I often feel like we're the Schrödinger's Cat of bioessentialism, I fear.
Perisex people are almost universally intersexist to some degree (it came free with living in an intersexist society), and they will alternatingly insist we're "just an [agab related identity term] with a ~disorder~" and that we're gender freaks who will never be a "real"..anything.
Trans people will use our existence as a talking point, a gotcha against transphobes, "How can you say transphobia is 'basic biology' when sex is a spectrum too? Look at intersex people!" they'll say.
But then those same trans people revolve their worldview of gender and trans identity so heavily around "agab" that suddenly, when it comes to trans conversations, we're "Just an [agab] with a disorder" to them, and trying to speak up on how our experiences with cagab and sig are so fundamentally different from the perisex experience that trying to put us into perisex normative boxes is fundamentally harmful to intersex people only ever leads to us being spoken over by perisex trans people.
Cis people will do almost the inverse, where, when using intersex people as a cudgel in transphobic arguments (which both sides do), cis people will lean into this idea that intersex people are just their agab, "they still have xy or xx chromosomes! they still have a primarily 'female' or 'masculine 'male' reproductive system!"
But then, again, those same cis people switch up when dealing with us directly. We're malgendered, misgendered, degendered, denied access to cis manhood/womanhood, subject to both social and medical abuse and biases for our whole lives, because fundamentally cisgender people do not see us as "just [agab] with a disorder", they see us as something other, something to be gawked at (at best) or eradicated (at worst), even cis people who don't really know what intersex people are and lump us in as "trannys" regardless of if you're trans or not.
We are lumped into our agab when we push back against bioessentialist frameworks, because at the end of the day we're "Just disordered [agab] people", but functionally, materially, in almost all aspects of our lives, we are not granted access to pericis manhood/womanhood, and when we try to bring this up, we're spoken over, called "collateral" of transphobia at best (because many people don't believe intersexism exists), and are told to shut up, because intersexism isn't treated as a legitimate axis of oppression, and perisex people fundamentally refuse to accept that our relationship with cagab and sig will never match theirs, or that any model which fails to account for this fact is incomplete at best and willfully intersexist at worst.
2087
stormborns
theartofmadeline
izzy806
jacobvanloon
dededos
