When we look at dystopian young adult fiction we think of the concepts presented as preposterous, things that could never happen in our world. One of those tropes we look at as somewhat unrealistic and farfetched is the idea of being sorted into factions against your own will. Unfortunately, that’s a part of our reality, just not in the way those novels may present it.
Sex is defined for us at birth. We have no control over how that happens, we’re told its based on purely biological traits, but have you ever questioned what happens when someone doesn’t fit the neat and tidy categories that are so plainly laid out in medicine and society? Have you ever seen a purple beanie at the hospital for newborns who seem to be neither male nor female but somewhere in between? I’m willing to bet your answer to that second question is no, though I, as an intersex person myself, really wish there was a picture of me in a sea of pink and blue with a little purple hat. Alas, the doctors felt that they needed to make a decision. A decision that came down to a size chart that determined if the somewhat phallic, somewhat vaginal genitalia I possessed indicated that I was closer to one side of the binary than the other. Ultimately the doctors decided I would be classified as a female though my specialist was understanding when 17 years later I told him that I would rather go by they/them pronouns and present in a neutral way. That interaction made me one of the lucky ones. Most would have experienced intense scrutiny and evaluation due to the mere idea that they would question their place in the medical sex binary.
This anecdote, though rambling, has a point. I was born with genitalia that made labor and delivery doctors call in endocrinologists to fully understand what they were looking at and yet I was so definitely classified as female. This is the medical gaze at work.
The medical gaze is a concept developed by French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe the way doctors will go to great lengths to fit a patient into the neatly defined biomedical paradigm. In the case of intersex people this is taking a baby that has no business being put on either end of the binary and forcing them into one of two boxes based on the size of the clitoral/penile structure between their legs to satisfy the need for individuals to fit one or the other. Though up to this point I have written about this in the context of babies, it is something intersex and non-intersex people alike do not escape for the duration of their lives.
Intersex people are often given hormone replacement therapy to better “normalize” them as the assigned sex they were given. Intersex people who were assigned female are given dilators from a very young age to ensure they can accommodate penile insertion during intercourse later in life (prompting a further conversation about heterosexism and heteronormativity too long to include here).
While I am lucky enough to have undergone minimal unnecessary treatment, many people like me have not been this lucky and will continue to experience the same medical abuse that I have described. Intersex people are not deformed, no matter what the medical community and pop culture may say. Intersex people are not in need of correction or normalization. We exist. Our lives and bodies are important and beautiful. One day this medical abuse will end, at least, I hope it will.
Thank you for sharing your story. There is no doubt that these are meaningful conversations that we should all be having, as only by informing ourselves rather than simply accepting things as they are will progress be possible.