its always helpful imo to remember theres a cis person with whatever problem you have as a trans person 9/10 times. theres a cis man as short as you, a cis woman as tall as you, with hands and feet as big or small as yours. theres a cis woman scared to go out without shaving twice a day, theres a cis man whos upset bc he will never grow a beard. theres a cis woman who worries her infertility makes her less of a woman, and theres a cis man feeling similarly about his lack of potency. theres cis women who dilate and cis men with phalloplasty. theres a cis man scared that painting his nails will make people think hes not really a man and a cis woman whos exhausted with spending hours grooming just so people treat her like she wants to be treated as a woman. they dont put it in the terms we do but theyre worried that these problems make them inadequate at the gender they want people to see them as. our patriarchal system has made the boxes were supposed to fit into so small and you arent alone in not fitting it--nobody really fits
intersex is a relevant term!
No, it's not. It's genuinely not. I am truly concerned with the growing number of people on tumblr who feel that physically diverging from an extremely narrow, colonial, oppressive and genuinely unrealistic notion of "what the sexes allegedly look like" makes you intersex. No. Like, 80% of Middle Eastern women have a lot of body hair and face hair they need to wax (or sugar) all the time, yes, with beards sometimes. No, impotent men or infertile women are not something else than dyadic men and women unless they actually are. No, there's cis men with "buried penis" who are 100% dyadic perisex cis men. Yes, men and women are sometimes almost indistinguishable by a glance without makeup, grooming, brow shaping, different clothes, different hair, etc: our natural dimorphism isn't particularly strong as a species. You are reinforcing the idea that the "natural state" of the two dyadic sexes is this extreme Disney-animal dimorphism that is actually a social construst and not the biological physical reality. You are reinforcing these extremely narrow and straight up statistically incorrect boxes by, rather than questioning them, calling what lies outside them "Other". Intersex people are people born with intersex variations. Like me. And our experiences are not just limited to the pressure to fit in narrow boxes we don't really fit in (hello, feminism 101 - that's everyone, that's how gender works), it's a lot more specific, often a lot more violent, with specific medical axes of abuse, with specific forms of discrimination, etc.
thank you for putting this better than i could. it was bothering me how a few people kept bringing up intersex people as if thats the sum of the experience im describing when it isnt. every single thing i mentioned is something that perisex people can and do experience, and its as much about the construction of the sex binary as a facet of white supremacy and eugenics and ableism as it is about intersexism. singling out intersexism does, as you said, more to reify that boundary by casting all sexual variance as other rather than accepting the fact that "male" and "female" are not very different from each other, while ignoring the specific violence that too often comes with being intersex
