Who are intersex people
Intersex Intersex: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia — this is a condition in which a person's sexual characteristics do not fit standard notions of female or male. Previously, intersex people were called hermaphrodites, but today this definition is considered outdated.
This phenomenon is quite common. According to approximate estimates How common is intersex? , one in a hundred children is born intersex.
Most likely, you have communicated What Does Intersex Look Like at Birth? What to Know with an intersex person at least once in your life. But neither you nor even he himself may have been aware of his condition.
This is because externally intersex people are indistinguishable from standard men and women.
How intersexness manifests
Sometimes intersexness can be recognized by the structure of the external genitalia. Here are a few common variations What Does Intersex Look Like at Birth? What to Know :
- a large elongated clitoris resembling a penis;
- a very small penis;
- absence of vaginal opening;
- a penis without a urethral opening at the tip (the urinary canal opening being under the penis, in the perineum area);
- adhesions of the labia resembling a scrotum;
- an open scrotum resembling labia.
However, the genital organs of an intersex person can also be completely normal. In such cases, the unusual traits lie within. For example, a completely outwardly standard man may have a uterus and ovaries. Or, a woman whose external genitalia look absolutely normal may lack a uterus in the pelvis, but have a prostate and seminal vesicles.
There are even more confusing cases. For example, manifestations of so-called mosaic genetics What is intersex? , where some body cells have a female chromosomal set (XX) and some a male (XY). Or even more interesting: a person may have only one sex chromosome (such cells are denoted as XO) or three instead of the standard two (say, XXY or XYY).
Such surprises are often diagnosed only in adulthood when a person experiences problems with conceiving children and consults specialists to find out the reason. Sometimes intersexness manifests during puberty: for example, a boy suddenly begins to grow breasts, while a girl’s voice deepens and she increasingly resembles a young man in appearance.
However, all these manifestations are by no means obligatory. Some people live and die with intersex anatomy that no one (including themselves) will ever know about.
Why intersexness is normal
Because the division of people strictly into men and women is merely an artificially constructed social stereotype. Experts from the Intersex Society of North America explain this by drawing an analogy What is intersex? between the sex spectrum and the color spectrum.
We all know that there are waves of different lengths in nature. They are converted into colors that we perceive as red, yellow, orange, blue, green, and others. All colors are essentially the same, equal. But sometimes, due to certain needs, we separate shades into two categories. For example, when selecting paints for interiors, we begin to differentiate colors into “warm” and “cool.” Or here is a social example (hello, Black Lives Matter): we differentiate people into “black” and “white,” although the color of their skin can actually be pink, beige, almond, chocolate.
The same applies to the perception of gender. In the gender sense, we are all born different: some have large penises, some small, some have voluminous breasts and noticeable clitorises, while others may have neither visible. There are a million variations. But at some point, humanity needed to simplify the entire sexual diversity of people into two categories: men and women.
Only recently has science begun to recognize that this spectrum is much broader than M and F. Intersex people are a completely normal intermediate part of the spectrum.
Where intersex people come from
Intersexness is an innate quality. Some people are born as standard girls, some as boys, and some receive an intermediate set of chromosomes and an unusual combination of external and internal sexual characteristics.
The reasons for intersexness are often impossible to determine. They are too complex and include a vast number of factors Intersex: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia that influence the formation of the future person.
Intersexness can be established at the moment of conception due to the characteristics of the egg or sperm. It can develop due to a deficiency of certain enzymes or a congenital reduced sensitivity of the fetus to certain hormones. Sometimes the cause is a malfunction during the formation of internal organs — for example, adrenal glands that synthesize various hormones.
One way or another, it is impossible to prevent intersexness. It is an individual innate characteristic, like hair color, left-handedness, or penis length.
Can intersexness be cured
Once again, let’s repeat: intersexness is a variant of the norm, not a disease. Therefore, there is no therapy for such conditions What Does Intersex Look Like at Birth? What to Know .
Only health problems that may arise from intersexness can be treated. For example, if there is a uterus but no uterine opening, during adolescence, a person may face painful menstruation and accumulation of blood inside the body. In this case, surgery will be needed to open the opening. But this will not be “treatment of the intersex individual.” It will be a solution to the problem of a closed uterus.
However, since social stereotypes are still strong, doctors, upon discovering signs of intersexness in a newborn, often suggest that parents “choose a gender.” And recommend performing surgery on the infant so that their genitalia look more male or more female.
But this again is not treatment. Such a choice can lead to serious problems when the child grows up. For example, parents may face questions like:
- What if, when they become adults, the child realizes that an inappropriate gender was chosen for them in infancy? And because of this mistake, they, feeling like a girl, have to live in a male body, or vice versa.
- What if we remove a micropenis, but during puberty, the "girl's" body starts producing a large amount of male sex hormones?
- Do we have the right to change the child’s physiology at all without medical indications — just to satisfy our notions of what is “correct”?
These are complex questions. And society still does not have clear answers to them. They are just being sought. Thus, in some states in the USA, it is already allowed What Does Intersex Look Like at Birth? What to Know to use X instead of the familiar M (male) or F (female) in the "Gender" field on identification documents. Passports indicating a third gender or gender-neutral ones are issued in Germany Germany adopts intersex identity into law , the Netherlands Netherlands issues gender neutral passport for first time in its history , Canada Canada introduces ‘X’ as a third gender category on passports .
The world is gradually moving from denying intersexness to recognizing: “This is normal.” But how long this transformation will take is hard to say.
