#intersex DSD

[ridibulous]

intersex people who are/were invisible to others and/or themselves, I love you. intersex people who don't have a cut-and-dry label or short explanation for their bodies, I love you. intersex people with imposter syndrome about their experiences, I love you. please have faith in yourself.

[intersex-support]

What do you do when you just find out you're intersex? What's the next step or a good way to get involved with and learn more about the community?

Hi anon!

Welcome to the intersex community. I'm glad you're here.

There's a lot of different things you can do to start learning more, meet other intersex people, and get involved in advocacy.

This post has a long list of different articles, videos, and books all about intersex politics, art, and history. @intersexbookclub also runs a monthly intersex book club through Discord.

If you're in the US, there are multiple different intersex support groups you can get involved with. @interactyouth is an intersex organization for intersex people aged 13-29. They have a Discord server, monthly meetings, resources, and just recently hosted a youth retreat. InterConnect is an intersex organization for people of all ages, and also has virtual support groups and regional meet-ups. Intersex Justice Project is a groundbreaking intersex organization that prioritizes intersex justice, working specifically to provide resources for intersex people of color and fight against the intersection of colonialism, racism, and intersex oppression. Intersex Awareness is a grassroots group that does a poster campaign during every October for intersex awareness day. The LA LGBT center hosts virtual Club intersex meetings twice a month, and if you're local to LA, they also have some more resources. If you live in Houston, the Houston Intersex Society has tons of resources, including a lot of resources for intersex people of color, and is currently trying to get a physical space. If you're in Minnesota, Tigerrs (@tigerrsmn)has an intersex support group and a ton of other local intersex resources.

If you're outside the US, this post has a list of a lot of other intersex organizations in other countries.

If connecting with an organization feels too overwhelming, I think that following intersex people on social media can be a great way to start getting more connected to intersex topics! There's a lot of people linked on the very first post of articles and videos that I posted, and you can always look through the intersex tag on here. I know the intersex reddit is also fairly active.

If you like making art, I know that for some people, making intersex themed art can be a great way to feel more connected to your intersex identity.

It can absolutely be a journey where you learn a lot about yourself, unlearn a lot about society, and it can come with a lot of emotions! Definitely feel free to move at your own pace and access the resources that feel the most helpful to you, with no pressure to rush into anything before you're ready.

Sending you so much solidarity, and again, welcome to the intersex community!

[trans-axolotl]

Bo Laurent created the Intersex Society of North America in 1993, starting the intersex rights movement in the United States. Describing the founding of ISNA, they wrote:

"Over the course of a year, simply by speaking openly within my own social circles, I learned of six other intersexuals--including two who had been fortunate enough to escape medical attention. I realized that intersexuality, rather than being extremely rare, must be relatively common. I decided to create a support network. In the summer of 993, I produced some pamphlets, obtained a post office box, and began to publicize the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) through small notices in the media. Before long, I was receiving several letters per week from intersexuals throughout the United States and Canada and occasionally some from Europe. While the details varied, the letters gave a remarkably coherent picture of the emotional consequences of medical intervention. Morgan Holmes: "All the things my body might have grown to do, all the possibilities, went down the hall with my amputated clitoris to the pathology department. The rest of me went to the recovery room--I'm still recovering." Angela Moreno: "I am horrified by what has been done to me and by the conspiracy of silence and lies. I am filled with grief and rage, but also relief finally to believe that maybe I am not the only one." Thomas: "I pray that I will have the means to repay, in some measure, the American Urological Association for all that it has done for my benefit. I am having some trouble, though, in connecting the timing mechanism to the fuse."

ISNA's most immediate goal has been to create a community of intersex people who could provide peer support to deal with shame, stigma, grief, and rage, as well as with practical issues such as how to obtain old medical records or locate a sympathetic psychotherapist or endocrinologist. To that end, I cooperated with journalizes whom I judged capable of reporting widely and responsibly on our efforts, listed ISNA with self-help and referral clearinghouses, and established a presence on the internet. ISNA now connects hundreds of intersexuals across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. It has also begun sponsoring an annual intersex retreat, the first of which took place in 1996 and which moved participants every bit as profoundly as the New Woman conference had moved me in 1993.

ISNA's longer-term and more fundamental goal, however, is to change the way intersex infants are treated. We advocated that surgery not be performed on ambiguous genitals unless there is a medical reason (such as blocked or painful urination), and that parents be given the conceptual tools and emotional support to accept their children's physical differences...To provide a counterpoint to the mountains of medical literature that neglect intersex experience and to begin compiling an ethnographic account of that experience, ISNA's Hermaphrodites with Attitude newsletter has developed into a forum for intersexuals to tell their own stories.

...When I established ISNA in 1993, no such politicized groups existed. I was less willing to think of intersexuality as a pathology or disability, more interested in challenging its medicalization entirely, and more interested still in politicizing a pan-intersexual identity across the divisions of particular etiologies in order to destabilize more effectively the heteronormative assumptions underlying the violence directed at our bodies."

-Cheryl Chase, Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism, Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1998, 189-211.

[satyrradio]

"for anyone that wants to hear about these disordered freaks (or as the trannies call them: 'people' XD)" run into oncoming traffic like actually

[intersex-animal]

Herculine Adélaïde Barbin, later known as Abel Barbin (November 8, 1838 – February 1868),[1] was a French intersex person who was assigned female at birth and raised in a convent, but was later reclassified as male by a court of law, after an affair and physical examination. She is known for her memoir, Herculine Barbin, which was studied by Michel Foucault. Their birthday is marked as Intersex Day of Remembrance.

Early Life

Most of what is known about Barbin comes from her later memoirs. Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d'Angély in France in 1838. She was assigned as a girl and raised as such; her family named her Alexina. Her family was poor but she gained a charity scholarship to study in the school of an Ursuline convent. According to her account, she was enamoured of an aristocratic female friend in school. She regarded herself as unattractive but sometimes slipped into her friend's room at night and was sometimes punished for it. Her studies were successful and in 1856, at the age of 17, she was sent to Le Château to study to become a teacher. There, she fell in love with one of her teachers.

Puberty

Although Barbin was in puberty, she had not begun to menstruate and remained flat chested. The hairs on her cheeks and upper lip were noticeable.[2] In 1857, Barbin received a position as an assistant teacher in a girls' school. She fell in love with another teacher named Sara. Sara's ministrations turned into caresses and they became lovers. Eventually, rumors about their affair began to circulate. Barbin, although in poor health her whole life, began to suffer excruciating pains. When a doctor examined her, he was shocked and asked that she should be sent away from the school, but she stayed. Eventually, the devoutly Catholic Barbin confessed to Jean-François-Anne Landriot, the Bishop of La Rochelle. He asked Barbin's permission to break the confessional silence in order to send for a doctor to examine her. When Dr. Chesnet did so in 1860, he discovered that although Barbin had a small vagina, she had a masculine body type, a very small penis, and testicles inside her body. In 20th-century medical terms, she had male pseudohermaphroditism.

Reassignment as male

A later legal decision declared officially that Barbin was male. She left her lover and her job, changed her name to Abel Barbin and was briefly mentioned in the press. She moved to Paris where she lived in poverty and wrote her memoirs, reputedly as a part of therapy. In these memoirs, Barbin would use female pronouns when writing about her life prior to sexual redesignation and male pronouns following the declaration. Nevertheless, Barbin clearly regarded herself as punished, and "disinherited", subject to a "ridiculous inquisition". In his commentary to Barbin's memoirs, Michel Foucault presented Barbin as an example of the "happy limbo of a non-identity", but whose masculinity marked her from her contemporaries.[3] Morgan Holmes states that Barbin's own writings showed that she saw herself as an "exceptional female", but female nonetheless.

Death

In February 1868, the concierge of Barbin's house in rue de l'École-de-Médecine found her dead in her home. She had died by suicide by inhaling gas from her coal gas stove. The memoirs were found beside her bed. Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculine_Barbin

Movies:

https://letterboxd.com/film/the-mystery-of-alexina/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CizKypcFF20

Books:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200686.Herculine_Barbin

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2187.Middlesex

[queercripintersex]

Tumblr intersex polls without votes from non-intersex people

My project for this evening was to go through past tumblr polls I and others have made for intersex people and re-calculate them to show only the intersex respondents. This is because non-intersex respondents have overwhelmed the results to a point where you can't really see the differences between responses from actually intersex people (sigh). Here are the graphs I got:

Questions About Intersex Journeys

From: when did your intersex variation become evident? (Not same as finding out you were intersex). Puberty was by far the most common, which checks out with the most common intersex variations typically presenting at puberty.

From: when did you find out you were intersex? Here most people figured it out in adulthood but it varied a lot whether there had been signs beforehand. A lot of people figured it out in adolescence which I found heartening!

From: what led you to question if you were intersex? Most common reason is medical but a lot of people wrote in that it was a combination of medical, social, and psychological motivations to question.

From: how many intersex people have you knowingly met in person? This result was not so heartening, with the plurality of respondents having never knowingly met another intersex person. When we intersex people talk about isolation and invisibility this is the sort of thing we mean; it's a real problem.

:(

Questions About Gender and Intersex

From: how much do you feel being intersex influences your gender identity? (@skelejon) An almost uniform spread from "it is my gender identity" to "not at all", most common response being "a lot".

From: ipsogender poll (@intertrek). Ipsogender refers to intersex people who identify with their gender assigned at birth. From replies seems a lot of people saying "not sure" felt it was up to the individual ipsogender person to decide.

.🌈

Terminology Questions

From: intersex vs DSD? (@our-queer-experience) Overwhelming preference for intersex here.

From: term for non-intersex? I don't like dyadic so I honestly gumbled at this but these were the results. This poll I think shifted me towards using perisex more often than endosex but I still kinda mix it up.

From: what term do you use more commonly to describe intersex discrimination/oppression? (@trans-axolotl) Strong consensus here on "intersexism".

If there are any other intersex polls that you want to see re-plotted with only the intersex responses let me know! Thanks to everybody who voted, reblogged, and created these polls! <3

EDIT: I license this post as Creative Commons 4.0 Sharealike.

[deadmemegraveyard-blog]

Its so strange seeing trans activists go "Actually "intersex" babies are the ones being mutilated not transgender people!" because they know- they KNOW that unnecessary surgery on minors is bad. They KNOW that the child should decide for themselves once they are an adult... I don't get it

[crossdreamers]

Important Intersex Artists: Jimmy Scott, Master of Jazz

Them reports on intersex jazz legend Jimmy Scott over at Instagram:

Little Jimmy Scott is arguably the most influential jazz musician you've never heard of. The Cleveland-born crooner sang at not one but two presidential inaugurations — 40 years apart, no less, and for presidents of both parties (Eisenhower in 1953 and Clinton in ’93). 

Legendary artists from Madonna to Marvin Gaye have sung his praises — the former saying that Scott was the only singer to make her cry; the latter reportedly played a single record during his Belgian refuge: Scott’s Falling In Love Is Wonderful... Born in 1925, Scott lived with Kallman Syndrome, which affects the pituitary gland, causing either a delayed puberty or bypassing puberty altogether. Throughout his life, Scott was very open about having the “deficiency,” yet when he was offered the opportunity for medical intervention, he declined. “I didn’t even think about fixing my body because my body didn’t feel broken," he told his biographer. "I could deal with my body.”

You can read the full article here.

Photo: Photo by Tom Pich/tompich.com

[sickly-sapphic]

shout out to the "intetsex inclusive" survey that called us DSD. they asked what I wish people knew about queerness, obviously I had to say I wish they knew not to fucking say DSD.

[erebusvincent]

This is the kind of thing you’d do if you were covering something up. He’s a man. The IOC lets men compete against women. The IBA is the only entity involved in all this being honest with us. It’s the only one that hasn’t changed its story or obfuscated the relevant issue.

TRAs love to bring up DSD conditions when they’re trying to argue that sex is a spectrum (despite never being able to name a third gamete.) But when it comes to an actual man with a DSD condition, suddenly not only do DSDs not exist, but having certain organs (that there is no evidence this man has) determines sex again. This whole episode is so fundamentally unserious.

[eccentricphilosoph]

I came across this after hearing out a few DSD/intersex/CCSD people and their frustration in being used as a “prop” for trans rhetoric. I had actually never ever heard from a DSD/CCSD person on the trans topic for years til I heard those people this year.

I always thought it had been a mutual understanding and even support on their part to be part of trans/self-ID rhetoric, but it seems not?

They also said something about how the phrase “assigned at birth” originated from the DSD/intersex/CCSD community. The phrase came out of the debate concerning “sex-conforming” surgeries done to babies before they could consent, hence literally “assigning” the “sex at birth”. They said they fought for no sex- conforming surgeries on minors until they were of age to decide what to do with their bodies on their own because of the complications that arose in their lives as a result of having the conforming surgeries before their consent. So, that’s where the phrase “assigned at birth” is actually taken from

I never really thought about or heard of this before, so I thought I’d share.

Edit: I had a guy comment on this telling me this is offensive and he was “intersex”… I went to his page and found he had actually purposefully castrated himself and also identified as an “eunuch”. He’s not intersex… He even, without me having said such a thing, said I called him a “pervert”, which was a huge red flag that he’s been called that before!

this is where self-ID becomes an issue… a man who willingly had his parts removed claimed he was “intersex” and speaking for people with DSD…

[intersex-animal]

i would like to speak about transgender people here as little as possible

because almost every space or resource i can find for intersex people is drowned out with conversations about transgender topics, not intersex ones.

there are so many more transgender voices than intersex ones even just trying to use google, it now considers the results for "transgender" and "intersex" synonymous and the first results are typically for transgender, not intersex even when trying to look for medically relevant information like bone density loss due to atypical hormones in intersex people, the top results are immediately for transgender research, not intersex, despite searching for "intersex":

imagine if you searched for "bone density in black adults" and the results returned, literally word for word, were "bone density in white adults" as the first and majority of results or even just trying to find a community of intersex people:

the top results, anywhere you go, anywhere you bring up intersex, end up being for transgender imagine if you searched "community clubs for black adults" and the results returned to you verbatim were "community clubs for white adults who are also black, but are still at least part white" when you yourself may not be any part white, and being white is the first pre-requisite to being part of that club, with a special subsection for white people who have black ancestry in addition to (but not without) white ancestry. and youre just a black guy. most of the time the only intersex space for an intersex person to exist in is within a transgender community that has some sortve sub-community within it that caters to transgender people who are also intersex, even though an intersex person seeking community/etc. may not be transgender no space to be understood, only swept up under "some kind of transgender" whether the intersex persons is or is not themselves transgender

with diminishing ability to even use search engines to separate "intersex" from "transgender"

no ability to even search, reach out, or find anyone or anything that isn't transgender-first and intersex-second (if intersex is even included at all) then, on top of this, what intersex space you typically do find is very little conversation about or by intersex people, but instead about 80% of the conversation is transgender/queer people joining the community to ask "am i intersex?" and ask people to essentially diagnose them as intersex via internet in pursuit of some sort've "intersex pass card", and contributing really nothing else except that and transgender conversations/ideas/concerns during their stay. the people asking these questions or "questioning intersex" almost always outnumber the amount of intersex people existing in the community if the community is made public at all. many intersex support groups and communities are now invite only.

it makes it difficult for people who are very, very aware they are intersex to just exist with each other and talk about something other than medical diagnoses, being made to play internet doctor to a stranger, or the conversation largely being about being transgender--anything other than that quickly gets drowned out by being outnumbered.

it is devastatingly lonely and causes resentment towards transgender people at times

[linger-straits]

I never went through a natal puberty, and was bound to undergo lifelong hormone therapy regardless if I was trans or not. People used to think I was lucky (from a trans perspective) that I didn’t. That I was practically getting all the perks of hormone blockers without being on hormone blockers. But people don’t know how the lack of natal hormones permanently affect you. People don’t know the drawbacks of having a medical condition that prevent such, including the symptoms that are not hormonal. How I need to deal with disabilities that comes with my condition, how it affects me mentally and how my perception of me and my sexuality got severely skewed.

To some extent, I guess I was lucky. To some other extent, I’m daily dealing with what it entails.

[masculinerose]

GOD us perisex trans people need to do better. We are NOT good intersex allies, on the whole, AT ALL. Fuck it makes me so mad.

[sleezebag-grimedog-furfag-nobag]

important ❗❗

[crossdreamers]

Intersex joy and how surgery harms intersex people

Transphobes pretend that they are always talking about "biological sex", but when it comes to intersex people they seem to accept that they are rather talking about "sex assigned at birth". The biology is, after all, often ambiguous, both as chromosomes and genitals are concerned.

In other words: The objective of the anti-trans activists is, both as trans people and intersex people are concerned, to make sure they conform to the gender assigned at birth.

In this context the paradox that transphobes are for surgery and hormone treatment in intersex people but against it in trans people is no paradox at all. This is not about biology. This is about forcing people to live up to their social order.

This leads to severe suffering in both transgender and intersex people.

This is why Pidgeon Pagonis new memoir, Nobody Needs to Know, is so important. It documents how the bigoted obsession with putting everyone into pink and blue boxes is so destructive.

USA Today reports:

Intersex is an umbrella term for variations in reproductive or sex anatomy, and could show up in someone's chromosomes, genitals, testes or ovaries. It's estimated that 1.7% have intersex traits, and 0.07% are recommended to have surgical intervention. Pagonis, for example, was born with XY chromosomes but was raised as a girl; surgeries attempted to "correct" their gender.

Another intersex person asked Pidgeon: "Pidgeon, does it get better?" Pidgeon explains:

I was so caught off-guard. Because I've never really been asked that point blank from another intersex person, who's almost half my age. I didn't really know what to say, because every day is literally a struggle. When your body has been pillaged by surgeons, and some of the most sensitive parts of your body have been literally thrown away into the garbage, and those are the parts that allow you to connect with other people – in one of the ways you can connect, like sexual intimacy – which then allows you to connect as a family.

What is intersex joy? Pidgeon answers:

Being in relationship with others and actually trusting that you're worthy of their time and their love, and appreciation and friendship, that's intersex joy.

Read more over at USA Today.

Some intersex variations.