Author: Casey Harwick

When we talk about gender, yes we talk about it as something that we do that was given to us, but we also talk about it in a way that implies malleability. To us, societally, gender is a fluid concept on a sliding scale that can be different from the way we were born, different from the way we were told, just fluid.

Sex, on the other hand, is spoken about in rock-soild, definite, unchanging terms. The sex you were born as and that is on your birth certificate is one of two extremes. What if that wasn’t the way the world was structured? Well there is a “third sex” so to speak, encompassing everything between the extremes. Intersex.

The article “Giving Sex” describes the way that our medical system, as we know it, decides what sex is and how it has enforced this hard boundary line in sex that endures even beyond the hard boundaries in gender beginning to fall. Both trans and intersex people run into this wall where if we ever question our assigned sex, it is medically inconceivable that someone may exist in the grey area between. This is a product of the medical gaze, where doctors feel that they need to fit a patient’s background or story into the neatly defined biomedical paradigm that has been described and upheld for a long time.

Intersex people are required to undergo medical treatment to affirm a sex that was assigned by doctors based on a clitoral size gauge in most cases, in some completely based on what kind of surgery the surgeon thinks is easier. Trans people, on the other hand, are not allowed to have access to these treatments because they, for some reason, know what sex they feel correct as to a less complete extent than a doctor assessing a baby that has been born literally 3 minutes ago.

Davis, Georgiann, Jodie M. Dewey, Erin L. Murphy. 2016. “Giving Sex: Deconstructing Intersex and Trans Medicalization Practices.” Gender and Society 30:3:490-514

Despite the topic of my final paper ultimately focusing on intersex movements in South Africa, I felt it was important to provide myself with background on intersex rights and intersex struggles across Africa, a continent that I had not done any meaningful research into before this paper.

Swarr (2023) starts the chapter with a quote:

We exist to amplify the voices of African Intersex people at the regional level. We
offer ourselves as the African Intersex reference of intelligence for stakeholders and
allies who are interested in strengthening the ongoing liberation work for intersex
peoples’ rights and autonomy. We affirm that intersex people are real, and we exist
in all countries of Africa. As intersex people in Africa, we live in a society that per-
petuates violence and killings of intersex people by cultural, religious, traditional
and medical beliefs and practices.

African Intersex Movement, statement on
July 3, 2019

This quote provides the foundation for the rest of the chapter, laying the groundwork for the explanations to come.

The African Intersex Movement finds its roots in the work of a few in the 1990s and the brave voices who spoke up in a time where it was dangerous to do so. This movement spread across Africa and addresses head-on the difficulties faced by African Intersex people, no matter the country. This is a truly continent-wide movement, operating through transnational and international means, an organized force for a continent.

This movement finally gained attention on the world stage when Caster Semenya was barred from competing in the Olympics because of the levels of testosterone she was found to have due to her own physiology. The test also brought to the world stage the way in which sex testing such as this has been dehumanizing African women and discrediting their identities and womanhood, regardless of if they are intersex or not. Let me be very clear, intersex women are women, just as they can be any other gender. Being intersex does not determine a person’s gender.

Sally Gross was an early intersex organizer and founded the organization Intersex South Africa, one of two organizations that have been making waves in normalizing and spreading awareness for intersex alongside Iranti. She was a pioneer in South African intersex rights, helping make the way for the 2005 amendment that defined intersex in the South African constitution and included that definition in the category of legally protected sex.

Reference:
Swarr, Amanda Lock. 2023. “Toward an ‘African Intersex Reference of Intelligence’: Directions in Intersex Organizing.” Pp. 132-155. Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine

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.

Intersex and Transgender people are often pitted against one another. The arguments used by the intersex community are twisted to condemn the trans community, arguments in the trans community are twisted to condemn the intersex community. Despite both movements often working together to fight against medicalization and fight for civil rights, the two are seen by outsiders as opposed. This view is changing in an era dominated by legislation against transgender people, specifically involving gender-affirming care.

Gender-affirming care includes any medical practices meant to help a person feel more like theirself in their body in terms of gender expression. This can include hormone replacement, genital surgery, and plastic surgery among other things in the case of trans people, but many of these same techniques are applied to cisgender people to affirm their gender, though they may not recognize it.

Many of the practices known as gender-affirming care in the trans community and that are so demonized by the legislature at the moment are, in the context of the intersex community and medical community, called “gender-normalizing care.” This refers to any medical practices used to make an intersex person more definitely fit the socially constructed binary of sex. These can include hormone replacement, genital surgery, and vaginal dilation among others. See any similarities?

Consenting trans people are denied these treatments and yet on unconsenting intersex babies these treatments are not far off from mandatory. This is at the heart of the confusion in the intersex community regarding anti-trans legislation.

Until recently, an unintentional byproduct of anti-transgender legislation has been bans on medically unnecessary surgeries and treatments for intersex children as many of the laws simply refer to “children under 18.” This side-effect is now being noticed by legislatures around the country and amendements to these bills are being rolled out just as fast as the anti-trans bills did in the first place.

The amendments being proposed would make intersex babies an exception to these bans, reinstating the ability of doctors to prescribe these medically unnecessary treatments. The intersex and trans communities have been fighting against these developments, but the is still much to do.

I myself had a vaginoplasty and clitorectomy within a few months of my life to make me look more like a “typical female.” On the other hand, I have trans friends in Texas who have sought these surgeries I underwent without my consent but these trans people are being told that they can’t possibly know what their bodies are supposed to look like. How was I, a 3 month old baby, more deserving of those surgeries than people who have lived their lives in a body that is not their own?

Article:
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/11/1169194792/some-states-that-ban-gender-affirming-care-for-trans-youth-allow-intersex-surger

Montana’s Senate Bill 458 is an unassuming enough name. The contents, however, are somewhat problematic. The bill draws the binary of female and male based on the presence of XX or XY chromosomes. A spokesperson for lawmakers behind the bill have argued that the bill simply follows commonsense and biological logic for this binary and that the bill does not infringe on the rights of Montanans to identify as whatever gender they so choose, but not sex.

The commonsense argument on the surface makes sense. In biology many of us are taught that there is a clear binary between male and female, but people who have grown up between that binary, like myself, will tell you that sex is nowhere near that cut and dry. Intersex people are people who were born with a mix of primary and secondary sex characteristics, placing these people neither definitely male nor definitely female.

The Montanan intersex community has, from the first proposal of this bill, expressed extreme opposition to the binary it defines and how it affects their rights. By defining sex in this way, any protections for intersex people are by default rendered non-existent as, according to the bill, no one falls between the two. As the bill became a law, the intersex community, along with the transgender and two-spirit communities, geared up for a legal battle.

The lawsuit identifies Monatana’s governor and attorney general as defendants and seeks to have a judge rule the law unconstitutional in the eyes of the court.

As an intersex person myself who lived through North Carolina’s HB2, I feel for the intersex community of Montana. I remember being a 14 year old, always prepared to justify myself through biology, joking about how I would do it if I was confronted. I cannot imagine that stress being applied to every single aspect of my life. Current medical science is increasingly defining sex as a spectrum rather than a binary while legislation moves in the opposite direction. Education is necessary and destruction of the binary is necessary.

Article:
https://montanafreepress.org/2023/10/12/transgender-intersex-montanans-challenge-law-defining-sex-as-binary/

The topic of testosterone in women’s sports has been dominating conversations on women’s athletics from childhood to professional sports. One group often overlooked but deeply affected by this topic is cis-identifying female intersex athletes.

In 2019, the Olympics did away the the archaic and humiliating system that was sex-testing for all female athletes and brought in testosterone testing instead. The idea was that this would be a less humiliating and invasive alternative for athletes and would even the playing field to a greater extent. This came with the side effect of excluding intersex athletes with heightened testosterone such as Caster Semenya of South Africa.

Semenya filed a suit challenging this new regulation as violating her human rights. It barred her from the Olympics, a stage on which she had shined again and again and a sport that has been a major part of her life. She filed her lawsuit in a Swiss court and was struck down as the court cited her argument as violating women’s rights and maintaining an unfair advantage. The court agreed that the regulation violated Semenya’s rights but upheld that the argument still violated the rights of women.

This shows me, as an intersex person, that at least in legal and legislative settings that I cannot be valid unless I undergo unnecessary medical procedures to reduce testosterone levels. People like my little sister, an extremely talented rifle athlete, should not be considered “true women” unless they conform to medical standards of the binary. I am far from athletic, but according to these governing bodies, I am a superhuman and a threat.

Article:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/18/caster-semenya-won-her-case-not-right-compete

Queering the Map is a moderated online social platform for queer people to anonymously share their stories. The website shows a simple map with location pins representing every queer message posted. When it was created in 2017, the founders could never have imagined the messages that would appear.

In 2023, conflict began between Israel and Gaza’s ruling party, Hamas, after Hamas launched an attack on Israel. Israel quickly began a retaliation campaign with a death toll that rises higher every day. Supplies have been cut off and civilian casualties skyrocket. Among the people here are queer Gazans, people who have already lived under legal discrimination, who are desperately seeking to have their voices heard as loss of electricity and internet are slowly silencing them.

“I’ve always imagine you and me sitting out in the sun, hand-in-hand, free at last…” “The only thing that keeps me patient in Gaza is the sea and you.” “My biggest regret is not kissing this one guy… He died in the bombing. I think a big part of me died too. And soon I will be dead. To younus, I will kiss you in heaven.”
There are messages of people caught in this conflict, expressing their final regrets. The regrets, hopes, and dreams of these people are on full display for the world to see. Many describe homophobia they faces, many describe the loves they lost, that they never had, and that could have been.

Many sources have denied the existence of queer Gazans and queer Palestinians, but they are here, they are queer, and they want their voices to be heard.

Article Link: https://time.com/6326254/queering-the-map-gaza-lgbt-palestinians/