So What's Intersex Mean?

In the last post, I mentioned the term “intersex.” While this term is thrown around a lot, it’s largely misunderstood. The intersex community is sometimes overlooked even by the bigger transgender community to which it theoretically belongs. Is it because an intersex (or “intersexed”, I’ve heard both terms used as adjectives) person was simply “born that way,” while many transfolk have to rearrange everything in their lives in order to live openly? Not EVERYONE in the trans community overlooks the “I” in GLBTI, of course, but it’s a phenomenon worth noticing.

Being intersex technically has nothing to do with gender identity; it is a term that applies purely to a person’s physical, biological body. There are several ways to be classified as intersex, which is really more of an umbrella term than anything else—just like “transgender” is. Sometimes, people are considered intersex because they have a different chromosome set than males (XY) and females (XX). Most common is Klinefelter’s Syndrome, which occurs when a ‘male’ has an extra X chromosome. It’s more common than you’d think; you can’t trust everything you read on Wikipedia, but the article suggests one out of 500 males is born with an extra sex chromosome.

Other times, a person is declared intersex because ze has ambiguous genitalia or reproductive organs. Although it’s not very carefully tracked, it’s estimated that one out of every two thousand children are born with some physical traits that are male while other traits are female. Doctors sometimes choose to “fix” this ambiguousness at birth with surgery in the hopes that the baby will be able to grow up “normal.” Of course, if this actually worked, we wouldn’t know about it! There are several published cases—and certainly many more private ones—in which a child was born intersex, operated on, and carefully raised as a gender-conforming boy or girl. Often, this child grows up to come out as transgender or genderqueer later in life. You can read about several of these cases here, courtesy of Cosmos Magazine.

Not all intersex people grow up to be gender-variant. Does everyone remember Caster Semenya from the Olympics last year? Semenya’s sex was called into question based on hir impressive performance; multiple tests revealed that Semenya did indeed have an intersex condition.

For more information, check out this article by Alice Dreger that appeared on Fathermag.com. It explains some things better than I could!