You know how there are lots of ace people who end up ace exclusionists and trans people who end up nonbinary exclusionists?
There are intersex people who see their intersex identity as purely medical, closer to a chronic illness or disability than to a gender or sexuality, and that’s their business of course.
But for the rest of us, who have been here for decades, having our intersexuality be a critical part of our queer politics, as well as for almost every major queer organization, as well as for almost every major intersection organization, the inclusion of intersex people under the banner of LGBTQIAPN+ is considered accurate and correct for three reasons:
1) Radical inclusivity is the name of the game when you stand in opposition to an exclusionary system of oppression
2) Historical basis, as intersex people have been attacked as and celebrated as queer for as long as such communities have existed, and the differentiation of intersex and trans is shockingly recent. I’m talking “the last 15 years” recent.
3) Shared goals and oppressions: intersex people are brutalized for not being gender normative enough, and we benefit from expanded understandings and acceptance of the actual breadth of human gender.
Now, let’s dig into the rest of the claims made here.
“Hermaphrodite,” is a slur basically the same way queer is. Having a simple group noun to refer to intersex people as a community and an identity fulfills a critical grammatical gap in English. Its use originates in neutral tone scientific research, and it was adopted and spread by and for intersex people ourselves.
However, the term reached the gender binarist majority and was used as a slur by them. At this point, many intersex people (as well as many trans people) have serious difficulty trusting anyone who uses this term.
Reclamation of the term is barely starting and is primarily being done by people like myself who have been using it for decades and refuse to give it up just because our oppressors got all pissy with it.
And even I find myself wary of its use by perisex people. But, there’s also not very many grammatically smooth alternatives. “Intersex people,” is probably the best choice, but it’s about as clunky as saying “male people,” instead of “men,” so I understand why some people don’t use the phrase.
Personally, I identify as a hermaphrodite (and as a herm, for short), as at birth I had two different types of gonad, as well as ambiguous genitalia, prior to being surgically altered in infancy.
It’s something of a personal choice. If you aren’t intersex, be very wary indeed of using the term until the person/group you’re talking about has used it first.
Additionally, intersex genital mutilation was not made illegal in the US.
The surgeon general issued a statement last year (not this year) urging doctors to stop treating IGM as best practice, but that has no legal weight, and both doctors and parents still get to decide how an intersex child’s body is altered, free of consequence.
This is a huge problem that persists in the US medical system, and acting like it is over is horrifying. It’s not over, it has never been over. We’re still out here being fucked up every day by doctors who want us to be cis, straight people.
Which brings me to the bogeyman of the “cishet intersex,” there’s… There’s a lot to unpack there, actually. Let’s break it down.
Can intersex people identify with the gender assigned to them at birth? Yes, absolutely. Indeed this is one of the more common ways for intersex people to identify.
Doesn’t this make them cisgender then? From a technical perspective, yes, it can. However, many intersex activists prefer the term ipsogender to refer to these non-trans intersex people, because the gender binary does not reward intersex people for adherence in the way it rewards the “truly cis.” The differentiation of trans and intersex identity took place around the same time as the differentiation of gay and trans identity: when AIDS started killing people off and everyone was struggling to find some form of safety.
Prior to this, all hatred of queers was presented as hatred for violating the “natural order” of man and woman. In many conservative areas, it still is. No matter what we do, we as intersex people will always violate that so-called natural order, and be punished for it. The gender binary hates us the same as it hates trans people, albeit with that hatred manifesting in very slightly different ways- and I do mean very slight. Everything you can think of as transphobia has absolutely been done to intersex people, and vice versa. Up to and including infant genital mutilation.
Can intersex people be heterosexual? Yes, if an intersex person identifies with a binary gender and is exclusively attracted to people of the other binary gender, then, of course, they can be heterosexual.
Doesn’t that mean they’re prioritized under heteronormativity, then? To some degree, yes, heterosexual intersex people are prioritized by heteronormativity. However, an intersex person does not have the same relationship to straightness as a perisex person. We cannot. So much intersex mutilation is rooted in the belief that we need A) a binary gender and B) to be sexually available to the other binary gender. The reason the vast majority of intersex people have our phalluses cut off and vaginas surgically formed or altered, is so that we can be “sexually functional women.“ Sexually functional meaning capable of receiving penetration from a man’s penis (I specify a man’s here for a reason). If our phalluses aren’t large enough or normative to make doctors consider us viable as penetrative, heterosexual men, we just cut up into “women.”
The fact that many of us will grow up with no desire to have sex with cisgender men, or to have penetrative sex, or anything of the sort is irrelevant. This is what we are forced to do, at the cost of thousands of dollars in medical bills and decades of forced surgeries and hormone treatments. We don’t get a choice. That many of us ultimately adhere to something we’re been violated repeatedly from birth to enforce is not a sign of our prioritization under heteronormativity. It is a sign of how vile and violent heteronormativity truly is.
So, if an intersex person can be cis, and an intersex person can be het, then they can be cishet, right? Again, from a technical perspective, yes. But intersex people are not rewarded, favoured, or protected by the gender binary in any way. We are brutalized, violated, mutilated, and medicated by it. To position us as being favoured by it is to ignore the factual reality that we face.
Finally, while intersexism is the oldest term for describing intersex oppression, many intersex activists consider it inappropriate because it positions intersex people as the oppressive force or as benefitting from it. Compare to heterosexism, where heterosexual people are the beneficiaries of the oppressive force, or binarism, where the gender binary is the oppressive force. Many intersex advocates prefer to use dyadism, perisexism, or intersexphobia/misia/antagonism to more accurately position intersex people as the oppressed rather than the oppressor.
All in all, this post comes from a place of good intention, but so does the road to hell. The fact that the OP is operating under so many different pieces of misinformation about our shared identity suggests to me that they are primarily getting their information from radical feminist revisionist sources.
Unsurprisingly, even a brief glance at OP’s blog shows that they think of asexuals as “cringe,” that positivity and pride posts are somehow something only asexual people do, lots of stuff about intersex exclusionism, tons of sex negative garbage, tons of “polyamorous peopel aren’t oppressed” business.
TBH, I take it back, this post definitely did not come from a place of good intention. It’s just wall to wall misinformation and general nonsense.
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