#the support and allyship needs to be much much better
I’m finding that one of the surreal parts of the intersex experience in the 2020s is how in the current moral panic about trans people there’s this discussion about biologial sex that seems to entirely forget that intersex people exist.
Like on one hand I am super relieved to not be facing the hypervisibility that trans people are facing. Props to my trans bretheren who are out there, existing, despite it all.
And on the other hand when the Discourse starts talking about biological sex as though intersex people don’t exist… it hurts?
Writing this after I just watched Yet Another Thoughtful, Overly-Patient Youtube Video Essay about why terfs are wrong about “biological sex”… that also failed to acknowledge the intersex elephant in the corner. And it just keeps happenening and I don’t get it?
I don’t know why trans people don’t engage with the intersex community. We share so many issues and can offer complimentary perspectives. This is a legit ask if anybody has real insights!
But as to why it hurts… I think one of the things that suck about being intersex is the isolation and invisibility of being intersex while, ironically, it not actually being that rare. We’re not a well-mobilized community. We’re too often off feeling our individual traumas are individual, rather than social.
Doctors and other gatekeepers have long been working to uphold a cisheteronormative standard and keeping intersex invisible is part of the hegemony. A good fraction of posts on intersex forums basically boil down to “Am I one of you? Does this mean I’m not alone?” but are instead framed as “I think/have these variations/diagnosis, am I intersex enough to be here?”
And so when there’s an actual discussion happening about biological sex and how it’s actually super complicated, it hurts to get excluded, because it feels like such a lost opportunity to let intersex people out there know that we exist, that we’re here, that they don’t have to be alone, that if we got together we could organize for the protections we deserve.
Probably/definitely selfish of me to be asking this of trans activists but definitely wondering how to improve the narrative to foster more solidarity.
