[Koomah is in a garden with a snail (Garden snails can mate with any other adult of their species.)]
All bodies are valid and beautiful and unique. A person who is intersex is usually born that way due to natural genetic diversity. An intersex person can have any gender or sexual identity, just like a dyadic person. There are lots of things a doctor might look at to label someone intersex, and many folks are intersex without even knowing it. Let’s learn more.
Genetic Conditions like Klinefelter’s Syndrome and Turner Syndrome
Your genes determine all kinds of things like: your eye color, if you have freckles, and your sex. These genes travel on molecules called chromosomes. You might have the famous XX or XY chromosomes (these are often dyadic sexes). Alternatively you could have XXYY, XXY, XO, or XXX chromosomes, or multiple kinds at once (those are considered intersex). Bodies are complex and beautiful. The only way to tell your chromosomes is with a blood test, so most of the time we won’t know what we have.
Hormonal Conditions like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome and Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia
All people have communication chemicals like estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone in different levels in their blood, and every body processes them a little differently.10 That means your hormones are personal to you! Because they affect secondary sex characteristics, individuals with hormone levels out of the expected ranges or whose bodies react in unique ways to their hormones can be considered intersex.
(in Koomah’s speech bubble) “Hi, my name is Koomah! I am an artist and an educator. I want to tell you that Intersex people are just normal people! We aren’t deformed and are not defective. These bodies aren’t shameful. These bodies deserve the same respect as anyone else’s. They’re not scary, they’re just different, and that’s okay.”
F.Y.I… (in snail thought bubble) True hermaphrodites are quite rare outside of animals and plants like me. Today we use the more appropriate and honoring term “intersex” for our human friends.
This is a very rough draft I’m working on, posting here for community feedback. Please let me know what you think, where I am being problematic and how it could be better! If you prefer to respond anonymously or join the team to be a more active collaborator, you can write me at [email protected]
Feel free to use it as-is if you’d like to, though. It’s creative commons licensed so the only limitations are to share your source and don’t sell it.
hellooooooo i have had this account for three years and havent posted for over two so i am making a comeback (and u may not see me for another two years lol lets see how this goes). here are some rough biology notes i did for a test last week! they aren’t complete, as you can see but they are the best of what i’ve done in a long long time. look below for list of stationery i used!
i’ve been struggling a lot more than usual with my mental health recently - depression and anxiety/ocd wise - and i’m struggling so much to keep going but i’m just about plodding on i guess. it was around this time last year that i almost got forced into hospital and my eating disorder was at its worst. and i feel like i have not got anywhere over the past year because i’ve almost ended up in hospital twice in the past month and feel like i’m getting worse every day but at the same time i just can’t tell because i’m so phased out??? i feel like this ended up as some kind of rant lol sorry
supplies in this picture:
a4 rhodia dotted notepad
zebra fude brush pen medium
pentel fude touch brush sign pen
muji polycarbonate ballpoint pen 0.7mm
muji acrylic mechanical pencil 0.5mm
(ps i’m trying to get up and running again so i would appreciate reblogs etc!!!)
hellooooooo i have had this account for three years and havent posted for over two so i am making a comeback (and u may not see me for another two years lol lets see how this goes). here are some rough biology notes i did for a test last week! they aren’t complete, as you can see but they are the best of what i’ve done in a long long time. look below for list of stationery i used!
i’ve been struggling a lot more than usual with my mental health recently - depression and anxiety/ocd wise - and i’m struggling so much to keep going but i’m just about plodding on i guess. it was around this time last year that i almost got forced into hospital and my eating disorder was at its worst. and i feel like i have not got anywhere over the past year because i’ve almost ended up in hospital twice in the past month and feel like i’m getting worse every day but at the same time i just can’t tell because i’m so phased out??? i feel like this ended up as some kind of rant lol sorry
supplies in this picture:
a4 rhodia dotted notepad
zebra fude brush pen medium
pentel fude touch brush sign pen
muji polycarbonate ballpoint pen 0.7mm
muji acrylic mechanical pencil 0.5mm
(ps i’m trying to get up and running again so i would appreciate reblogs etc!!!)
aside from being cissexist the whole XX = female and XY = male thing is Straight-Up Wrong
AFAB people can have XO,XXX,XXXXandXY chromosomes while AMAB people have have XXYY,XYY, and XX chromosomes and since the majority of the population never has their karyotype examined, they’ll never know that they have one of these chromosomal quirks unless that specific combination has associated symptoms, and not all of them do. you could literally have one of the aforementioned combinations without even knowing it and meanwhile you’re insisting that all AFAB people are XX and that anyone else who has this must also be female
we could also talk about how hormonal patterns for XX persons can naturally and biologically mirror that of a typical XY person, or vis versa, which gives rise to things like androgen insensitivity disorder. here u have it, folks, an whole group of intersex people who have XY chromosomes and testicles and vulva and vagina, all grown naturally, all at the same time.
the number of people who are intersex mirror the number of people who are born with red hair, but no one goes around trying to say that red isn’t a natural hair colour just because the phenotype doesn’t manifest in the majority of the population.
seriously consider the bold if you are aggressively upholding the ridiculously flawed theory that is the sex and gender binary.
Big genetics nerd here, with a biology degree for whatever that’s worth. I’ve been saying this for well over a decade (i.e. it’s not a “tumblr thing” lol). The whole “XX = woman, woman = XX” thing, ditto for XY and men, works okay as a rough guideline but it’s simply not a universal “rule”.Sotelling trans people “you’ll always ‘really’ be [assigned gender], because chromosomes” is scientifically ignorant nonsense for three reasons:
Sex differentiation in humans isn’t really controlled by chromosomes. In species where it is, things like bilateral gynandromorphism can occur. That’s not possible in humans, though, because our development is controlled by hormones. Our chromosomes play only a very small role.
Because people don’t know other people’s karyotypes (or even their own, most of the time), they’re just pre-selecting the conclusion they want, then “proving” it with “evidence” they don’t actually have.
Because other conditions can also produce XX men and XY women, the idea that a trans person’s karyotype determines what they “really” are is a blatant double-standard. One which exists solely to “prove” the pre-determined conclusion that cis people’s genders are valid, and trans peoples’ aren’t.
Consequently, there are only two scientifically informed, logically consistent options:
Accept that nature is more complex than one learned in 5th-grade science class, and chromosomes can’t tell someone’s “real” gender. DNA is a truly wondrous molecule, not some Magical Essence of Gender.
OR, double down and demand to see everyone’s karyotype. Refuse to respect anyone’s gender if the results aren’t what one expected. Insist that all cis people with “mismatched” karyotypes must transition against their will, and be transphobic toward them until they do.
In other words, transphobes claim to be authorities on X and Y chromosomes, yet have no clue what they’re talking about.
Cisnormative society has a bizarre obsession with finding the One True Indicator of Biological Sex. Chromosomes are just the latest answer. In the past it’s been ovarian/testicular tissue, or penis/clitoris size. What will it be fifty years from now? But whichever One True Indicator is the current fad, there’s always at least one intersex condition which contradicts it, thus exposing how ridiculous and arbitrary these indicators really are.
Not that transphobes let facts stop them, of course. If someone doesn’t fit either One True Sex, they just don’t count! (I’ve literally heard this.) Cis people with reproductive, endocrine, or urogenital disorders still “count,” of course. An XY man with a small, hypospadic penis? An XX woman born without a uterus? Eh, just a man and a woman with minor quirks. A non-XX woman or non-XY man? They ~don’t count~, because ~disorder~. What an odd coincidence that this magical gender-invalidating power of “disorder” only applies to people who threaten the all-important binary. Circular logic at its finest: the binary is real because anyone who disproves it doesn’t count, and they don’t count because if they did, they’d disprove the binary!
That isn’t science. It’s not nature, or reason. It’s bigotry, plain and simple.
If you’ve gone to the Google homepage at some point today, you’ll have noticed the above doodle of Nettie Stevens.
Today (July 7, 2016) marks the 155th birthday of Nettie Stevens, a woman who made major contributions in the discovery of the X and Y chromosomes. Though the work is frequently attributed to her male colleagues Thomas Hunt Morgan and Edmund Beecher Wilson, many argue that more credit should be given to this pioneering female biologist.
Born in Vermont in 1861, Nettie Stevens worked as a teacher of physiology and zoology before saving enough money to enroll at Stanford at age 35. Stevens then completed her PhD work at Bryn Mawr, where she became a student of T. H. Morgan and E. B. Wilson. By the time she had finished her PhD, she had already published nine papers, and was soon after given an award of $1,000. With this grant, Stevens began her work on chromosomes.
In the 1890s, Stevens began studying mealworm beetles, and noticed that the females had 20 chromosomes of the same size, whereas males had 19 chromosomes of the same size and one smaller one. Stevens correctly theorized that the size of this final chromosome determines the sex of an organism. While Wilson came to similar results at the time, it is argued that Stevens made original contributions that should not be overlooked. Through careful dating of their published work and correspondence, it is clear that many of the important ideas of sex inheritance should be attributed to Stevens.
Though Wilson got the credit for so much of her research, before her death, she had the honor of being listed among 1,000 leading American “men of science”.
Read more about Nettie at Genes to Genomes, read about the undervaluing of her contributions atVox, or learn some fun facts about her at The Independent.
I haven’t watched the film documentary for ‘What is a Woman’ because I don’t need to(note; I may watch the film since I do love Matt lol) since I already know like rest of the healthy minded females(note; including males) out there, know what we are, but after curiously going through the tag on here; it didn’t surprise me that a bunch of tumblr users who are leftist unhealthy minded folks got upset and started to either insult the film, Matt and everyone who thinks normally like Matt. Instead of making a critique to try to make your opinion stand on its own two feet - no just raw insults by throwing a fit online about it existing - like that one film behind a membership will murder people irl lol utterly ridiculous, the rest tried to construct their own opinions on the movie but I 100% disagree with them because it’s pure madness of how you all want to change the definition of what a female is to your own likings instead of going based off the real definition a simple one. Now, the opinions we’re fine, glad other folks decided to do that, instead of the other ones that mixed it in and just bash in insults to wanting to kill people’s lives over this..
Now for the sake of this topic let’s give out the…definition of what a female is to a male:
A woman has XX chromosomes while the male has X and Y that is important because it defines what a humans sex is, biologically everything about us as a female or a male :D pretty uncomfortable that i needed to lay out common sense, but I am making a post discussing about a documentary that shouldn’t exist to begin with, however, since we’re living in a disaster satanic age of madness that is gonna get worse as the latter continues on as the children of the devil continue to rage out like wild creatures; not even a compliment if you want to try to twist is as something edgy cool- its what it is that you are striving to become even more.
It doesn’t sadly, sadly, surprise me that *this* needs to be restated after so many years of people knowing what a woman is and that you can never transition to be a man or woman it is biologically, scientifically (note; pointing at the none athiest scientist but then again even they admit it too so eh) impossible for a male to become female you cannot do it. If you have a problem with what i just stated then simply block me.
Nonetheless if I needed to be rough, blunt and serious about it, fair warning grossume explanation away;
a woman has a vagina, and boobs which get hurt like heck when you slap those things against a wall lmao or by accident get hurt xD..I had to okay. A man gas a penis, which are the most sensitive area ever just like a woman’s boobs if a man gets his penis slapped it will hurt like heck - see how it is the same pain? Instead of it being downstairs for us females that’s for the men while us females have to suffer the top part; either or same equal pains different ways just like a man has to ahem in the words of every feminist out there man spread us females has to do it as well since males have to spread their legs for comfort on their penis, females have to wear bras to protect those sweater puppies from getting hit towards anything. Unless you got iron boobs then okay lol.
I am not gonna stop, to continue on; the reason us females have a vagina is to pee, have our bloody mascar awful stinking mood swings that we cannot control cause it’s just how it is unless you want to fabricate something that it’s possible - yeah factually speaking you cannot control your emotions while on your period ladies because it is part of the harmon going wild while you are having the bloody rivers of doom coming in. We also get this disgusting yellow icky sticky stuff forgot what it was called but it’s the reason we wear pads unless you have 0 problem changing your underwear 24/7 then be my guest, now, I do know that some females get that contrast a bit less then others I feel awful for the ones that need like boxes of panty liners like that ugh, what also makes it wonderful - we can give birth because we got vaginas that can have the seeds that men release from their private area, which then gets us pregnant to allow new lives that isn’t your body anymore rather a new life’s body :“). That is precious no matter what, so get reckt if you find that offensive.
So now that i went through the grossume adult short explanation of what females have that males can never obtain at all and what male have that they can never obtain from trying to be a transvestite, takijg hormone pills to even giving it your own children to yourself doing it as a teenager to child, adult on tumblr, now we, understand right? Welp there goes the post, pretty sure I am now I am terf, transphobe, etc whatever but I don’t mind it :D for those who enjoyed this post thank you ♡.
I advise you all to please seek God, if you find this to be an awfully wrong, grotesque, etc post..because that toxic positive, alarming mindset is just gonna lead you to a rabbit hole of complete destruction of pure misery instead of being happy…
….God bless you all, remember that you aren’t alone on this mad place or world, they’re people out there that believe normal things like you do.
