The Trump administration’s attacks against trans people – arguing that the observation of genitalia and/or chromosomes will determine their legal gender for life – not only threaten the well being of those who are transgender, but also intersex people.
“The majority of intersex people in the U.S. today do not gender transition. But all of us have been fighting for social acceptance, for an end to infant genital surgeries that rob us of the capacity for sexual sensation, and against the stigmatizing and concealment of physical sex variance. Our battle as intersex people has been for recognition of the sex spectrum, and for respecting our physical sex diversity.
Think what will happen to us now. Consider, for example, those of us who have complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, born with female-typical genitalia but XY chromosomes. Virtually all people with XY, CAIS are assigned female at birth and are raised as girls–but suddenly, they’d be declared men. This would disrupt not only their lives, but those of their parents, their spouses, their neighbors, and friends. Or consider all the children born with intermediate genitalia. Doctors have forced surgeries onto so many, basing their decision on factors like gonads, or surgical convenience. Suddenly, many intersex people would find that the surgeries forced on them took away the parts of their bodies that the new HHS policy declares to be the ones that should have been kept under the new chromosomal standard. This will compound their trauma–and perhaps lead to a further round of unwanted surgical interventions.
For those of us intersex people whose chromosomes are XX or XY, this new policy would counter all of our efforts to push back against forcing sex reassignment surgeries onto us, mutilating our genitals. Instead, the policy would declare that these are not sex reassignment surgeries at all, because our penises are “false penises,” our vaginae “fake.” And for those of us who have one of the many other sex genotypes this policy fails to recognize–XXY, XYY, Xo, XX/XY, etc.–ironically, even if our bodies have appeared typical enough that we’ve escaped surgical mutilation or social stigma, suddenly, we become the “true intersex,” our lived genders falsified, leading to confusion, discrimination and shame.”
Now, more than ever, intersex and transgender people need to stand together and fight these evil policies, which are all clearly aimed at shoehorning all people into the Conservative Right’s narrow gender binary.
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