post on "casual intersexism", and while they're all good points, I did have questions about one- the "casual use of the word hermaphrodite". I know that calling a human person that is both wrong and rude, but is it a word that should be avoided entirely, including in scientific/nonhuman context? IE, talking about hermaphroditic snails, made up alien species, etc. This is a genuine question, because I know any word can be used offensively in the right context... but is this one of those, or one that just shouldnt be used..?

It's... complicated. Everyone in the intersex community has a different opinion on this.

My thoughts are that if a species is actually hermaphroditic and that is the most accurate terminology, then in a strictly biological context it may be fine and I do not consider that to be "casual use" as it is used in a scientific context. However, there are also more specific biological words that may be both more accurate and more specific to what is being talked about, so be sure you're saying what you think you are saying and using the proper terminology if it's actually a conversation about biology. Too many people I see will claim they are using the word hermaphrodite to talk about biological features and then just use it completely wrong anyway. Due to this, in my opinion, the use of the word in this context should probably just mainly be left to biologists or people who are otherwise very educated in this area...

Also, if we are talking biology, hermaphrodite is not a "more scientific term" for intersex, they are not interchangeable and in a biological sense they are completely different concepts altogether, so please keep this in mind too. Way too often I will see the furry community or fanfiction writers who do not know this and will just throw around the word hermaphrodite as if it is just a biological term to describe sex similar to how female or male is used when it is not.

Related to that, I do not believe it is appropriate to call OCs or characters hermaphrodites. These are characters/species created from the mind of a human being and therefore are subject to human biases and stereotypes, and I have never in my life seen "hermaphrodite OCs" done respectfully, if they even can be. This may be related to how the character's entire biology is based off of a fetishized slur, but in my experience they are always stereotypes and always fetishizing. These characters are also anthropomorphic in a way in which calling them hermaphrodites is... extremely uncomfortable and absolutely fuels intersexism.

I am strongly of the opinion that anyone who is so drawn to the label of hermaphrodite as to use it in this way has some shit to unpack, because it is admittedly fucking weird to use a slur to define your character's biology or species.

This is just my thoughts as a singular intersex person, also. Again, this topic is one that nobody in the intersex community fully agrees on and you'll find a lot of different people with a lot of different opinions and it is worth listening to what they have to say. Don't just listen to me alone, I'm just a random asshole on the internet, find what other intersex people have to say too. We aren't a monolith and all that.

[plumesofio]

Yeah ok there are ppl who personally identify as baeddels but calling anyone who doesn't that is fucking awful. It means "hermaphrodite" so yeah it's largely an intersexist slur rather than a specifically transmisogynistic one but you can't just fucking call trans women hermaphrodites because they agree with some of the ideas of people who self-identify that way. Again a lot of transfems really shouldn't be reclaiming that but also. You sure as shit shouldn't be calling them it.

[trans-axolotl]

ID: Intersex activist Max Beck standing in front of the American Academy of Pediatrics with a sign that says Silence=Death.

On October 26th, 1996, the first ever protest for intersex liberation in America took place when activists from Hermaphrodites With Attitude took to the streets to protest the American Academy of Pediatrics. Later memorialized as intersex awareness day, this important action was a milestone for the American intersex movement. Max Beck, one of the intersex activists from HWA, documented the entire protest and later published their recollection in the Intersex Awakening Issue of the Chrysalis Journal. The full piece is pasted under the cut.  

"But we’re here today to say we’re back, we’re no longer lost, and we’d like to offer some feedback. We’re here to say that the treatment paradigm for “managing” intersexuals is in desperate, urgent need of re-examination. We’re back to say that early surgical intervention leads to more than “just” physical scars and sexual dysfunction. We’re back to say that the lack of education and counseling for intersexuals, our families and the community at large does not lead to a blissful, healthy, well-adjusted ignorance. Rather, it too often leads to a life-threatening shroud of silence, secrecy, and self-hatred. 

I’m here representing over one hundred fifty intersexals throughout North America. One hundred fifty intersexuals are saying: Please! Listen! You doctors, you pediatric endocrinologists and urologists treating intersexuals, you nurses interacting with intersexuals and their families, listen to us! We understand intersexuality, not because we have studied the medical literature — although many of us have — not because we have performed surgeries, but because we have been grappling with intersexuality every day of our lives. We’re here to say that those who would have us believe that intersexuality is rare, cloud the issue by breaking us and separating us into narrow etiological categories which have little meaning in terms of our actual, lived experience. 

We’re here so that other intersexuals can find us — for many of us, finding others like ourselves has been a lifealtering, even life-saving, experience. We’re here to reach parents before their intersex child is born. We’re here to elicit the help of other sympathetic professionals. We can take a stand as openly intersex adults without being crushed by shame! And we did!" 

Hermaphrodites With Attitude Take to the Streets: By Max Beck, 1997

In late October of 1996, Hermaphrodites with Attitude took to the streets, in the first public demonstration by intersexuals in modern history. On a glorious fall day, the like of which you can only find in New England, under a crackling, cloudless sky, twenty-odd protesters joined forces to picket the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Pediatricians in Boston. Deeply aware of the historical and personal significance of the action, and — correctly — surmising that a notebook diary would not be practical on such a whirlwind, windy week-end, I took a small hand-held tape recorder with me. What follows are excerpts from the resulting transcript.

October 24, 1996 2:45 PM, Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport

The trip has only just begun and I am already exhausted. Hot. Starving. Fifteen minutes until take-off. Every businessman boarding the plane looks like a pediatric endocrinologist, Boston-bound. Silly thought, testimony to what? My anxiety? My fear? My giddy anticipation? If these bespectacled, suit-and-tie sporting men were pediatricians, would they be flying coach on Continental, with a layover in Newark? I’m headed for Boston, for the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP). Tens of thousands of pediatricians. I’m not a pediatrician, though, nor am I a nurse; in fact, I barely managed to complete my B.A. I’m a manager of a technical laboratory. We don’t work with children, and the AAP certainly didn't invite me, so why am I going?

With the plane taxiing toward take-off, this is a lousy time to reassess. I’m going. I’m going because I am intersexed. I’m going because the doctors and nurses who treated me as an infant and a child and an adolescent, and those who continue to treat intersexed infants and children today, consider me “lost to follow-up.” I was lost— that’s part of the problem. Now, I’m back.

9:02 PM: Boston’s North End

I’m comfortably ensconced in Alice’s warehouse condo in Boston’s North End, a renovated warehouse with a view of the city skyline, ceilings easily twenty feet high, exposed beams and brick, gorgeous tile floor. As I speak, my hostess is preparing an absolutely phenomenal meal. The aroma of roasted peppers permeates the entire space. Tomorrow, the work begins; my project this evening is to unwind and enjoy this wonderful meal. Easier said than done. I’m feeling excited, enervated, I feel very alive, something I don’t feel very often, I feel very present and aware. It could be my exhaustion, it could be the Chardonnay. But I think, rather, that the excitement is anticipation about what we are about to do. Being here, finally being prepared to raise a voice, to be heard, to be seen, a vocal, out, proud hermaphrodite who is standing up to say, “Let’s rethink this, this isn’t working, we’ve been hurt, stop what you’re doing, listen to us!” I’m really looking forward to meeting Morgan at the airport in the morning; it’s always amazing to make eye contact with someone else who has been there.

October 25, 7:38 AM Boston Commons

En route to my encounter with the AAP, walking the approximately two miles from my hostess’ domicile to the Marriott Hotel at Copley Square, I pause in the Boston Commons to enjoy a park bench, to sip my Starbuck’s decaf, and to watch a group of senior citizens performing Japanese swordsmanship on top of the hill beneath a monument to some forgotten general. The city is cool this morning, but clear, and it promises to be a beautiful weekend. That’s good: we won’t be rained out. I’ve got a stack of about ninety ISNA brochures in the bag at my side, crammed in the inside pocket of my leather jacket. If I want these pamphlets to get inside, I’ve got to get to the site of the Nurses’ Panel at the Marriott before they close the doors. Then it’s back out to the airport, to pick up Morgan. My feet are already killing me.

October 26, 9:15 AM: North End

Morgan and I are sitting at our hostess’ breakfast table, pulling our thoughts together. In a few minutes, we’ll have to leave to pick up Riki at the airport. The logistics of pulling together an action are mind-boggling. There’s no describing the thrill, though, of all that work, all those phone calls, all those miles. Riding a clattering subway on a Saturday morning, seated beside another living, breathing, laughing, swearing intersexual, hugging near-strangers at unfamiliar airports, then riding back, together, defiant, determined, organized, to the heart of so much of our pain, so much of our anger, so much of our need. We gathered in front of the huge Hynes Auditorium, pamphlets and leaflets in hand, and met the AAP attendees as they left the convention center for lunch. The next hour-and-a-half was a blur, as we positioned ourselves in strategic locations before the Hynes, held signs and “Hermaphrodites with Attitude” banner aloft, distributed our literature, engaged AAP members and passers-by in conversation and debate, spoke to microphones, to cameras. In all that time, I recorded only one fragment of a breathless sentence. 

Saturday, 12:20 PM Outside the Hynes

We’ve got all the exits covered, and it’s an incredible, incredibly empowering experience. I remember the words I spoke to the TV camera, if only because I had scribbled a rough outline on the airplane, pirating mightily from Cheryl’s press release. And because the moment was so salient, so real. Me, Max, bespectacled, with blisters on my feet and chapped lips, speaking out to untold numbers of invisible viewers (and a few bewildered pediatricians behind me.)

"When an intersex child is born, parents and caregivers are faced with what seems to be a terrible dilemma: here is an infant who does not fit what our society deems normal. Immediate medical intervention seems indicated, in order to spare the parents and the child the inevitable stigmatization associated with being different. Yet the infant is not facing a medical emergency; intersexuality is rarely if ever life-threatening. Rather, the psychosocial crisis of the parents and caregivers is medicalized. 

Intersexuality is assumed to be a birth defect which can be corrected, outgrown and forgotten. The experiences of members of the intersex support groups indicate that intersexuality cannot be fixed; an intersex infant grows up to be an intersex adult. This hasn’t been explored, because intersex patients are almost invariably “lost to follow-up.” The abstract of a talk that will be given at this very conference by a doctor who treats intersex infants concedes that “the psychological issues surrounding genital reconstruction are inadequately understood.”

Part of the problem is that we were lost to follow-up, and there were reasons for that. But we’re here today to say we’re back, we’re no longer lost, and we’d like to offer some feedback. We’re here to say that the treatment paradigm for “managing” intersexuals is in desperate, urgent need of re-examination. We’re back to say that early surgical intervention leads to more than “just” physical scars and sexual dysfunction. We’re back to say that the lack of education and counseling for intersexuals, our families and the community at large does not lead to a blissful, healthy, well-adjusted ignorance. Rather, it too often leads to a life-threatening shroud of silence, secrecy, and self-hatred. I’m here representing over one hundred fifty intersexals throughout North America.

One hundred fifty intersexuals are saying: Please! Listen! You doctors, you pediatric endocrinologists and urologists treating intersexuals, you nurses interacting with intersexuals and their families, listen to us! We understand intersexuality, not because we have studied the medical literature — although many of us have — not because we have performed surgeries, but because we have been grappling with intersexuality every day of our lives. We’re here to say that those who would have us believe that intersexuality is rare, cloud the issue by breaking us and separating us into narrow etiological categories which have little meaning in terms of our actual, lived experience. We’re here so that other intersexuals can find us — for many of us, finding others like ourselves has been a lifealtering, even life-saving, experience. We’re here to reach parents before their intersex child is born. We’re here to elicit the help of other sympathetic professionals. We can take a stand as openly intersex adults without being crushed by shame! And we did!

7:20 PM: Boston’s North End

Goddess, this is so sweet, so liberating! I was so reluctant a week ago, having my Jesus-in-Gethsemane experience, reluctant to accept — not an onus or responsibility but — to accept who I am. And here’s where the hard work really begins. I’m exhausted when I think of the road before us. But then, it’s nothing like the road behind us. 

Max Beck, 1997.

[lewdityiota]

hey PSA cuz seeing people in the DOL fandom use it so casually is driving me up the wall:

Hermaphrodite is an intersexist slur

If you’re not intersex, you should not be using that word to describe your character. (“Herm” too)

The fact it’s in the game in the first place is already :/ but at the very least I’d hope the fandom would be a bit more sensitive. Just call your PCs intersex instead. Thanks.

[identitty-dickruption]

there’s this misunderstanding going around that “hermaphrodite” is the scientific term, and “intersex” is the social/identity term. this probably comes from learning about hermaphroditic animals. so here we go again:

humans can’t really be hermaphrodites, because we can’t have two functioning sets of sex organs. no human can BOTH impregnate and be impregnated

there is still an intersex variation that is sometimes called “true hermaphroditism”, but this is an inaccurate term, so is not in common medical use

the more accepted medical terminology is Disorders of Sex Development (DSD). this is also a controversial term, as it pathologises intersex variations and makes it seem like we’re always “disordered” for being intersex

so, in a way, “intersex” is the community term for having a so-called DSD, but that’s also changing in some spaces. I would always rather people refer to me as an intersex person rather than anything else

once again, hermaphrodite is a slur that has a particular history of being used against intersex people (as well as being used against trans women in some parts of the world). you should never use it to refer to a HUMAN BEING unless they ask you to do so

hope this makes sense!