The Woman Inside, Lauren's Journey

A major part of my journey has been the discovery last year, that I am an intersex person. It explained a lot about how I have always felt my entire life. Now, knowing that I am the woman I always felt I was from early childhood, I find that there is still much to discover about being an intersex person. I share the following as it really does a thorough explanation of the history of the term ‘Intersex’, what being intersex is and the fight just to be the people we are in a world that ‘seemingly’, despite what people think, doesn’t truly appreciate things that are different.

From its introduction as a medical term, to its rebranding in the 1990’s, the word intersex has been reclaimed by activists, and it’s a word that challenges how doctors treat intersex bodies. So how much do you really know about the history of the word intersex?

Intersex is an umbrella term that refers to people who carry variations in their reproductive and sexual anatomy that differ from what is traditionally male or female. An intersex person can appear to have have one kind of genitalia on the outside and another internally. They might have some xx chromosomes and some XY chromosomes. They can have ambiguous genitalia and not know at birth that they’re intersex, or find out later on. The bottom line, intersex is a word with a broad meaning, and we’ve only been using it for the last 100 years. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word intersex has been around since the late 1700’s. Before the 20th century the term was rare and referred to relations between the sexes. It was only in 1917 that a German geneticist named Richard Goldschmidt used the term in a way that we understand it today. In his research Goldschmidt used the term to describe moths with atypical sex characteristics and it extended to humans who at the time would have been called hermaphrodites. The term hermaphrodites was used in18th and 19th century medical literature to describe individuals who were intersex. Now considered a derogatory slur, the term evoked a mythical creature and the pursuit of a body with both male and female reproductive anatomy. Staying in the 19th century for a moment, we can get a sense of the discrimination that intersex people have faced throughout history.

In the 1960’s a French newspaper reported on the reclassification of Herculean Barban, and intersex woman who was forced to live as a man and commited suicide when she was just 30 years old. Barban was painted as a monster by the press.

Back to the 20th century, after the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt used the term in his paper, intersex and hermaphrodite were used interchangeably in articles in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s. The 1950’s marked a turning point for the word intersex and the ways intersex was pathologized by both doctors and the public. Dr. John Money, a psychologist, began writing in the 50’s that intersex people were psychologically healthy but would turn out even better if babies were made to look like the gender they were raised as. Money and his team at Johns Hopkins believed that gender identity was a matter of nurture and not nature, and that changing a child’s body surgically and supplementing it with hormones would make them a boy or a girl. His theory was that babies are malleable before they were 18 months old. In a study Money claimed that a boy was able to live successfully after his penis was burned in a circumcision accident. The baby was castrated and had a surgery to appear female. It didn’t work, 30 years later Money’s subject was living as a man and the baby wasn’t even intersex.

Money’s research and the hundreds of articles he wrote changed the direction of how intersex people were treated medically. Until the 50’s most surgeries to alter intersex traits were done on adults who chose to undergo such procedures, or whose doctors pressured them to do it. There was pressure to normalize bodies to avoid homosexuality, because the thinking was that a person didn’t know who to avoid having sex with if they didn’t know their own sex.

The hopkins team gave way to a new protocol, where intersex children were given so-called corrective surgeries and hormone treatments, often without their knowledge and consent, and even if the surgeries were not medically necessary. For the next three decades the word intersex proliferated along with such surgeries until intersex people came together to reclaim the terminology. In the late 1980’s the intersex movement began to percolate. Intersex people who had been subject to secrecy about their medical records and made to feel ashamed of their bodies, began organizing groups and circles.

In 1993 an activist, then named Cheryl Chase, wrote a letter to ‘The Sciences’, a magazine, in response to a paper about sex and gender. In it Chase announced the founding of The Intersex Society of North America.

“Surgical and hormonal treatment allows parents and doctors to imagine that they have eliminated the child’s intersexuality. Unfortunately the surgery is immensely destructive to the sexual sensation and sense of bodily integrity.” The letter read.

In 1996 intersex activism became more noticeable, the first ever intersex demonstration was held on October 26th, later becoming Intersex Awareness Day. When ISNA activists protested a conference held by the American Academy of Pediatrics in Boston, activists used the slogan ‘Hermaphrodites With Attitude” on signs shirts and newsletters as a way to reclaim the term hermaphrodite. This shifted to intersex as they sought to work with doctors to stop non-consensual surgeries.

In the 2000’s intersex entered pop culture to mixed results in 2002. Jeffrey Eugenities published his best selling book ‘Middlesex’. Eugenities wrote the book after reading Herculine Barban’s posthumously published memoir. Middlesex told the fictional story of an intersex young man, and has been criticized for fetishising the shame and suffering intersex people experience. After selecting Middlesex for her book club club, Oprah featured intersex people on her show in 2007 to talk about their experiences, not without a salacious spin of course. “All new! Are you male or female? Simple question right for today’s guest, the answer is much more complicated, they’ll tell you why and the preferred description is intersex.” A 2006 episode of ‘House” further hit on bad tropes when a girl in the fictional hospital is found to have internal testes, and was really a boy. The episode played into the idea that there is a true marker of sex, an idea that has historically characterized how doctors approach intersex people, while the term intersex gained more traction and challenged the idea that there was anything to fix with intersex bodies. New terminology arrived in 2005. DSD, or disorders of sex development, was introduced in medical settings as another way to describing intersex. DSD, a controversial term, frames being intersex as a disorder in need of treatment rather than a biological variation. In fact, activists fear that if parents of intersex kids are told their child has a disorder of sex development, they won't be able to make an informed choice about surgery or even know it means intersex.

Even in the media it’s only recently that intersex hasn’t been treated as a medical diagnosis. In 2014 the organization Interact worked with MTV to develop the first character where being intersex was an identity. And in August 2018 California passed a resolution acknowledging that non-consensual intersex medical interventions are an abuse of Human Rights, the first piece of legislation of its kind, in the United States, a major win for the intersex community.

Today intersex is still being reclaimed by people as a way of challenging how doctors have treated their bodies. Intersex people continue fighting non-consensual surgeries and are seeking legislation to protect kids from these procedures. Intersex is entering a new terrain as a human rights issue to allow people to make choices about their own bodies. Since the 90s intersex has found its power, and it’s not slowing down!

Until next time,

Lauren