October 26th is Intersex Awareness Day!

I am writing this on Intersex Awareness Day, October 26th, 2019. Intersex people are individuals born with some combination of both masculinized and feminized genitalia, chromosomes, gonads, etc. Historically, Western doctors have used intersex bodies as experiments on how to change someone's sex and gender to fit into the proscribed two gender system. This has meant that many intersex individuals underwent several surgeries as babies and very young children in order to "correct" their "abnormal" bodies. The surgeries done on little intersex babies are often unnecessary and can severely harm the person's genitalia and ability to orgasm. What's worse, doctors usually tell parents to keep the facts of these individuals bodies a secret from them, and discovery of their body and the surgeries done on them when these people get older can lead to severe mental health issues. Just imagine what it would be like finding out your parents had lied to you, tried to "fix" your body, and in the process removed your ability to enjoy sex. Thus, these surgeries and the secrecy surrounding their status as intersex has left many intersex individuals unhappy with their gender, their sexual functioning, and their body. Click here to read more about intersex people, their political activism, and how to be a good ally.

Queer theorists often point to the intersex body as evidence for the idea that sex is almost as much of a social construction as gender. While there are certainly differences in the genitalia of men and women, the presence of individuals that have both male and female sex markers indicate that sex is not a strict binary. We can never escape our conceptions of gender, so every assumption or "discovery" we make about sex is already filtered through our ingrained beliefs about gender. Thus, intersex people can help us break down our assumptions about the supposedly "natural" progression of sex > gender (> sexuality).