According to a common statistic, 1.7% of people in the U.S. are intersex, which is about the same proportion of people that have red hair. The only difference is that you know a redhead, but chances are, you aren’t aware of anyone who is intersex. Why don’t you know about intersex people? For one thing, many intersex people go their whole lives unaware they are intersex. There have been documented autopsies of men who have tiny uteruses present and women with testes alongside their ovaries. Some intersex people fortunate enough to know about their condition, while others face unfortunate circumstances, problems that you and I should know about.
First, let’s define what intersex actually means. People that are intersex have a variety of reproductive anatomies or hormones that don’t definitively fit a male or female body. Though a person may physically manifest as a male or female, their internal anatomy may differ from this perceived gender. A person may also have abnormal external anatomy, such as a small penis with a scrotum that opens almost like a labia or have a vagina, but with no vaginal opening. Even if an intersex person’s internal and external anatomy may be distinctly male or female, they might have mosaic genes, where some of their cells are XX while others are XY.
A quick sidenote: transgender and intersex are not the same thing! Transgender people are those individuals who often relate to feelings of being born in the wrong body, and therefore, leads them to identify with a gender different than the one assigned to them by birth. Intersex people, by contrast, are born “inter-sex” or between the sexes.
Even though many intersex people are aware they are intersex at birth, some who are intersex do not find out until they have sex or try to conceive. In this article, I will be focusing on the problems that intersex people face when they are diagnosed as intersex at or around birth.
Doctors all diagnose intersex on different criteria- some will diagnose purely off of differing internal and external sex organs, others of abnormal sexual anatomy, and still some will diagnose off of mixed hormones. For those that are diagnosed off of hormone differences, they may still have ambiguous genitalia, but due to having only female or male hormones, are not considered intersex.
Once a child is diagnosed as intersex, doctors will often push parents to seek hormone treatments or cosmetic surgeries to make a child more clearly male or female. This is where trouble usually starts.
Treatments to make a child more-specifically male or female include a variety of genital modifications, hormone therapy, and gene therapy. Without having to describe these procedures in blatant detail, a whole set of problems can arise when interesex people have medical procedures to be “gender-normalized”. For many gender-normalization procedures, risks include scaring, loss or diminishment of orgasms, tissue death, discomfort or pain when aroused or during intercourse, loss of sensation, fistulas, distortion in genital shape or appearance, infection, incontinence, the list goes on. The scary part is that the likelihood of these risks actually happening are extremely high, and many gender-normalized intersex people suffer one or more of these conditions post-surgery.
But the scariest part is that intersex children do not consent to any of these procedures. Most gender-normalizing surgeries and treatments are performed in early childhood, leaving the decision of what the baby’s gender will be up to the parents. Pressured by doctors and possibly their own personal biases, parents choose to normalize their child in hopes that this will make their child’s social, romantic, and sexual life better. After a child has been ‘normalized’, medical staff will encourage parents to raise their child as their medically-chosen gender and never tell their child that they were intersex in the first place.
Though I would love to say that intersex children are easily normalized and face no negative effects, I would be lying. Children whose parents have chosen their gender as male might actually express more female attributes once they complete puberty and vice versa. This can often leaves an intersex person feeling confused, and can even lead to depression and anxiety about their gender identity. In some cases, intersex persons find out they’re ntersex in emergency situations. Especially for intersex women, bleeding or unnecessary pain when they become sexually active are their first indications that they might be intersex. Worse than all these tramatic side effects, is that hospitals will sometimes keep intersex persons medical records secret from them, even when the intersex person is above the age of 18. Supposedly, this is to eliminate any confusion or emotional stress an intersex person may have when they find out they’re intersex, but I call BS.
So, how do you fit into this equation? I’m assuming many readers plan on or already have children and even those who aren’t going to have children, you have relatives or friends who will. If you find out that your child or another’s is intersex, do not choose gender-normalizing surgeries or treatments until the child is competent enough to decide for themselves. Then, complete a gender-assignment. Gender-assignment is essentially just writing an M or an F on a child’s birth certificate. It’s purely a legal process. You aren’t deciding anything about that child’s identity, just ensuring they will have a complete birth certificate in the end. After the child has consented to a specific gender identity, raise or support that child with love, like you would literally any other child. Some families or friends of intersex children may opt to talk to other intersex people about how to properly raise their intersex child or to have an intersex mentor for the intersex child. The options are limitless for intersex children, and you would like to know more about intersex people and how to help, visit http://www.isna.org/faq/what_is_intersex.