Part one of Swarr's Envisioning African Intersex (finally!)
In January and March 2024, we read the 2022 book Envisioning African Intersex by Amanda Lock Swarr, and it was a harrowing, nauseating, emotional experience, but some of the best writing on and about intersex issues that we've had in the book club even to date (note: this was written retrospectively in March-June 2025).
The review will be divided in two parts, reflecting the two-part reading experience of the book. For Jan 26 2024, Michelle and Elza were present.
Content note: This book dealt extensively with colonial violence, physical personhood violations, sexual trauma visited upon black/African bodies, and similar and related topics. Please be prepared for discussion of racial violence and trauma, and intersections with debility, dehumanization, eugenics, and ableism.
Preliminary and retrospective thoughts:
The most outstanding thing about this particular book is that, in retrospect, it has become our gold standard for academic intersex writing. This might be a little surprising because it was written by a perisex individual, but Swarr clearly put in the effort to learn from and participate in the intersex community, and clearly articulates her motivations to write the book. It stands out as an instance of how to do positionality the right way. For those who want to learn intersex issues, this is absolutely recommended as a starting point. It’s not an overly long book, and the prose is clear, legible, and sharp. It isn’t abstruse or jargon-laden, the way one might expect of an academic text.
In fact, the burning anger and clear communication style of the book work in harmony. There is a clarity and simplicity to the style that makes it shockingly accessible to a lay person, or at least, to people outside the depths of the academic world – praise that cannot be offered to all of the academic nonfiction titles we’ve read so far. Another refreshing, sustaining element of the work was that despite the nauseating and troubling content, Swarr made sure to end every chapter on a happy, hopeful, or uplifting note, with examples of activist progress on intersex issues related to the topic of each chapter.
We are both white, and this was our first time learning about the racist history of how intersex was socially constructed. In brief: eugenicists believed that intersex (though they used the h-slur) was a property of “lesser” organisms. And because they were intent on “proving” the supposed inferiority of black bodies, this meant “proving” that intersex in humans was mostly seen in black people (and a rare and exceptional thing in the “superior” white race). Swarr demonstrates how this has had a major effect on how intersex is understood in society, from physicians’ reluctance to recognize common intersex variations as such (when white people have them), to how black athletes are singled out for sex verification testing.
Swarr’s incisive history lessons
In the introduction and first two chapters, Swarr lays out (with burning cold fury) the history of sexual exploitation and spectacle of African people, in the context of colonialism that dates all the way back to the European land grabs in Africa in the 1800s. And boy is there a lot of it. For example, the well-known case of Saartjie or Sarah Baartman, whose non-colonized name has been stolen by history. The “Hottentot Venus”’s sex differences were a subject of fascination and cruel spectacle by Europeans, and she was dehumanizingly exhibited across Europe.
In the context of intersex history, differences, and activism, Baartman is an important figure, and unfortunately, a germinal one.
Aggressive colonialist efforts attempted to demonstrate the perceived inferiority of black/African bodies and minds with scientific rationalizations. The racist idea that black/African people are hypersexual and animalistic, with poor self control, had to be validated in order to justify the chattel slavery trade and exploitation of the people and land. How better to do so than with the hot new trend of the era, evolutionary biology?
(For more about Darwin’s feelings about race and eugenics, such as his dislike of both and hatred of slavery, consider this article or this article. It’s worth noting that Charles Darwin was disgusted by the eugenics and race science his cousin put forth.)
With seething fury and elegant readability, Swarr lays out the sexual investigations perpetrated against African bodies in search of physical sex differences that proved a “lesser” sophistication or development (compared to white bodies, of course). Intersex bodies or traits, and sex differences in general, became a fixation among white physicians.
Swarr here makes a bold choice that diverges from the common “blacked-out face, naked body” photographic norms frequently normalized by medical history texts. Instead of presenting photos, and implicitly validating the dehumanizing scrutiny of white medical gazes searching for visible differences, Swarr describes the photographs.
This technique was revelatory, and took both of us aback in its efficacy. It felt punk rock, but in an academic way. It would have been so easy for Swarr to do what, say, Reis did in Bodies in Doubt, and include pictures and woodcuts of various people’s bodies, exposed for the reader to judge and scrutinize, and compare to perceived norms of white perisex bodies. Swarr’s refusal to be complicit in the chain of scrutiny and sensationalism hit us both like a truck, and would shape our perspective on previous academics as well as those to come.
As I (Michelle) put it, expressing my understanding of Swarr’s stance, “I'm not going to put people's bodies on display because that is coherent with the thesis of this work in a very important way, and I refuse to exoticize or reveal and violate people's privacy in the same way as it has been violated for hundreds of years. You don't get to ogle.”
One of the other powerful effects of this technique was that Swarr effectively deconstructed the reflexive tendency to try and categorize exoticized, medicalized bodies. However, the throughline of abusive and dehumanizing actions by physicians and scientists from the nineteenth century to the present cannot be ignored. Swarr lays out how the pseudoscience of eugenics was just given an image makeover and turned into population genetics and especially evolutionary psychology – which is functionally as scientifically messy and unsound as eugenics, and has the same atrocious habit of using a conclusion to reverse-engineer the cause. Swarr shows the process concretely, such as through listing specific academic journals on eugenics that renamed themselves into population genetics or evolutionary psychology journals.
Returning to the previous mentions of eugenics and hypersexualization, the horrifying thing about the application of this particular fallacy is that it created a situation where sexual differences were expected among black/African bodies – and the expectation of higher than (white) average presentation of intersex traits. “Citation chain” analysis is a useful tool for analysing intersex history, as which debunked or fallacious information is repeated as factual just because it’s been referred to by other academic sources so many times. A strategy of definition, scrutiny, repetition, and legitimacy occurred over and over.
The scrutiny of black bodies by white eugenicists was extensive and exhausting, down to things like measuring the widths of African assigned-female pelvic bones and comparing them to the pelvic bone widths of white/European women. Since there is a spread of variation between population members of cultural and ethnic groups, appropriately representative data about measuring bones would not, in fact, yield useful, determinative conclusions. Determining intersex status or ethnicity from pelvic measurements is on par with using the caliper measurements of skulls taken by physiognomists, trying to determine the content of a mind, personality, and history…from bumps on the skull.
Swarr documents how repetition legitimizes: this spurious concept was repeated so often it became a scientifically expected fact. Even now, it’s somewhat difficult to obtain reliable data on the frequency of intersex traits among African and black populations, because of a kind of expectancy effect. The zombie statistics, as they’re referred to on the podcast Maintenance Phase, just keep coming back – even though by all rights, they should be dead and debunked.
There were also cases where overtly false information or aberrant behaviour was cloaked in scientific inquiry, including potentially predatory behaviour on the part of some scientists, who were just way too interested in genital differences among people, and trying to see and observe them. There were also cases in which anthropologists either flat-out lied or treated false information as scientifically verified, which led to harrowing inaccuracies and scientific sensationalism. In one instance, a German trader was convinced that a particular Papua New Guinean person had intersex traits, and photographed them, and this was treated as being worthy of scientific validation – rather than, say, interrogating whether a random German demanding to photograph a person’s genitals was predatory or invasive.
Yet another thing Swarr did was to critically review and contextualise the methodology of people like physician John Money, who is considered a prominent and seminal light in the field of surgical intercessions in intersex children – in a word, intersex genital mutilation, in many cases. Furthermore, calling out problems in the field of genetics was as courageous as it is necessary. For instance, Swarr uses the term “gender” to talk about sex traits in some cases, because sex is also an artificially constructed category, a decision Elza applauded. It also means that gender should not and cannot be assumed from physical appearance – which is actually just correct and accurate, even though it’s not socially accepted widely yet.
Elza pointed out, “I just kept being disappointed by how people are turning off their brains at some of the most obviously false things,” and described an obviously false, but widely believed, descriptive statement about black women’s genitals. Another issue that became blatantly apparent was that cultural acceptance of gynecomastia was common among multiple African groups - and white racists couldn’t wrap their heads around it. We both expressed frustration and outrage at how obvious it was that these scientists were thinking with their horny goggles on rather than critical consideration. As I (Michelle) said, “this is like science dictated by fetishes.”
Some of these assertions about black bodies would have been anatomically unfeasible and unrealistic, yet were quoted by supposedly serious scientists with every pretention of scientific accuracy. For example, the idea that black women have labia that are so elongated they “hang down to the knees”. As I put it, “they were so disappointed that, God forbid, these African women had relatively normal genitals, but then they had to measure the crap out of them to justify any degree of difference.”
Swarr lays out an effective critique of the concept of “third gender”: it’s been used by anthropologists and biologists as a colonial “junk drawer into which a great [deal of] non-Western miscellany is carelessly dumped.” It includes concepts from all over the world and every historical period, without regard for consistency or coherency. It has no regard for how “woman” or “man” may have been understood in cultural context. It reinscribes a dual gender system (“two plus other”) while also exotifying and homogenizing non-Western cultures. Or as @taliabhattwrites has put it:
Given eugenicists’ goals to “prove” that intersex is more common among non-white populations, many so called “third genders” were described misleadingly with the h-slur to to help imply they were ore intersex than they actually were, and “third genders” that were primarily intersex (e.g. the guevedoches) have been relentlessly exotified and exceptionalized.
One thing which was slightly tricky to navigate and discuss in the text was the perspective on blackness versus Blackness; Swarr, coming from an African perspective, dislikes the capitalization of Blackness. This is not a universal preference, and Michelle is personally used to the capitalizing, as this is the norm in the world of Black diasporic literary fiction.
More about Colonialization and South Africa
Swarr unflinchingly points out how white physicians in South Africa saw colonization as a positive thing, and themselves as active agents of it. We had an extensive discussion about how gynecologists and urologists can interpret and perform their jobs in a way that enforces and polices gender norms. As Michelle said, “I'm just sitting with that because gender police definitely reflects how I feel when I first got my PCOS diagnosis. I'm sorry ma'am, these testosterone levels are a little high. How fast were you going to that intersection? I remember that was the moment, especially when I asked, is this going to affect my fertility? That feeling of being defective and of my future like closing before me.” After reading this book, the phrase “doctors are gender cops” made its way into our book club’s lexicon, and has stayed there ever since.
Swarr is unflinching about discussing the problems with the term “diagnosis of sexual disorder” (DSD) and how stigmatizing the language is – the issue of DSD would reoccur in future works and discussions repeatedly. As well, the policing of which intersex variations are considered “actually intersex” is usually implemented by doctors, and has arguably been very destructive to the community. Who gets to be considered “intersex” by physicians? People with chromosomal differences? Genital differences? Hormonal differences? Those with a particular combination of all three? The implicit fear of physicians in potentially normalising intersex and sex variations becomes palpable when the actual delineation of sex differences is examined. To quote our discussion again, “Intersex is kind of the queerness that dare not speak its name, because it’s so medicalized.”
Intersex, Disability, Debility, and Prejudice
Swarr clearly does not see intersex people as broken in any way – just part of the range of variations among humanity (and non-human animals, of course). But as disabled people ourselves, we were both struck viscerally by Swarr’s implicit assertion that, in the same way that we say trans men are men, trans women are women, and nonbinary people are real – intersex is normal.
In fact, Swarr was defiant in not specifically defining the limits of what and who is “actually intersex”, and focused on the oppression of intersex people, as Elza said. “This is a rhetorical move that has been used in disability studies for decades, because of the controversy of how do you define disability? And the scholars were eventually like, fuck that, we're just going to study and focus on ableism instead.”
We had a lively and emphatic discussion of agreement on the way the medical system fights porous definitions of gender and sex. Michelle expressed, “We see conservatism in medicine, because if you can alienate and exoticize African bodies and black bodies, and you can reinforce white norms, you can also reinforce gender norms. Men have this measurement, women have this measurement, and it's much easier to keep people in little boxes. And it's really interesting how gender and sex as hard divisions are self-perpetuating.”
One dismaying thing we realised from the text was that there’s often a lot more joy and acceptance of non-human intersex variations. A bird or butterfly with bilateral gynandromorphism (i.e. plumage or wings that diverge from gender norms) is celebrated as a wonder of the world. Human beings who present with divergent secondary or primary sex characteristics are seen as requiring medical intervention – even when it’s entirely unnecessary.
Swarr mentions briefly the history of the h-slur in biology. For millennia, this word meant intersex, and its use in biology to mean cosexual/dichogamous is surprisingly recent. In the early and mid-16th century, colonists started using the word to describe black people’s genitalia in the same texts where they also described black people as “like animals”. Only after this use was established, did 17th-century biologists start to take up the word to mean cosexual and dichogamous in nonhuman organisms.
We also discussed the differences in disability perception for animals, and Elza pointed out the ways in which animals’ lives with disabilities are perceived as unworthy, unpleasant, or not worth enduring.
Final thoughts
We have more to say about Swarr’s book, so stay tuned! It’s available as an open source work, meaning that it’s not paywalled. You can download the whole book at the link in the previous sentence!.
