interACT Youth

interACT Advocates for Intersex Youth works to empower intersex youth and advance the rights of all people with innate variations in their physical sex characteristics through advocacy, public engagement and community connection. www.interactadvocates.org

[interactyouth]

Happy Intersex Awareness Week 2024! (October 21st-26th)

On Intersex Awareness Day, we ask the world to support intersex people in our right to live authentically and unapologetically. But one day hasn’t been enough—so welcome to #IntersexAwarenessWeek!

Intersex Awareness Day, October 26th, marks a historic day in the start of the intersex movement. A group of intersex people and their allies protested at an American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) meeting nearly thirty years ago, to oppose the medical abuse and discrimination they’d endured.

Today, we are still fighting for that bodily autonomy. We're fighting for our freedom to exist as we are, beyond the stereotypical sex binary.  We're fighting against the belief that doctors' opinions of how our bodies look matter more than ours do.

But we are also visible. The intersex-inclusive flag is flown across the country. Intersex people's bodies are starting to be taught in health classes and across medical schools. Intersex people are featured in films, memoirs, runways and on the morning news. We are here, and we're not hiding again.

Learn more & educate others! Look through our images and share them far and wide! Linked below is our Intersex FAQ for all the basic questions, and we'll be sharing new resources and tips to be an ally all week long! (We will only be blazing this post, however!)

We also suggest checking out other United States intersex organizations such as Intersex Awareness, Intersex Justice Project, Club Intersex, TIGERRS, The Houston Intersex Society, and InterConnect!

For those not in the USA, here is a list of international intersex organizations!

What is Intersex? Frequently Asked Questions

Intersex is an umbrella term for differences in sex traits or reproductive anatomy.

[interactyouth]

I'm a WNBA player. Don't use athletes like me to exclude trans women.

IOC's policy invites unequal scrutiny. We cannot choose our genes or chromosomes, but we can choose whether we protect the dignity of every

Policies that single out transgender women and athletes with intersex variations do not protect women’s sports. They manufacture a scapegoat while the real challenges to women’s sports go unaddressed: unequal funding, limited access to training and facilities, pay disparities, male-dominated leadership, gender-based violence and harassment across race, sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Focusing on who should be allowed to call themselves a woman distracts from the structural inequities that actually limit women’s opportunities. This policy also invites unequal scrutiny for women who already face heightened suspicion; Black and Brown athletes and competitors from the Global South will be unfairly targeted.

In more than 15 years of organized basketball, I’ve played with and against people who are transgender and undoubtedly people with intersex variations, and I've never experienced any unfair advantages. I saw these players as my fellow athletes, not my enemies. We cannot choose our genes or chromosomes, but we can choose how hard we work, how we treat one another and whether we protect the dignity of every athlete.

Do not use the names of women athletes to target, shame or exclude transgender women. Transgender women are women. Women with intersex variations are women. I welcome these women – and all women – onto my teams.

Brianna Turner, a forward on the WNBA Indiana Fever

[interactyouth]

How the Olympic Ban on Transgender Women Could Affect All Women Athletes

A new Olympic policy on genetic testing could reshape women’s sports and raise questions for intersex and cisgender athletes alike.

Erika Lorshbough, a lawyer and executive director of the advocacy group interACT who is intersex themselves, explained that many athletes undergoing genetic testing may only learn they have intersex variations during the genetic testing process. “They will be finding out this life-changing medical information at the same time that they are banned from their sport and publicly outed about it,” they tell TIME. “There are places around the world where this kind of outing is incredibly dangerous. I would like to think the U.S. is not one of those places. But right now it doesn't feel like that to a lot of people.”

[interactyouth]

Transgender Day of Visibility 2025

Today is the International Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV). Each year on March 31, we observe TDOV to celebrate the lives of transgender people. The day also brings attention to the discrimination, misunderstanding and threats to safety that transgender people still face.

Transgender and intersex are different. Transgender people have a gender identity that is different from the gender they were thought to be when they were born. Intersex people are born with physical variations (like in their chromosomes, hormones or reproductive anatomy) that don’t fit neatly into binary sex categories. 

Are intersex people also transgender? Not necessarily, but they can be. Gender is a complex set of relationships about personal identity, a person’s relationship to their body, and to the world around them. Many intersex people aren’t transgender—they are cisgender women or men. Some intersex people also just happen to be transgender in addition to being born with physical differences. For others, their gender identities are linked to being intersex.

Intersex and transgender people both challenge the idea of a clear-cut sex and gender binary. People who are both intersex and transgender live at an intersection. For this Transgender Day of Visibility, we talked to intersex people who are also transgender about their lives.

[interactyouth]

Position statement: Participation in sport by women with innate variations of sex characteristics - InterAction

A Position Statement in response to new eligibility rules published by the IOC, by InterAction for Health and Human Rights, Equality Austral

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced an eligibility framework that included mandatory genetic testing for all athletes competing in a girls/women category as well as blanket bans on transgender women.

Under previous and current testing regimes, women athletes may only discover that they have an innate variation of sex characteristics in the course of eligibility testing for competitive sport.

Athletes have reported severe impacts including loss of employment and career opportunities, loss of relationships, loss of housing, impacts to mental health, and exposure to unnecessary medical interventions.

Medical interventions consequential to sex testing in sport have included clitorectomies and other feminising interventions which have no relationship to ability to participate in sport. Reported medical interventions consequential to sex testing in sport also include interventions requiring lifelong access to hormone replacement.

[interactyouth]

interACT Responds to New IOC Policy Discriminating Against Intersex Olympic Athletes

Today’s newly released policy by the IOC discriminates against transgender and intersex women with Olympic dreams through mandated sex testi

While the new IOC policies are blatant attacks on transgender women, they also clearly target intersex athletes, especially women. Intersex people, also known as those with Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) or with variations in sex traits, make up an estimated 1.7% of the population.

Intersex people are born with variations in physical traits such as chromosomes, hormone function, and/or reproductive biology. Doctors and scientists agree that biological sex characteristics exist on a spectrum.

Some intersex women are born with XY chromosomes, or other chromosomes that are not XX. Some intersex women produce higher-than-typical levels of testosterone, or have genetic variations that change how their bodies process and respond to hormones.

The policy makes a few rare exceptions for some intersex athletes with specific variations (using the stigmatizing term “DSD”), but restricts many more intersex athletes from competition. The new eligibility restrictions will discriminatorily deny many intersex women access to women’s sports.

No single physical characteristic can determine a person’s sex. Experts have spoken out about how “sex testing” is unscientific, whether based on traits like chromosomes, hormones, or the SRY gene. Hormones such as testosterone vary widely among individual women, by ethnic group, and due to factors like PCOS.

Exclusionary policies based on sex testing encourage discrimination against all women athletes, opening their bodies up to improper scrutiny. Only women, not men, are subjected to these additional hurdles to compete.

Intersex women and those with variations in their sex traits suffer under sex testing policies. Athletes may not even be aware of their own intersex variation until forcibly outed by sex testing. Many women have endured invasive physical exams and even been forced to alter their bodies to be allowed to play under similar policies. Caster Semenya publicly “went through hell” as her health declined when she was forced to alter her body’s hormones.

Under mandated sex testing, many intersex women (as well as transgender women) may lose their right to compete altogether.

[interactyouth]

90 Human Rights and Sports Groups Call for Olympics to Drop “Sex Testing” Plans

As recently as November, IOC president Kirsty Coventry signaled they would bring the practice back.

"Reinstituting those tests — which can include cheek swabs, blood tests, and physical examinations — would represent “a catastrophic erosion of women’s rights and safety,” Sport & Rights Alliance executive director Andrea Florence wrote in the joint statement this week. “Gender policing and exclusion harms all women and girls, and undermines the very dignity and fairness the IOC claims to uphold,” Florence wrote. “Our concerns are compounded by the fact that the IOC also seems to be, at the same time, divesting from the safe sport infrastructure that actually provides protection for women and girls.”

[hellyeahscarleteen]

"It’s common to think that when sex or a vaginal exam is painful or uncomfortable, we should just push through. That can cause an injury and we can start associating something in our vaginas with pain and discomfort, which can sometimes result in vaginismus⁠. If you’re ever thinking you should just grin and bear it and keep pushing, don’t do that!"

Janet Newandyke, The Power of Pelvic Floor Therapy

[interactyouth]

'Ponyboi's River Gallo Inks First-Look With Fox Entertainment Studios

River Gallo, star and writer of the 2024 Sundance pic Ponyboi, has inked a first look deal with Fox Entertainment Studios for scripted TV &

“I’m grateful to continue my creative relationship with Fox Entertainment Studios [successor of 20th Century Fox],” said Gallo. “Ponyboi was a deeply personal project, and the trust and support I found at Fox made it possible to tell that story without compromise. I’m excited to expand our collaboration and to keep creating bold, unexpected work together.”

We love intersex creatives getting more opportunities!!

[interactyouth]

Today was an important step in Victoria’s journey toward justice and bodily autonomy for people born with variations in sex characteristics.

The Victorian Legislative Assembly debated the Health Safeguards for People Born with Variations in Sex Characteristics Bill 2025- a long‑awaited reform designed to protect intersex children from unnecessary and harmful medical interventions. The bill passed the lower house without opposition, and will return to the upper house for debate in 2 weeks.

[interactyouth]

New Laws Protecting Intersex People From Unnecessary Medical Procedures Pass In Victoria

Victorian Parliament has passed legislation protecting children with variations in sex characteristics from unnecessary medical procedures.

Victoria is now the first state — and the second jurisdiction in the country after the ACT [Australian Capital Territory] — to enshrine these protections in law. It joins only a handful of countries around the world that have implemented protections from medically unnecessary/ non-consensual surgeries for intersex people. Independent assessment panels will oversee proposed treatment plans for children born with innate variations of their sex characteristics, with additional support for parents and clinicians.

[interactyouth]

Celebrate Black intersex history! SLIM's African Diaspora event is Feb. 24th

Strategy Lab for Intersex Movements (SLIM) is commemorating Black History Month with a virtual panel of distinguished guests: writer Yezenia León Mezu, musician Adeyanju Aiyegbusi, Intersex Nigeria founder Obioma Chukwuike, and researcher-artist Olivia Hunte, speaking on intersex experiences across the African Diaspora. You can register here (link) for the online event on February 24th, 12pm to 1:30pm EST!

[interactyouth]

Jazz Legend Little Jimmy Scott Is a Cornerstone of Black Intersex History

The Cleveland-born crooner is your favorite jazz musician’s favorite jazz musician.

"His experience mirrors that of so many people with intersex variations who do not necessarily want to be activists or public at all about their sex characteristics, but want to live in the world as they are without pressure to change their bodies. People with intersex variations want to be accepted for who we are, not just for the difference we represent. We are more than our bodies. We embody complex lineages encompassing where we’re from, where we live, and who we love." - Sean Saifa Wall, 2023

[interactyouth]

Intersex Texans fear new law will force gender identities

Intersex Texans fear House Bill 229, which defines gender based on the reproductive system, could increase surgeries on intersex children an

Thurber said the amendment [to Texas HB 229] has little impact because it doesn’t specify any accommodations and doesn’t properly define either of the two binary genders. The law defines women as individuals “whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova” and men as individuals “whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” Because Klinefelter syndrome causes infertility for some individuals and Thurber’s testosterone levels are very low as result of her intersex variation, may not fit into either category. “I literally fall into a third gender, according to this law, a third gender that is not defined. So, does that mean I legally don’t exist?” Thurber said.

[interactyouth]

Celebrate Black intersex history! SLIM's African Diaspora event is Feb. 24th

Strategy Lab for Intersex Movements (SLIM) is commemorating Black History Month with a virtual panel of distinguished guests: writer Yezenia León Mezu, musician Adeyanju Aiyegbusi, Intersex Nigeria founder Obioma Chukwuike, and researcher-artist Olivia Hunte, speaking on intersex experiences across the African Diaspora. You can register here (link) for the online event on February 24th, 12pm to 1:30pm EST!

[lgbtqiatext]

[interactyouth]

Tatenda Ngwaru is an advocate and intersex woman from Zimbabwe who sought asylum in the United States. She's the founder of True Identity, the first intersex organization in Zimbabwe that promoted community awareness of intersex issues. She's participated in two webinars regarding her life story and advocacy work, linked above and below!

[interactyouth]

Today was an important step in Victoria’s journey toward justice and bodily autonomy for people born with variations in sex characteristics.

The Victorian Legislative Assembly debated the Health Safeguards for People Born with Variations in Sex Characteristics Bill 2025- a long‑awaited reform designed to protect intersex children from unnecessary and harmful medical interventions. The bill passed the lower house without opposition, and will return to the upper house for debate in 2 weeks.