#intersex medical intervention

[intersex-questions]

tw// IGM

Hey, I have a question. Is IGM only done to babies, or can they be done after the child has gotten older?

Also, is it possible for IGM to happen(as a baby) but not be put on their medical book? Like the doctor does the surgery, then writes down that their genitals are male/female.

IGM (intersex genital mutilation) absolutely can and does happen to individuals older than babies. It happens to children, teenagers, and adults. Many individuals undergo "corrective" surgery to their genitalia under the guise of being told it is medically necessary, they'll be infertile otherwise, they can't have sex otherwise, and more.

And yes, that is possible. Although it shouldn't happen, doctors absolutely can and do medical procedures or similar things without listing them or being explicit about what they are. This is medical malpractice, but it does happen. And, often when things like IGM do happen to babies, they don't share the real/true/actual reason behind the mutilation/surgery and instead say it is medically necessary.

[doberbutts]

I was typing a big long thing about the changes I've experienced in a year on testosterone and how it's affected me and all that and then tumblr ate it and I really don't feel like retyping that whole thing but I am kinda salty about it so tldr:

Starting testosterone has been the best thing for my health that I've done. Ever. Better than getting a service dog. Better than restructuring my life to cater to my disabilities. Better than any procedure or medication or otherwise that I've tried. Simply rubbing a pack of gel on my arm once a day has done more for me than anything else.

When I went to my endo to start T, I went with a suspicion that I am intersex. She confirmed it via blood test and told me that with my variation I could try two different things: estrogen to control my high levels of natural androgens, or testosterone to lower my estrogen further and make it stop arguing with my androgens about whether I'm supposed to be a boy or a girl, as it's that argument that was causing a significant portion of my health problems. Estrogen has been tried in the past and only made things worse. She told me it was my choice, and only I could choose my path forward, as I knew my body the best.

When TERFs have a fit about gender affirming care, they usually leave out people like me, or they brush my story aside by saying that I'm just an anomaly, or they claim for me and my demographic that we don't want to be part of this discussion. But I don't fit their definition of a woman- I have a testicle, and my natural testosterone was within normal range on the low end for a cisgender, perisex man, and enough male sexual partners have commented on what's in my pants to tell me that it's far from the picturesque womanly pussy, especially considering I can- and have- use it to penetrate with the help of devices designed for cis men who are a little lacking in length.

When TERFs have a fit about gender affirming care, they scaremonger about side effects and changes. But, I was already hairy. I was already growing facial hair. I already had atrophied- and by 30 to the point that it's not really possible to fix without significant medical intervention. I was already infertile. I already had an adam's apple and a deep voice. I already had belly fat and blood pressure problems. My menstrual cycle was already hellish and had interfered with my school and work schedules. A popped ovarian cyst sent me to the ER.

I'd tried no treatment. I'd tried estrogen-based solutions. These not only did not work but actively made things worse. I was fainting at school. I was calling out of work. I couldn't drive without my service dog. I couldn't go out and have fun with my friends. I spent days at a time laying in bed in too much pain to move.

TERFs say, gender affirming care turns you into a forever patient.

I already was one of those. I almost died when I was a baby strictly because of lack of access to care that accepts children who are born who are both and also neither from the womb, before anyone has a chance to develop a personality or understand the difference between a boy and a girl.

Testosterone has turned me into a "once every 3 months" patient instead of a "twice a month minimum" patient. I pay less than $15/month for my prescription and it's mailed to my house in three-month increments. Stopping my wildly irregular and incredibly painful menstrual cycle has increased my quality of life so much. My body doesn't ache for no reason anymore. I don't faint anymore. I can go out and do things and not be punished for it for days on end by fevers and chills and vertigo.

Don't let a handful of transphobic assholes scare you. If this is your way forward, then live your life to its fullest.

My only regret is that I didn't have the chance to do this sooner.

[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!

[queercripintersex]

To all those questioning if you're intersex

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you have PCOS

It's valid to call yourself intersex if the diagnosis you have isn't on one of the standard lists of intersex diagnoses

It's valid to call yourself intersex if your intersex variation wasn't evident at birth (most aren't!)

It's valid to call yourself intersex if your intersex variation was one where puberty Did Not Go To Plan

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you have totally ordinary genitals

It's valid to call yourself intersex if the only signs that you're intersex show up on lab tests/imaging and otherwise there's no way somebody could tell from looking at you

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you never had any coercive medical interventions

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you identify your sex as male or female (we are not a third sex!)

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you don't look like how white people with your intersex variation look

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you only found out through freak happenstance as an adult

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you think you were misdiagnosed

It's valid to call yourself intersex if no doctor ever told you you're intersex

It's valid to call yourself intersex if your doctor(s) dispute whether your diagnosis counts an intersex condition (it's not up to them!)

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you feel your intersex variation is a health condition

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you don't like the way you look

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you do like the way you look

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you started your questioning as part of a gender journey

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you started questioning to figure out trauma from your youth

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you started questioning to find other people like you

It's valid to call yourself intersex if you started questioning your intersex status just because you wanted to know

FINAL NOTE: you don't need to be 100% certain you're intersex to start finding, following, and getting involved in intersex spaces. People will understand if you're questioning, and it's the best way to find out if the label fits you! <3

[identitty-dickruption]

i was wondering if you could break down the other problematic example phrases, particularly the "i wish i was intersex" one?

yeah, absolutely. I'll try my best, but if it's still not clear feel free to ask more specific questions. I'll start with the easier and more obvious one and then get into the mess of "I wish I was intersex"

“intersex people are naturally nonbinary, so a nonbinary intersex person is cis”

this is both bioessentialism and a massive simplification of what it means to be intersex. being intersex can play a massive role in the way someone understands their gender identity, which is why there are gender labels like intergender and ipsogender. as a multigender person, it's quite complicated for me, personally

that being said. the idea that an intersex person has a naturally nonbinary body is just another expression of the idea that gender and sex are inseparable and natural categories. it also plays into the idea that intersex people all have "androgynous" bodies when that is not at all the case. many intersex people will have bodies that are indistinguishable from one of the binary sexes, or that can pass as dyadic in many situations

"I wish I was intersex"

people are always asking me about this one when I complain about it. but. like. once again it is simplifying the intersex experience and it is playing off of a heavily romanticised version of an intersex body. when people say they wish they were intersex, they have a clear vision in their heads of what "intersex" looks like. and, more often than not, that is going to be a very fetishised version of what we look like and what our experiences are

do you wish you were intersex or do you wish you had ambiguous genitals? do you wish you were intersex or do you wish you had androgynous features? do you wish you were intersex or do you wish you had a body that was confusing to cishet people?

you're allowed to fantasise about individual and specific components of what you IMAGINE the intersex experience to be, but you do not need to bring intersex people into it. because the chances are that you don't actually wish you were intersex. being intersex is a lot more complicated than that, and the same things you fantasise about can be the source of a lot of trauma for the intersex community

while dyadic people fantasise about our genitals, our hormones, and our bodies, we are fighting against traumatic medical intervention. many of us have been bullied, harassed, and objectified our entire lives for being intersex. all I'm asking is that you a) engage with the intersex community, b) care about intersex issues, and c) stop seeing intersex people as nothing more than objects to be fantasised about

I hope that helps

[familyabolisher]

Young’s protocol banked on a naturally available plasticity in the growing body that would induce phenotypic changes during childhood growth. Yet sex was not given by plasticity—it had to be grown. If it was plastic, then there were no guarantees that the originally mixed character of an embryo or infant would inevitably reach a binary form. This instability was precisely what drew researchers to experiments on intersex bodies in the first place, for in displacing the gonadocentric paradigm they cast serious doubt on whether humans were really sexually dimorphic, even as medicine promised to capitalize on their plasticity to produce a binary. To resolve this instability, the plasticity of sex was coded in this clinical research as an abstracted form of whiteness, a latent capacity to be reformed and transformed into something new. That most of Young’s intersex patients were white indexes how the “abnormal” body of a child diagnosed with hermaphroditism could be made valuable through its plasticity, the promise of alteration and normalization through medical intervention. That the few black intersex children and families who spent time at the Institute were regarded by its staff as more “difficult,” combative, irrational, and ultimately disposable points to the racialization of plasticity in this era. Young saw an abstract sense of alterability in white children, while he projected a fungibility onto black children that has a genealogy in American medicine stretching back to slavery. As was the case more broadly at Hopkins, doctors like Young regarded black children as suitable experimental subjects because of presumed access and disposability, whereas white children who were subject to similar procedures were framed as exhibiting the potential for a normative cure or at least improved normality.

Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

[lordmushroomkat]

《The strong association of PCOS with cis womanhood, the defining of it as a disorder or syndrome, and its framing as a “women’s health issue” obscures the fact that PCOS is a natural hormonal variation, an endocrine difference that is illustrated through secondary sex characteristics. 

During my initial search for resources and community, I also learned that PCOS, given its characterization as a hormonal variance, falls under the intersex umbrella. This intersex umbrella covers a wide range of “individuals born with a hormonal, chromosomal, gonadal or genital variation which is considered outside of the male and female norms,” and PCOS meets that definition. 

This is not an attempt to sway every person who has PCOS to identify themselves as intersex—though it is an acknowledgment that we have the option and the right to do so if it rings true to us. Rather, this is to say that shifting my perspective on PCOS and viewing it through an intersex lens allowed me to better understand it as a natural human variation rather than an affliction causing my body to do the “wrong” thing. 

“I believe that someone with PCOS has every right to use the term intersex for themselves if they want, but I also understand it if they don’t,” said writer and intersex advocate Amanda Saenz.

“As an advocate and an intersex person, I opt to use a definition of intersex that is open ended and expansive,” Saenz explains. “The experiences that a term like ‘intersex’ hopes to define include differences in hormonal production and hormone reception, and the phenotypic effects these differences have on the body. To me, this is inclusive of things like PCOS.”

Discussing PCOS in this way is often met with indignation and resistance. Our society has a hard time separating gender from sex. This has resulted in a widespread misunderstanding of intersex identity as equivalent to transgender identity. Many who vehemently resist the idea of PCOS being under the intersex umbrella do so because they categorically link “female” with “woman,” and therefore misinterpret any acceptance of intersex identity as a denial of womanhood. Moreover, the stigma around and marginalization of intersex communities prevents many people from feeling comfortable with embracing it. 

“You can be intersex and cisgender, transgender, or nonbinary. The ‘opposite’ of intersex is endosex, not cisgender,” explained Eshe Kiama Zuri, founder of U.K. Mutual Aid. As a nonbinary intersex person, Zuri approaches these ideas with a clear understanding of how the bodies of intersex individuals as well as many people with PCOS interrupt binary thinking about both sex and gender. 

“The resistance to PCOS falling under the intersex umbrella is due to a white supremacist society’s desperation to cling to binary genders, which we know [have been] used as a colonial tool of control,” they offer. 

The same medical and surgical interventions that legislators seek to ban trans and nonbinary people from accessing—which would be gender-affirming, life-saving care for them—are often forced on intersex infants and children who are unable to consent. This is done in efforts to align intersex bodies with social expectations of female and male, man and woman; the same logic undergirds the societal and medical pressure to “feminize” the female-assigned bodies of PCOS patients. 

PCOS is “shockingly common [and] the most frequently occurring hormone-related disorder.” However, according to Medical News Today, “up to 75% of [people] with PCOS do not receive a diagnosis for their condition.” If we were to understand and accept something like PCOS as intersex, considering how “shockingly common” it is, the dominant idea of binary sex, with intersex being thought of as nothing more than a fringe occurrence, would be shattered. 

“PCOS is only one of many conditions that could fall under the intersex umbrella, and care for people with PCOS would be considerably better if it wasn’t for the forced gendering and resistance to providing actual support for people with PCOS, even if it challenges society’s ideas of gender,” says Zuri. 

Combating myths built around the gender and sex binaries would create more space to understand PCOS traits as part of normal human variation, rather than inherent problems to be fixed, symptoms to be eradicated. As Zuri so beautifully put it, “When we start to accept that this is not a body behaving ‘wrong’ and it is just a body, we stop blaming and punishing people for how their bodies work and start challenging societal expectations.”》

I was fucking right!

[doberbutts]

It was a year or two ago some annoying terf was harassing me because I'm a terrible evil trans man beguiling and leading gay men astray with my gross vagina or whatever

And at some point how women are born with vaginas and men are born with penises and that was that

And I replied 'what about those who are born into the space inbetween? Women with psuedo-penises? Testicles where ovaries should be? Naturally higher testosterone? Facial and body hair?'

And naturally she screeched about how I was an evil tra who throws intersex people under the bus when intersex people have asked to be left out of this conversation.

But the problem is... I was talking about MYSELF. If you're going to forcibly label me a woman because I was born with a vagina, I'm going to require you to tell me what your definition of "woman" is that doesn't inherently exclude me from being ABLE to be labeled such.

A woman is someone born with a vagina, ovaries, and a uterus? And never with testes, prostate, and penis? Well I have a little of column A and a little of column B and that is without any amount of surgery or medical procedure.

A woman is someone whose endocrine system is estrogen-dominant? Sorry, that's never been me, I've always had higher testosterone than estrogen even before I went on T.

A woman doesn't need to shave her face? My beard predates my HRT. Doesn't have an adam's apple? I've had one since puberty. Cannot penetrate a partner without the help of a toy? Can and have. Body capable of creating new life? I've got it on pretty good authority that I've been infertile since the day I was born and that if I did somehow manage to get pregnant the fetus likely would never be viable anyway.

Doctors are sure she's a female baby the moment she comes out? Well considering my name was almost Jon Roger before the doctor realized he needed to take a second glance...

Has XX chromosomes? Well since I figured out this year that I for sure am intersex I do actually know my chromosomes now... but I didn't before. XY babies with my condition usually just die and those who do survive aren't intersex so I have to be XX since I made it to 30 without dying (I mean I tried real hard tho) without medical intervention. But if we're basing it on just XX or XY then you still have to put forth the effort of figuring out where you sort all the other possible configurations such as XY babies that look identical to XX babies and were often not caught until something was medically wrong with them that required a deeper look than just what was on the surface.

[vacuously-true]

Trans rights and intersex rights are always going to go hand in hand. No one should be prevented from accessing gender affirming medical care and no one should be forced to undergo unwanted medical interventions to make them conform to society's binary sex ideal. It's about choice and bodily autonomy.

If your arguments for the rights of one of these groups ignore the other, idealize the experiences of the other, or tokenize the other without actually advocating for its rights (example: "cis kids have easy access to the same treatments trans kids desperately need!" ignoring that many of those cis kids are intersex and not necessarily undergoing those treatments willingly), you're both missing the point and your proposed policies will have massive holes in them so that they may not actually fully support either group, or may even make these worse for one or both of them.

Abortion/contraception access is always going to go hand in hand with access to fertility treatment and eliminating nonconsensual sterilization. No one should be forced to have a child they don't want or prevented from having children they do want. It's about choice and bodily autonomy.

If your arguments for one of these issues ignore the other, idealize the other, or tokenize the other without actually advocating for that issue (example: "if the men in the government aren't going to let women have access to abortion and contraception, they should all have vasectomies!" advocating for unwanted sterilization), you're both missing the point and your proposed policies will have massive holes in them so that they may not actually fully address either issue, or may even make one or both of them worse.

Et cetera et cetera. Every time an issue is about bodily autonomy it may have two sides: restricted access to desired treatments, and forced infliction of unwanted treatment. And these will have to be addressed together to be addressed at all.

[redditreceipts]

Wow, that's interesting! I didn't know that HRT is a biological sex change, please tell me more about why that's the case!

Okay, please tell me how HRT can change your phenotype and make you the opposite sex! I've never heard that before, but you seem to be quite sure of yourself

Well, that's not entirely true. Not every part of phenotypically male development is dependent on testosterone production. Even before testosterone production, the Y chromosome leads to the development of testicles in a fetus. This is why people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome will develop testicles (whose information is stored in the Y chromosome), even if they are never exposed to testosterone. So the male phenotypic development is not entirely dependant on testosterone, but also genetic information on the Y chromosome.

So what does he mean with "female genetic programming"? Under HRT, men develop secondary sex characteristics that are typical for women. They are not exclusive to females, however, because men can also develop these characteristics without HRT or any other medical intervention. Yes, breast growth is more often found in women, but men can also get breast growth, for example those affected by gynecomastia. Saying that breast growth is "female genetic programming" is just false, because even though it is primarily females who are affected by breast growth, there are males who are also affected. If you grew a vagina and a uterus from HRT, you would be right in saying that the female genetic programming was activated, because a vagina is consistently found in the female phenotype. But breasts? Everyone can get them. It's not special and it doesn't make you more female, just as a woman who hasn't grown breasts for whatever reason isn't any less of a female.

You are not developing female physiological traits, though. Female physiological traits are about gamete production. If your balls went up again into your body and became a uterus, and your penis would recede and become a clitoris and you would stop peeing through it, that would be a sex change. Your biology on HRT is not any more female than the biology of a guy with a hormonal imbalance. Also, you're not going through a second puberty, you're purposefully inducing a severe hormonal imbalance and changing your fat distribution and other physical characteristics. For it to be a puberty, you would have to re-change into a child and then reach sexual maturity as the opposite sex again. But you have already reached sexual maturity as a male, and therefore you are not going through puberty. You aren't even going from sexual maturity as a male to sexual maturity as a female. You are just going from being a sexually mature male to being a sexually mature male with self-induced erectile dysfunction. Congratulations on that though lmao

You haven't even touched on genetics 😭 please tell me how your genetic sex is affected by taking HRT

PCOS is not intersex. Only people who have a phenotype organised around the facilitation of the function of the large gamete can be affected by PCOS. For it to be an intersex condition, it would have to be impossible or very hard to tell what type of gamete production your phenotype is organised around. And HRT is not inducing and intersex condition 😭😭😭 please stop throwing intersex people under the bus, everyone can clearly tell what type of gamete-production your phenotype is organised around, and it's not ova

Inverting a penis will not make it a vagina, and there was no advanced biology found in your argumentation.

almost two thousand upvotes for that bullshit

lmao

I mean I could be wrong here, of course, and if anyone more knowledgeable about biology told me about that, that would be cool - but from what I can tell, this entire thing was just offensively stupid

[gatheringbones]

[“But it was through these non-consensual interventions on intersex people that the consensual treatments on which trans people today rely were developed. As Jules Gill-Peterson has shown in her careful, compassionate, politically resolute book Histories of the Transgender Child, which centres the experiences of trans and intersex children in the twentieth-century USA, experiments with changing intersex children’s bodies through hormone treatment directly paved the way for the hormone replacement therapy many trans people access today.

The gap between the experiences of those children – who were stripped of agency and often didn’t even know what was being done to them – and the experience of trans people today, who have been given the opportunity to change our bodies in the ways we want to precisely by the non-consensual treatment of these children, is stark. This is a shared history, but it’s a history whose outcome has been strikingly different for trans and intersex people. Initially, though, as these medical techniques developed in the mid-twentieth century, trans people struggled to access them. As stories of surgical and hormonal interventions on intersex people gained wider attention, trans people realised the opportunities they presented, but found the door barred.

The same doctors who were keen to change intersex bodies, which they saw as in need of ‘correction’, were reluctant to help trans people, whose problems they understood as psychological, not physical. The treatments trans people wanted would only be available to them if they were found to be intersex. Faced with this barrier, some trans people chose what seemed a logical strategy. If the doctors needed them to be intersex – well, then, intersex they would be.”]

kit heyam, from before we were trans: a new history of gender, 2022

[crossdreamers]

Germany allows transgender people to change their gender and name more easily.

A new law easing the path for individuals to officially change their gender had been approved by the German Cabinet. Family Minister Lisa Paus calls it "a big moment" for transgender and intersex people, DW reports.

The proposed "Self-Determination Act" allows for changes to be made in a simple procedure at government registry offices.

A lot of countries allow for self-determination as regards legal gender, not requiring medical or psychological intervention of any kind.

"Everyone has a right to the state respecting their gender identity," Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said. "The current law harasses transgender people. We want to end this undignified situation."

AP reports that the existing “transsexual law” requires individuals who want to change gender on official documents to first obtain assessments from two experts “sufficiently familiar with the particular problems of transsexualism” and then a court decision.

Map over countries and states that allow for gender self-identification. (Germany not included)

Photo: Vladimir Vladimirov

[magnetothemagnificent]

Blocked this fucker, but this is important to post and respond to. This comment was a response to my post about how it's important not to mislabel intersex animals as trans.

1. Animals do not comprehend gender the way we has humans do. To imply that animals can conceive of gender is to imply that gender is immutable - and the whole point of trans activism is that gender is not immutable and not biological. Likewise, an animal that develops cross-sex characteristics without medical intervention is intersex, not transgender, whether they're a human or any other animal species. Intersex is a biological reality, and stigma around that reality is something that intersex people deal with all the time. Intersex babies and children who were born with visible intersex characteristics often undergo forced sexual reassignment, which can lead to long-term medical complications. Recognizing the prevalence of intersex variation in the animal kingdom shows that being intersex is natural and not an abnormality. It would mean that intersex people would be able to live their lives in their bodies without medical science treating their bodies like diseases that need curing.

2. Perisex trans people speak over intersex people all the time. There are trans people who claim they want to "transition to intersex", there are trans people who misuse terms that refer only to intersex people, even slurs. There are trans people that disregard intersex voices when they talk about how the way the labels "AFAB/AMAB", "TME/TMA", and so many other words used by the trans community carry specific assumptions about a person's body and the circumstances of their birth, assumptions that exclude the existence of intersex people and their bodies. Trans people often overlook the history of oppression intersex people still face when talking about the history of sex and gender theory. Intersex people are misgendered and fetishized by many trans people. Intersex people are told they are "lucky" for being born with the features a perisex trans person desires, even though said features resulted in a lifetime of discrimination for the intersex person. And your comment and blog is proof of the hostility many trans activists have towards intersex people.

3. I *am* trans people. I am a perisex trans man. Because surprise surprise, you don't have to part of a specific community to care and advocate for said community.

[id in alt text]

[intersexbookclub]

Summary: Chapter 4 of Critical Intersex

For many of us, Chapter 4 of Critical Intersex (2009) turned out to be a particularly rich source of information about intersex history. So I (Elizabeth) have decided to give a fairly detailed summary of the chapter because I think it’s important to get that info out there. I’m gonna give a little bit of commentary as I go, and then a summary of our book club discussion of the chapter.

The chapter is titled “(Un)Queering identity: the biosocial production of intersex/DSD” by Alyson K. Spurgas. It is a history of ISNA, the Intersex Society of North America, and how it went from being a force for intersex liberation to selling out the movement in favour of medicalization. (See here for summary of the other chapters we read of the book!)

Our high level reactions:

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): Until I read chapter 4, I didn't really realise how reactionary “DSD” was. It hadn't been clear to me how much it was a response to the beginning of an organized intersex advocacy movement in the United States.

Michelle (@scifimagpie): I could feel the fury in the writer's tone. It was a real barn burner.

Also Michelle: the fuckin' respectability politics of DSD really got under my skin, as a term! I know the importance, as a queer person, of not forcing people to ID as queer, but this was a lot.

Introducing the chapter

The introduction sets the tone by talking about how in the Victorian era there was a historical shift from intersex being a religious/juridical issue to a pathology, and how this was intensified in the 1950s with John Money’s invention of the optimal gender rearing model. 

Spurgas briefly discusses how the OGR model is harmful to intersex people, and how it iatrogenically produces sexual dysfunction and gender dysphoria. “Iatrogenic” means caused by medicine; iatrogenesis is the production of disease or other side-effects as a result of medical intervention.

This sets scene for why in the early 1990s, Cheryl Chase and other intersex activists founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA). It had started as a support group, and morphed significantly over its lifetime. ISNA closed up shop in 2008.

Initially, ISNA was what we’d now call interliberationist. They were anti-pathologization. Their stance was that intersexuality is not itself pathological and the wellbeing of intersex people is endangered by medical intervention. They organized around the abolition of surgical intervention. They also created fora like Hermaphrodites With Attitude for the deconstruction of bodies/sexes/genders and development of an intersex identity that was inherently queer. 

The early ISNA activists explicitly aligned intersexuality in solidarity with LGB and transgender organizing. There was a belief that similar to LGBT organizing, once intersex people got enough visibility and consciousness-raising, people would “come out” in greater numbers (p100).

By the end of the 90s, however, many intersex people were actively rejecting being seen as queer and as political subjects/actors. The organization had become instead aligned with surgeons and clinicians, had replaced “intersex” with “DSD” in their language.

By the time ISNA disbanded in 2008 they had leaned in hard on a so-called “pragmatic” / “harm reduction” model / “children’s rights perspective”. The view was that since infants in Western countries are “born medical subjects as it is” (p100)

Where did DSD come from? 

In 2005, the term “disorders of sexual differentiation” had been recently coined in an article by Alice Dreger, Cheryl Chase, “and three other clinicians associated with the ISNA… [so as] to ‘label the condition rather than the person’” (p101). Dreger et al thought that intersex was “not medically accurate” (p101) and that the goal should be effective nomenclature to “sort patients into diagnostically meaningful groups” (p101).

Dreger et al argued that the term intersex “attracts the interest of a large number of people whose interest is based on a sexual fetish and people who suffer from delusions about their own medical histories” (Dreger et al quoted on p101)

Per Spurgas, Dreger et al had an explicit agenda of “distancing intersex activism from queer and transgressive sex/gender politics and instead in supporting Western medical productions of intersexuality” (p102). In other words: they were intermedicalists.

According to Dreger et al, an alignment with medicine is strategically important because intersex people often require medical attention, and hence need to be legible to clinicians. “For those in favor of the transition to DSD, intersex is first and foremost a disorder requiring medical treatment” (p102)

Later in 2005 there was a “Intersex Consensus Meeting” organized by a society of paediatricians and endocrinologists. Fifty “experts” were assembled from ten countries (p101)... with a grand total of two actually intersex people in attendance (Cheryl Chase and Barbara Thomas, from XY-Frauen). 

At the meeting, they agreed to adopt the term DSD along with a “‘patient-centred’ and ‘evidence-based’ treatment protocol” to replace the OGR treatment model (p101)

In 2006, a consortium of American clinicians and bioethicists was formed and created clinical guidelines for treating DSDs. They defined DSD quite narrowly: if your gonads or genitals don’t match your gender, or you have a sex chromosome anomaly. So no hormonal variations like hyperandrogenism allowed.

The pro-DSD movement: it was mostly doctors

Spurgas quotes the consortium: “note that the term ‘intersex’ is avoided here because of its imprecision” (p102) - our highlight. There’s a lot of doctors hating on intersex for being a category of political organizing that gets encoded as the category is “imprecise” 👀

Spurgas gets into how the doctors dressed up their re-pathologization of intersex as “patient centred” (p103) - remember this is being led by doctors, not patients, and any intersex inclusion was tokenistic. (Elizabeth: it was amazing how much bs this was.)

As Spurgas puts it, the pro-DSD movement “represents an abandonment of the desire for a pan-intersexual/queer identity and an embrace of the complete medicalization of intersex… the intersex individual is now to be understood fundamentally as a patient” (p103)

Around the same time some paediatricians almost came close to publicly advocating against infant genital mutilation by denouoncing some infant surgeries. Spurgas notes they recommended “that intersex individuals be subjected (or self-subject) to extensive psychological/psychiatric, hormonal, steroidal and other medical” interventions for the rest of their lives (p103).

This call to instead focus on non-surgical medical interventions then got amplified by other clinicians and intermedicalist intersex advocacy organizations.

The push for non-surgical pathologization hence wound up as a sort of “compromise” path - it satisfied the intermedicalists and anti-queer intersex activists, and had the allure of collaborating with doctors to end infant surgeries. (Note: It is 2024 and infant surgeries are still a thing 😡.)

The pro-DSD camp within the intersex community

Spurgas then goes on to get into the discursive politics of DSD. There’s some definite transphobia in the push for “people with DSDs are simply men and women who happen to have congenital birth conditions” (p104). (Summarizer’s note: this language is still employed by anti-trans activists.)

The pro-DSD camp claimed that it was “a logical step in the ‘evolution in thinking’” 💩 and that it would be a more “humane” treatment model (p105) 💩

Also that “parents and doctors are not going to want to give a child a label with a politicized meaning” (p104) which really gives the game away doesn’t it? Intersex people have started raising consciousness, demanding their rights, and asserting they are not broken, so now the poor doctors can’t use the label as a diagnosis. 🤮

Spurgas quotes Emi Koyama, an intermedicalist who emphasized how “most intersex people identify as ‘perfectly ordinary, heterosexual, non-trans men and women’” (p104) along with a whole bunch of other quotes that are obviously queerphobic. Note from Elizabeth: I’m not gonna repeat it all because it’s gross. In my kindest reading of this section, it reads like gender dysphoria for being mistaken as genderqueer, but instead of that being a source of solidarity with genderqueers it is used as a form of dual closure (when a minority group goes out of its way to oppress a more marginalized group in order to try and get acceptance with the majority group).

Koyama and Dreger were explicitly anti-trans, and viewed intergender type stuff as “a ‘trans co-optation’ of intersex identity” (p105) 🤮

Most intersex people resisted “DSD” from its creation

On page 106, Spurgas shifts to talking about how a lot intersex people were resistant to the DSD shift. Organization Intersex International (OII) and Bodies Like Ours (BLO) were highly critical of the shift! 💛 BLO in particular noted that 80-90% of their website users were against the DSD term. Note from Elizabeth: indeed, every survey I’ve seen on the subject has been overwhelmingly against DSD - a 2015 IHRA survey found only 3% of intersex Australians favoured the DSD term.

Proponents of “intersex” over “DSD” testified to it being depathologizing. They called out the medicalization as such: that it serves to reinforce that “intersex people don’t exist” (David Cameron, p107), that it is damaging to be “told they have a disorder” (Esther Leidolf, p107), that there is “a purposeful conflation of treatment for ‘health reasons’ and ‘cosmetic reasons’ (Curtis Hinkle, p107), and that it’s being pushed mainly by perisex people as a reactionary, assimilationist endeavour (ibid).

Interliberationism never went away - intersex people kept pushing for 🌈 queer solidarity 🌈 and depathologization - even though ISNA, the largest intersex advocacy organization, had abandoned this position.

Spurgas describes how a lot of criticism of DSD came from non-Anglophone intersex groups, that the term is even worse in a lot of languages - it connotes “disturbed” in German and has an ambiguity with pedophilia and fetishism in French (p111).

The DSD push was basically entirely USA-based, with little international consultation (p111). Spurgas briefly addresses the imperialism inherent in the “DSD” term on pages 118/119.

Other noteworthy positions in the DSD debate

Spurgas gives a well-deserved shout out to the doctors who opposed the push to DSD, who mostly came from psychiatry and opposed it on the grounds that the pathologization would be psychologically damaging and that intersex patients “have taken comfort (and in many cases, pride) in their (pan-)intersex identity” (p108) 🌈 - Elizabeth: yay, psychiatrists doing their job! 

Interestingly, both sides of the DSD issue apparently have invoked disability studies/rights for their side: Koyama claimed DSD would herald the beginning of a disability rights based era of intersex activism (p109) while anti-DSDers noted the importance in disability rights in moving away from pathologization (p109).

Those who didn’t like DSD but who saw a strategic purpose for it argued it would “preser[ve] the psychic comfort of parents”, that there is basically a necessity to coddle the parents of intersex children in order to protect the children from their parents. (p110) 

Some proposed less pathologizing alternatives like “variations of sex development” and “divergence of sex development” (p110)

The DSD treatment model and the intersex treadmill

Remember all intersex groups were united that sex assignment surgery on infants needs to be abolished. The DSD framework that was sold as a shift away from surgical intervention, but it never actually eradicated it as an option (p112).  Indeed, it keeps ambiguous the difference between medically necessary surgical intervention and culturally desired cosmetic surgery (p112). (Note from Elizabeth: funny how *this* ambiguity is acceptable to doctors.)

What DSD really changed was a shift from “fixing” the child with surgery to instead providing “lifelong ‘management’ to continue passing” (p112), resulting in more medical intervention, such as through hormonal and behavioural therapies to “[keep] it in remission” (p113).

Cheryl Chase coined the “intersex treadmill’: the never-ending drive to fit within a normative sex category (p113), which Spurgas deploys to talk about the proliferation of “lifelong treatments” and how it creates the need for constant surveillance of intersex bodies (p114). Medical specialization adds to the proliferation, as one needs increasingly more specialists who have increasingly narrow specialties.

There’s a cruel irony in how the DSD model pushes for lifelong psychiatric and psychological care of intersex patients so as to attend to the PTSD that is caused by medical intervention. (p115) It pushes a capitalistic model where as much money can be milked as possible out of intersex patients (p116).

The DSD treatment model, if it encourages patients to find community at all, hence pushes condition-specific medical support groups rather than pan-intersex advocacy groups (p115)

Other stuff in the chapter

Spurgas does more Foucault-ing at the end of the chapter. Highlight: “The intersex/DSD body is a site of biosocial contestation over which ways of knowing not only truth of sex, but the truth of the self, are fought. Both intelligibility and tangible resources are the prizes accorded to the winner(s) of the battle over truth of sex” (p117)

There’s some stuff on the patient-as-consumer that didn’t really land with anybody at the book club meeting - we’re mostly Canadians and the idea of patient-as-consumer isn’t relatable. Ei noted it isn’t even that relatable from their position as an American.

***

Having now summarized the chapter, here's a summary of our discussion at book club...

Opening reactions

Michelle (M): the way the main lady involved became medicalized really made my heart sink, reading that.

Elizabeth (E): I do remember some discussion of intersex people in the 90s, and it never really grew in the way that other queer identities did! This has kind of helped for me to understand what the fuck happened here.

E: It was definitely a very insightful reading on that part, while being absolutely outraging. I didn't know, but I guess I wasn't surprised at how pivotal US-centrism was. The author was talking about "North American centric" though but always meant the United States!!! Canada was just not part of this! They even make mention of Quebec as separate and one of the opposing regions. I was like, What are you doing here, America? You are not the entirety of our continent!!!

E: The feedback from non-Anglophone intersex advocates that DSD does not translate was something that I was like, "Yes!" For me, when I read the French term - that sounded like something that would include vaginismus, erectile dysfunction - it sounds far more general and negative.

M: the fuckin' respectability politics of DSD really got under my skin, as a term! I know the importance, as a queer person, of not forcing people to ID as queer, but this was a lot.

E: it was very assimilationist in a way that was very upsetting. I knew intellectually that this was going on. There was such a distinct advocacy push for that. The coddling of parents and doctors at the expense of intersex people was such a theme of this chapter, in a way that was very upsetting. They started out with this goal of intersex liberation, and instead, wound up coddling parents and doctors.

Solidarities

M: I feel like there's a real ableist parallel to the autism movement here… It dovetails with how the autism movement was like, "Aww, we're sorry about your emotionless monster baby! This must be so hard for you [parents]!" And it felt like "aw, it's okay, we'll fix your baby so they can interface with heterosexuality!" [Note: both of us are neurodivergent]

E: A lot of intersexism is a fear that you're going to have a queer child, both in terms of orientation and gender.

E: You cannot have intersex liberation without putting an end to homophobia and transphobia.

M: We're such natural allies there!

E: I understand that there are these very dysphoric ipsogender or cisgender people, who don't want to be mistaken as trans, but like it or not, their rights are linked to trans people! When I encounter these people, I don't know how to convey, "whether you like it or not, you're not going to get more rights by doing everything you can to be as distant as possible."

M: it reminds me of the movements by some younger queers to adhere to respectability politics.

E: Oh no. There are younger queers who want respectability politics????

M: well, some younger queers are very reactionary about neopronouns and kink at pride. they don't always know the difference between representation and "imposing" kinks on others. In a way, it reminds me of the more intentional rejection of queer weirdos, or queerdos, if you will, by republican gays.

E: I feel like a lot of anti-queerdom that comes out of the ipso and cisgender intersex community reads as very dysphoric to me. That needs to be acknowledged as gender dysphoria.

M: That resonates to me. When I heard about my own androgen imbalance, I was like, "does that mean I'm not a real woman?" And now I would happily say "fuck that question," but we do need an empathy and sensitivity for that experience. Though not tolerance for people who invalidate others, to be honest.

E: The term "iatrogensis" was new to me. The term refers to a disease caused or aggravated by medical intervention.

M: So like a surgical complication, or gender dysphoria caused by improper medical counselling!

The DSD debate

ei: i think the "disorder" discussion is really interesting. in my opinion, if someone feels their intersex condition is a disorder they have every right to label it that way, but if someone does not feel the same they have every right to reject the disorder label. personally i use the label "condition". i don't agree with forcing labels on anyone or stripping them away from anyone either.

M: for me, it felt like a cautionary tale about which labels to accept.

ei: i'm all around very tired of people label policing others and making blanket statements such as "all people who are this have to use this label”... i also use variation sometimes, i tend to go back and forth between variation and condition. I think it's a delicate balance between being sensitive to people's label preferences vs making space for other definitions/communities.

We then spoke about language for a bunch of communities (Black people, non-binary people) for a while

E: one thing that was very harrowing for me about this chapter is that while there was this push to end coercive infant surgery, they basically ceded all of the ground on "interventions" happening from puberty onward. And as someone who has had to fight off coercive medical interventions in puberty, I have a lot of trauma about violent enforcement of femininity and the medical establishment.

ei: i completely agree that it's psychologically harmful tbh…. i was assigned male at birth and my doctors want me to start testosterone to make me more like a perisex male. which is extremely counterproductive because i'm literally transfem and have expressed this many times

Doctors Doing Harm

M: for me, the validation of how doctors can be harmful in this chapter meant a lot.

E: something that surprised me and made me happy was that there were some psychiatrists who spoke out against the DSD label. As someone who routinely hears a lot of anti-psychiatry stuff - because there's a lot of good reason to be skeptical of psychiatry, as a discipline - it was just nice to see some psychiatrists on the right side of things, doing right by their patients. Psychiatrists were making the argument that DSD would be psychologically harmful to a lot of intersex people.

ei: like. being told that something so inherently you, so inherently linked to your identity and sense of self, is a disorder of sexual development, something to be fixed and corrected. that has to be so harmful

ei: like i won't lie i do have a lot of severe trauma surrounding the way i've been treated due to being intersex. but so much of my negative experiences are repetitive smaller things. Like the way people treat me like my only purpose is to teach them about intersex people …. either that or they get really creepy and gross. I’m lucky in that i'm not visibly intersex, so i do have the privilege of choosing who knows. but there's a reason why i usually don't tell people irl.

M: intersex and autism have overlap again about how like, minor presentation can be? As opposed to the sort of monstrous presentation [Carnival barker impression] "Come see the sensational half-man, half-woman! Behold the h-------dite!" And like - the way nonverbal people are also treated feels relevant to that, because that's how autism is often treated, like a freakshow and a pity party for the parents? And it's so dehumanizing. And as someone who might potentially have a nonverbal child, because my wife is expecting and my husband and she both have ADHD - I'm just very fed up with ableism and the perception of monstrosity.

Overall, this was a chapter that had a lot to talk about! See here for our discussion of Chapters 5-7 from the same volume.

[antiterf]

I made a survey for beliefs on the sex binary and how it relates to intersex medical intervention. This is not going to be published anywhere and the responses are anonymous.

It's only 15 questions, and I promise it will take under 10 minutes for most people.

This is genuinely for my curiosity and, at most, to reconsider what questions I ask for an in-class assignment. Still I would really appreciate if people took it.

[asfateentertwines]

The Surprise

Okay so trans pregnancy Spider won my poll - thank you to the one person who told me who should carry lmfao - but it was a close tie. Consider this canon to the little universe but I think I'll try to write the incubator baby headcanons too cause it was really frickin close lmao

TW: Trans pregnancy, mentions of sex, medical stuff

So Ningni was not planned to say the least

Penetrative sex for Spider and Rotxo is...a process to say the least

Rotxo is double Spider's size and lets just say biology is proportionate. Hence, the build up is nothing to rush through and with three kids, it's a luxury they don't get often

Plus, with their differing biology, they never really paid mind to reproduction between them

Sure it was theoretically possible but they didn't linger on it all so much

Rotxo may have thought about a baby of their own biology but it was too much a health risk and he was never sure how Spider would do. He didn't ask, wouldn't, but...maybe he dreamed sometimes

That said...maybe protection wasn't always at the forefront of their minds

Spider finds out he's pregnant after Kiri starts getting an odd sense around him, she eventually visits the ancestors for advice and is informed their brother needs to see a Tsahik immediately

They bring Spider to Tsireya first, not wanting to alert anyone with how precarious the situation might be, and she is the one who affirms Kiri's information

It scares the shit out of him

Tsireya and Kiri keep the information quiet but they won't for long - namely for his own health

Abortion isn't really a thing in Na'vi culture - mating is for life, something that means even unplanned pregnancy or teenage mishaps are between a mated pair. Medical intervention occurs but an unwanted pregnancy is nearly unheard of

Children are a blessing from Ewya - while unplanned or untimely pregnancies may happen, it's not often and it's not like it is on earth. One doesn't have to leave everything behind to be a parent.

Still - come hell or high water, no one will take the choice from Spider

Tsireya takes Anea and the boys that night, Spider pulling Rotxo into the water for a late night ride to tell him

Honestly, Rotxo didn't predict shit, homie got blindsided

Spider cries, a mixture of terrified, hopeful, and sick all coiling in his throat, and tells Rotxo that they might have messed up

He tells him of Kiri's odd feelings, how a woman Kiri didn't know told her that he was blessed, that the next generation is growing, and how Tsireya confirmed he was with child.

Rotxo is thrilled but guiltily so, terrified for what it could mean for Spider and for their family.

It's a long talk about whether or not they have a choice here - Spider hasn't even told Norm or been formally checked out - but they opt that, if it can be done safely, Spider will carry the pregnancy to term

It's not an easy decision - Spider wants the baby, at least, he thinks he does, but carrying the child to term could be a painful experience, dangerous to his body but also his mind. Growing up with intersex being the standard meant that pregnancy wasn't a female thing, but he's human, and he knows the difference

the dysphoria of the coming months will be harsh and he knows it'll bother the limited medical transitions he's been able to make

With Norms help, he's more androgynous than anything by human standards and he's been able to become comfortable in himself - pregnancy will send it reeling back

Then, there's the side of how painful and dangerous a pregnancy might become

He knows how different his body is and he knows that this won't be easy

But...Ewya blessed him

It's what he's wanted his whole life and he won't give it up now

Rotxo will be at his side and so he decides to do it

His pregnancy is the scientific question of the ages that Norm thought he discovered each time one of the Sully kids walked in his lab, but an organic Na'vi and human child is more than a little unexpected

The baby is studied closely, the growth an alarming thing when na'vi size is taken into consideration. Afterall, a newborn Neteyam was about the same size as a one year old Spider

Unfortunately for Spider, this means a good six months of bed rest

Fortunately for him, he has three very excited children

Anea tries to find out everything she can about his pregnancy. Given he has to spend it's duration in the hut, she spends most of her time with him where they can both breathe and she can help

She becomes his little helper - gathering supplies so they can prepare things for the baby, getting him food, books, and entertainment, and helping him get around as the pregnancy continues and movement gets difficult

Wialik patrols the hut, much to Rotxo's amusement, and tries to protect his uncle and sisters. From what, he couldn't say, but Rotxo finds it insanely amusing

Wialik also ends up collecting pieces to make beads, working with surprising patience to start their newest additions songcord with his family. He enlists Astayì, Kiri's oldest, and makes little figures like a child born in the Ash clans would receive. He claims it's to help his knife skills but they all know better

Vipeì writes stories and lullabies for the baby

He's little, only about 6, so Tsireya and Neteyam help him with learning songs and teach him stories to tell

He works with Rotxo too to make clothes, both for Spider and the baby

This being the first baby they had real time to prepare for, Rotxo goes a bit overboard in getting things together

He and Vipeì make Spider clothes to help conceal his chest and make new shawls that knit over his shoulders

They also make a frankly obscene amount of baby clothes and blankets, anything that a human-Na'vi child may need - a bed for the marui and one for the hut, clothes for any sort of temperature intolerance, and toys galore

By 6 months in, Spider is bedbound entirely. He's sick, drained, and craving things he can't even eat. His body is beyond heavy and he relies a lot on his family to help him - it's a lot of time spent with his brothers teasing, Tuk's mischief, Kiri's support, and even Neytiri and Jakes care.

Norm monitors him constantly in the last few months before it's decided that intervention is needed - he'll be in serious danger if they let him continue.

Ningni is born 8 months into Spiders pregnancy, something that was a risky decision on all sides. Quite simply, she was too big for him to carry much longer and her needs were difficult to predict when her species wasn't even something they could guarantee

She's a pale blue, appearing a few shades lighter than Rotxo (something her brothers claim comes from them) with tiny blonde curls. Her hair is starkly human, something Spider fears and Rotxo loves. She combines them in the face in a way they're both proud of, but her eyes are big and brown and neither of their own. Paz had to leave her mark somehow

Ningni is tiny for a Na'vi but frankly appallingly large for human standards

Spider is on bedrest for several months and then on limited action after, but Ningni is thankfully born able to breathe both human and Pandoran air

She's clearly blessed and accepted easier than her family thought she'd be (though most of the clan hopes she's the only of her kind)

Her lungs can breathe both her parents air, her body tolerates food of both cultures, she has the extra fingers of humans, the enhances sense of Na'vi, and the flexibility of humans. Her strength is a bit lesser than a true blooded Na'vi, but she's astonishingly well adapted

As she grows, she's sort of an oddball like her Auntie Kiri was

She's in tune with the world around her but rambunctious and mischievous like both her fathers

She's a bit of a jack of all trades - choosing to do everything and nothing all at once

She's the type of kid that need constant supervision and both Jake and Norm smugly say she is much alike Spider was as a child

Due to Spider being with her near constantly in her younger years, she's very close to him but Rotxo is - very proudly - her hero