#alice dreger

[dead-desires]

Riva Lehrer, on Golem Girl / Alice Dromurat Dreger, on One of Us

[trans-axolotl]

this is a shortened works cited from my thesis, pulling out the sources about American intersex history and activism from the past 30 years. i have pdfs for most of the sources there, if there's something that isn't linked send me a message and i can try to find it!

just thought i'd try to put a lot of intersex history sources in one place.

Works Cited: 

Amato, Viola. “The Intersex Movement of the 1990s: Speaking Out Against Medical and Narrative Violence.” In Intersex Narratives: Shifts in the Representation of Intersex Lives in North American Literature and Popular Culture, 55–102. Transcript Verlag, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1xxrsz.6.

Bauer, Markus, Daniela Truffer and Daniela Crocetti. “Intersex Human Rights.” The International Journal of Human Rights. 24, no.6. (2020):724-749.https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2019.1671354 

Brown, Lydia X.Z., Erickson, Loree, da Silva Gorman, Rachel, Lewis, Talila A., McLeod, Lateef, and Mingus, Mia.  “Radical Disability Politics.” In Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics, edited by A.J. Withers and Liat Ben-Moshe, 178-193. Routledge, 2019. 

Cameron, David. “Hermaphrodites With Attitude.” Newsletter. 1994. https://isna.org/library/hwa/ 

Carpenter, Morgan. “Fixing bodies and shaping narratives: Epistemic injustice and the responses of medicine and bioethics to intersex human rights demands.” Clinical Ethics. 2024;19, no. 1. (2024) :3-17. doi:10.1177/14777509231180412

Chase, Cheryl. “Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism.” Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 4, no.2, (1998): 189-211. 

---, Hermaphrodites Speak! 1997; Rohnert Park: Intersex Society of North America. Video tape. 

Cohen, Julie, dir. Every Body. 2023; United States: Focus Features, DVD.

Denny, Dallas.  "Chrysalis Quarterly, Vol. 2 No. 5 (Fall, 1997 / Winter, 1998)."  Periodical.  1998.  Digital Transgender Archive,  https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/7s75dc39s  (accessed April 08, 2024).

Davis, Georgiann. “Introduction: Normalizing Intersex: The Transformative Power of Stories.”  in Voices: Personal Stories from the Pages of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics: Normalizing Intersex, edited by James DuBois and Ana Iltis. 1-4. John Hopkins University Press, 2016. 

Dreger, Alice. “Rejecting the Tranquilizing Drug of Gradualism in Intersex Care.” Alice Dreger (blog). November 2015. Accessed April 9, 2024. https://alicedreger.com/dsd_human_rights/ 

Dreger, Alice and April Herndon. “Progress and Politics in the Intersex Rights Movement: Feminist Theory in Action.” Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 15, no. 2. (2009): 199-224.

Fausto-Sterling, Ane. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. 2000. 

“A Framework for Intersex Justice.” Intersex Justice Project. 2021. Accessed April 8, 2024. https://www.intersexjusticeproject.org/intersex-justice-framework.html 

"FTM Newsletter #37."  Periodical.  1997.  Digital Transgender Archive,  https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/kd17cs89j  (accessed April 08, 2024).

Hegarty, Peter, Marta Prandelli, Trove Lundberg, Lih-Mei Liao, Sarah Creighton, and Katrina Roen.”Drawing the Line Between Essential and Nonessential Interventions on Intersex Characteristics With European Health Care Professionals.” Review of General Psychology. 25, no 1. (2020): 101-114. 

Hermaphrodites With Attitude.  "Hey AAP! Get Your Scalpels Off Our Bodies! Flyer."  Ephemera.  1990.  Digital Transgender Archive,  https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/qj72p712h  (accessed April 08, 2024). 

“Hermaphrodites With Attitude,” Intersex Society of North America. 2006. Accessed April 8, 2024. https://isna.org/library/hwa/ 

“How To: Organize an #EndIntersexSurgery Protest in your hometown--a toolkit created by Intersex Justice Project (IJP.” Intersex Justice Project. 2019. Accessed April 8, 2024. https://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20191111232744/https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EgYy2jfSO04HF_FGv-8RXYEgWW422L-RB7oxMOaIiBc/edit 

Hughes, Ieuan, Christopher Houk, Syed Faisal Ahmed, Peter Lee, and LWPES1/ESPE2 Consensus Group. “Consensus Statement on Management of intersex disorders.” Disease in Childhood. 91, no.7. (2006): 554-563. doi: 10.1136/adc.2006.098319

“I Want to Be Like Nature Made Me: Medically Unnecessary Surgeries on Intersex Children in the US.” Human Rights Watch. InterACT. July 2017, accessed April 8, 2024. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/lgbtintersex0717_web_0.pdf 

“InterACT Statement on Intersex Terminology.” InterACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth. 2015. Accessed April 8, 2024. https://interactadvocates.org/interact-statement-on-intersex-terminology/#:~:text=interACT's%20use%20of%20terminology%20and,of%20the%20term%20%E2%80%9Cintersex%E2%80%9D. 

Lindhal, Hans. “Is PCOS an Intersex Condition? Here’s 5 Reasons Why Some Say Yes.” HansLindhal.Com (Blog). February 2023, Accessed April 7, 2024. https://hanslindahl.com/blog/is-pcos-an-intersex-condition 

---., “9 Young People on How They Found Out They Are Intersex.” Teen Vogue. October 2019. Accessed April 10, 2024. https://www.teenvogue.com/gallery/young-people-on-how-they-found-out-they-are-intersex 

“M.C v. Aaronson.” Southern Poverty Law Center. 2017. Accessed April 8, 2024. https://www.splcenter.org/seeking-justice/case-docket/mc-v-aaronson

Merrick, Ten. “From ‘Intersex’ to ‘DSD’: A Case of Epistemic Injustice.” Synthese 196, no. 11 (2019): 4429–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45220035.

Orr, Celeste. Cripping Intersex. University of British Columbia Press, 2022. 

Pagonis, Pidgeon. “#EndIntersexSurgery Protest At Lurie Children’s Hospital Recap + 5 Ways To Get Involved.” Intersex Justice Project. 2018. Accessed April 8, 2024. https://www.intersexjusticeproject.org/blog/endintersexsurgery-protest-at-lurie-childrens-hospital-recap 

Pagonis, Pidgeon and Sean Saifa Wall. “Open Letter to AIS-DSD Support Group.” EndIntersexSurgery. Intersex Justice Project. February 2018. Accessed April 8, 2024.  http://www.endintersexsurgery.org/ 

Redick, Alison. “What Happened at Hopkins: The Creation of the Intersex Management Protocols.  Cardozo Journal of  Law & Gender. 12 (2005): 289-296 

Reid, Graeme, and Minky Worden. “Caster Semenya Won Her Case, But Not the Right to Compete.” Human Rights Watch. July 2023. Accessed April 10, 2024. https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/07/18/caster-semenya-won-her-case-not-right-compete  

Reis, Elizabeth. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. John Hopkins Press, 2021.

---, “Did Bioethics Matter? A HIstory of Autonomy, Consent, and Intersex Genital Surgery. Medical Law review. 27, no.4, (2019):658-674. https://doi.org/10.1093/medlaw/fwz007 

Rios-Espinosa, Carlos, Koomah, Syrus Marcus Ware, and Sean Saifa Wall. “Liberating All Bodies: Disability Justice & Intersex Justice In Conversation.” Webinar at the Crip Camp Impact Team and Human Rights Watch Film Festival, United States, October 2020.  

Rubin, David, Michelle Wolff and Amanda Lock Swarr. “Creating Intersex Justice: Interview with Sean Saifa Wall and Pidgeon Pagonis of the Intersex Justice Project.”  Transgender Studies Quarterly. 9, no. 2. (2022): 187-195. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-9612823 

Sharman, Zena. “Intersex Justice and the Care We Deserve: ‘I Want People to Feel at Home in Their Bodies Again.’” Ms. Magazine. 2022. Accessed April 8, 2024. https://msmagazine.com/2022/02/03/intersex-justice-the-care-we-dream-of-queer-trans-healthcare/  

Sharpe, Sam. “No one-size-fits all: Myths and Misconceptions about PCOS.” InterACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth. Advocates for Informed Choice. October 2022. Accessed on April 7, 2024. https://interactadvocates.org/no-one-size-fits-all-myths-and-misconceptions-about-pcos/ 

Spurgas, Alyson. “(Un)Queering Identity: The Biosocial Production of Intersex/DSD.” in Critical Intersex edited by Morgan Holmes. 97-122. Ashgate Publishing, 2009. 

Tamar-Matis, Anne. “ Advocates for Informed Choice, Newsletter Fall 2007.” Newsletter. 2007. AIC Legal .https://aiclegal.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/fall-07-newsletter-final.pdf

---. “Advocates for Informed Choice: Newsletter Spring 2008.” Newsletter. 2008. AIC Legal.https://aiclegal.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/spring-08-final.pdf

---. “Advocates for Informed Choice: Newsletter Summer 2009.” Newsletter. 2009. AIC Legal.https://aiclegal.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/aic-2009-summer-newsletter-pdf.pdf

---. “Advocates for Informed Choice: Spring 2010 Newsletter.” Newsletter. 2010. AIC Legal.https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=f8291560ebb2dafc25097480f&id=5803ec8c71

---., “June 2011: Promoting the Civil Rights of Children Born With Variations of Sex Anatomy.” Newsletter. 2011. AIC Legal. https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=f8291560ebb2dafc25097480f&id=cec68ddac 

---.. “June 2012: Promoting the Civil Rights of Children Born With Variations of Sex Anatomy.” Newsletter. 2012. AIC Legal. https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=f8291560ebb2dafc25097480f&id=b4d4dd90cf

---. “ 2012 Annual Report.” Newsletter. 2012. Advocates for Informed Choice. https://interactadvocates.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/AIC-2012-Annual-Report.pdf 

---. “2013 Annual Report. “ Newsletter. 2012. Advocates for Informed Choice. https://interactadvocates.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2013-annual-report-FIN1.pdf  

“US: Anti-Trans Bills Also Harm Intersex Children.” Human Rights Watch. October 22. Accessed April 10, 2024. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/10/26/us-anti-trans-bills-also-harm-intersex-children 

Vecchietti, Valentino. “A Journey to the Intersex-Inclusive Pride Flag.” Global Inclusive Pride Flag. Intersex Equality Rights. 2021. Accessed April 7, 2024. https://www.globalinclusiveprideflag.com/ 

Wilchins, Riki Anne.  "In Your Face No. 5 (Spring 1998)."  Newsletter.  1998.  Digital Transgender Archive,  https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/vq27zn45k  (accessed April 08, 2024).

Withers, AJ. Disability Politics and Theory. Fernwood Publishing, 2012. 

Woo, Elaine. “David Reimer, 38; After Botched Surgery, He was Raised as a Girl in Gender Experiment.: Los Angeles Times. May 2004. Accessed April 8, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-may-13-me-reimer13-story.html 

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Colin Wright

Published: May 3, 2023

The transgender movement has left many intelligent Americans confused about sex. Asked to define the word “woman” during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings last year, Ketanji Brown Jackson demurred, saying “I’m not a biologist.” I am a biologist, and I’m here to help.

Are sex categories in humans empirically real, immutable and binary, or are they mere “social constructs”? The question has public-policy implications related to sex-based legal protections and medicine, including whether males should be allowed in female sports, prisons and other spaces that have historically been segregated by sex for reasons of fairness and safety.

Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union frequently claims that the binary concept of sex is a recent invention “exclusively for the purposes of excluding trans people from legal protections.” Scottish politician Maggie Chapman asserted in December that her rejection of the “binary and immutable” nature of sex was her motivation for pursuing “comprehensive gender recognition for nonbinary people in Scotland.” (“Nonbinary” people are those who “identify” as neither male nor female.)

When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.

Intersex people, whose genitalia appear ambiguous or mixed, don’t undermine the sex binary. Many gender ideologues, however, falsely claim the existence of intersex conditions renders the categories “male” and “female” arbitrary and meaningless. In “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex” (1998), the historian of science Alice Dreger writes: “Hermaphroditism causes a great deal of confusion, more than one might at first appreciate, because—as we will see again and again—the discovery of a ‘hermaphroditic’ body raises doubts not just about the particular body in question, but about all bodies. The questioned body forces us to ask what exactly it is—if anything—that makes the rest of us unquestionable.”

In reality, the existence of borderline cases no more raises questions about everyone else’s sex than the existence of dawn and dusk casts doubt on day and night. For the vast majority of people, their sex is obvious. And our society isn’t experiencing a sudden dramatic surge in people born with ambiguous genitalia. We are experiencing a surge in people who are unambiguously one sex claiming to “identify” as the opposite sex or as something other than male or female.

Gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as simply either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of “gender identity.” This entails that males wouldn’t be barred from female sports, women’s prisons or any other space previously segregated according to our supposedly antiquated notions of “biological sex,” so long as they “identify” as female.

But “intersex” and “transgender” mean entirely different things. Intersex people have rare developmental conditions that result in apparent sex ambiguity. Most transgender people aren’t sexually ambiguous at all but merely “identify” as something other than their biological sex.

Once you’re conscious of this distinction, you will begin to notice gender ideologues attempting to steer discussions away from whether men who identify as women should be allowed to compete in female sports toward prominent intersex athletes like South African runner Caster Semenya. Why? Because so long as they’ve got you on your heels making difficult judgment calls on a slew of complex intersex conditions, they’ve succeeded in drawing your attention away from easy calls on unquestionably male athletes like 2022 NCAA Division I women’s swimming and diving champion Lia Thomas. They shift the focus to intersex to distract from transgender.

Acknowledging the existence of rare difficult cases doesn’t weaken the position or arguments against allowing males in female sports, prisons, restrooms and other female-only spaces. In fact, it’s a much stronger approach because it makes a crucial distinction that the ideologues are at pains to obscure.

Crafting policy to exclude males who identify as women, or “trans women,” from female sports, prisons and other female-only spaces isn’t complicated. Trans women are unambiguously male, so the chances that a doctor incorrectly recorded their sex at birth is zero. Any “transgender policy” designed to protect female spaces need only specify that participants must have been recorded (or “assigned,” in the current jargon) female at birth.

Crafting effective intersex policies is more complicated, but the problem of intersex athletes in female sports is less pressing than that of males in female sports, and there seem to be no current concerns arising from intersex people using female spaces. It should be up to individual organizations to decide which criteria or cut-offs should be used to keep female spaces safe and, in the context of sports, safe and fair. It is imperative, however, that such policies be rooted in properties of bodies, not “identity.” Identity alone is irrelevant to issues of fairness and safety.

Ideologues are wrong to insist that the biology of sex is so complex as to defy all categorization. They’re also wrong to represent the sex binary in an overly simplistic way. The biology of sex isn’t quite as simple as common sense, but common sense will get you a long way in understanding it.

[metamatar]

Are you super familiar with that 'Retraction Watch' website? I was adding it to bookmarks because it seems like a real nice resource, so I clicked another article (on a retraction of a piece related to gender dysphoria) to get a sample of what to expect, and idk, it looks neutral enough on first glance, but I get the impression they're very selective with what quotes they use. The comment section is not encouraging, but then again, I suppose it rarely is? After checking out a few of their other articles on the same topic (and looking up the people they've quoted, to see whether RW's description of their work is omitting anything that might be important about these self-professed free speech defenders - the answer appears to be yes on at least two cases, by the way, with a Christopher Ferguson and an Alice Dreger) it definitely seems like there's a questionable skew there, but I don't know if I'm jumping to conclusions too quickly? Do you know more about it?

Oh they're super dodgy about some stuff and always have been – a lot of it is like woke left censoring brave scientists bullshit. But they are legit as a database in that any retraction for any reason is in the database.

[intersexbookclub]

Summary: Chapter 4 of Critical Intersex

For many of us, Chapter 4 of Critical Intersex (2009) turned out to be a particularly rich source of information about intersex history. So I (Elizabeth) have decided to give a fairly detailed summary of the chapter because I think it’s important to get that info out there. I’m gonna give a little bit of commentary as I go, and then a summary of our book club discussion of the chapter.

The chapter is titled “(Un)Queering identity: the biosocial production of intersex/DSD” by Alyson K. Spurgas. It is a history of ISNA, the Intersex Society of North America, and how it went from being a force for intersex liberation to selling out the movement in favour of medicalization. (See here for summary of the other chapters we read of the book!)

Our high level reactions:

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): Until I read chapter 4, I didn't really realise how reactionary “DSD” was. It hadn't been clear to me how much it was a response to the beginning of an organized intersex advocacy movement in the United States.

Michelle (@scifimagpie): I could feel the fury in the writer's tone. It was a real barn burner.

Also Michelle: the fuckin' respectability politics of DSD really got under my skin, as a term! I know the importance, as a queer person, of not forcing people to ID as queer, but this was a lot.

Introducing the chapter

The introduction sets the tone by talking about how in the Victorian era there was a historical shift from intersex being a religious/juridical issue to a pathology, and how this was intensified in the 1950s with John Money’s invention of the optimal gender rearing model. 

Spurgas briefly discusses how the OGR model is harmful to intersex people, and how it iatrogenically produces sexual dysfunction and gender dysphoria. “Iatrogenic” means caused by medicine; iatrogenesis is the production of disease or other side-effects as a result of medical intervention.

This sets scene for why in the early 1990s, Cheryl Chase and other intersex activists founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA). It had started as a support group, and morphed significantly over its lifetime. ISNA closed up shop in 2008.

Initially, ISNA was what we’d now call interliberationist. They were anti-pathologization. Their stance was that intersexuality is not itself pathological and the wellbeing of intersex people is endangered by medical intervention. They organized around the abolition of surgical intervention. They also created fora like Hermaphrodites With Attitude for the deconstruction of bodies/sexes/genders and development of an intersex identity that was inherently queer. 

The early ISNA activists explicitly aligned intersexuality in solidarity with LGB and transgender organizing. There was a belief that similar to LGBT organizing, once intersex people got enough visibility and consciousness-raising, people would “come out” in greater numbers (p100).

By the end of the 90s, however, many intersex people were actively rejecting being seen as queer and as political subjects/actors. The organization had become instead aligned with surgeons and clinicians, had replaced “intersex” with “DSD” in their language.

By the time ISNA disbanded in 2008 they had leaned in hard on a so-called “pragmatic” / “harm reduction” model / “children’s rights perspective”. The view was that since infants in Western countries are “born medical subjects as it is” (p100)

Where did DSD come from? 

In 2005, the term “disorders of sexual differentiation” had been recently coined in an article by Alice Dreger, Cheryl Chase, “and three other clinicians associated with the ISNA… [so as] to ‘label the condition rather than the person’” (p101). Dreger et al thought that intersex was “not medically accurate” (p101) and that the goal should be effective nomenclature to “sort patients into diagnostically meaningful groups” (p101).

Dreger et al argued that the term intersex “attracts the interest of a large number of people whose interest is based on a sexual fetish and people who suffer from delusions about their own medical histories” (Dreger et al quoted on p101)

Per Spurgas, Dreger et al had an explicit agenda of “distancing intersex activism from queer and transgressive sex/gender politics and instead in supporting Western medical productions of intersexuality” (p102). In other words: they were intermedicalists.

According to Dreger et al, an alignment with medicine is strategically important because intersex people often require medical attention, and hence need to be legible to clinicians. “For those in favor of the transition to DSD, intersex is first and foremost a disorder requiring medical treatment” (p102)

Later in 2005 there was a “Intersex Consensus Meeting” organized by a society of paediatricians and endocrinologists. Fifty “experts” were assembled from ten countries (p101)... with a grand total of two actually intersex people in attendance (Cheryl Chase and Barbara Thomas, from XY-Frauen). 

At the meeting, they agreed to adopt the term DSD along with a “‘patient-centred’ and ‘evidence-based’ treatment protocol” to replace the OGR treatment model (p101)

In 2006, a consortium of American clinicians and bioethicists was formed and created clinical guidelines for treating DSDs. They defined DSD quite narrowly: if your gonads or genitals don’t match your gender, or you have a sex chromosome anomaly. So no hormonal variations like hyperandrogenism allowed.

The pro-DSD movement: it was mostly doctors

Spurgas quotes the consortium: “note that the term ‘intersex’ is avoided here because of its imprecision” (p102) - our highlight. There’s a lot of doctors hating on intersex for being a category of political organizing that gets encoded as the category is “imprecise” 👀

Spurgas gets into how the doctors dressed up their re-pathologization of intersex as “patient centred” (p103) - remember this is being led by doctors, not patients, and any intersex inclusion was tokenistic. (Elizabeth: it was amazing how much bs this was.)

As Spurgas puts it, the pro-DSD movement “represents an abandonment of the desire for a pan-intersexual/queer identity and an embrace of the complete medicalization of intersex… the intersex individual is now to be understood fundamentally as a patient” (p103)

Around the same time some paediatricians almost came close to publicly advocating against infant genital mutilation by denouoncing some infant surgeries. Spurgas notes they recommended “that intersex individuals be subjected (or self-subject) to extensive psychological/psychiatric, hormonal, steroidal and other medical” interventions for the rest of their lives (p103).

This call to instead focus on non-surgical medical interventions then got amplified by other clinicians and intermedicalist intersex advocacy organizations.

The push for non-surgical pathologization hence wound up as a sort of “compromise” path - it satisfied the intermedicalists and anti-queer intersex activists, and had the allure of collaborating with doctors to end infant surgeries. (Note: It is 2024 and infant surgeries are still a thing 😡.)

The pro-DSD camp within the intersex community

Spurgas then goes on to get into the discursive politics of DSD. There’s some definite transphobia in the push for “people with DSDs are simply men and women who happen to have congenital birth conditions” (p104). (Summarizer’s note: this language is still employed by anti-trans activists.)

The pro-DSD camp claimed that it was “a logical step in the ‘evolution in thinking’” 💩 and that it would be a more “humane” treatment model (p105) 💩

Also that “parents and doctors are not going to want to give a child a label with a politicized meaning” (p104) which really gives the game away doesn’t it? Intersex people have started raising consciousness, demanding their rights, and asserting they are not broken, so now the poor doctors can’t use the label as a diagnosis. 🤮

Spurgas quotes Emi Koyama, an intermedicalist who emphasized how “most intersex people identify as ‘perfectly ordinary, heterosexual, non-trans men and women’” (p104) along with a whole bunch of other quotes that are obviously queerphobic. Note from Elizabeth: I’m not gonna repeat it all because it’s gross. In my kindest reading of this section, it reads like gender dysphoria for being mistaken as genderqueer, but instead of that being a source of solidarity with genderqueers it is used as a form of dual closure (when a minority group goes out of its way to oppress a more marginalized group in order to try and get acceptance with the majority group).

Koyama and Dreger were explicitly anti-trans, and viewed intergender type stuff as “a ‘trans co-optation’ of intersex identity” (p105) 🤮

Most intersex people resisted “DSD” from its creation

On page 106, Spurgas shifts to talking about how a lot intersex people were resistant to the DSD shift. Organization Intersex International (OII) and Bodies Like Ours (BLO) were highly critical of the shift! 💛 BLO in particular noted that 80-90% of their website users were against the DSD term. Note from Elizabeth: indeed, every survey I’ve seen on the subject has been overwhelmingly against DSD - a 2015 IHRA survey found only 3% of intersex Australians favoured the DSD term.

Proponents of “intersex” over “DSD” testified to it being depathologizing. They called out the medicalization as such: that it serves to reinforce that “intersex people don’t exist” (David Cameron, p107), that it is damaging to be “told they have a disorder” (Esther Leidolf, p107), that there is “a purposeful conflation of treatment for ‘health reasons’ and ‘cosmetic reasons’ (Curtis Hinkle, p107), and that it’s being pushed mainly by perisex people as a reactionary, assimilationist endeavour (ibid).

Interliberationism never went away - intersex people kept pushing for 🌈 queer solidarity 🌈 and depathologization - even though ISNA, the largest intersex advocacy organization, had abandoned this position.

Spurgas describes how a lot of criticism of DSD came from non-Anglophone intersex groups, that the term is even worse in a lot of languages - it connotes “disturbed” in German and has an ambiguity with pedophilia and fetishism in French (p111).

The DSD push was basically entirely USA-based, with little international consultation (p111). Spurgas briefly addresses the imperialism inherent in the “DSD” term on pages 118/119.

Other noteworthy positions in the DSD debate

Spurgas gives a well-deserved shout out to the doctors who opposed the push to DSD, who mostly came from psychiatry and opposed it on the grounds that the pathologization would be psychologically damaging and that intersex patients “have taken comfort (and in many cases, pride) in their (pan-)intersex identity” (p108) 🌈 - Elizabeth: yay, psychiatrists doing their job! 

Interestingly, both sides of the DSD issue apparently have invoked disability studies/rights for their side: Koyama claimed DSD would herald the beginning of a disability rights based era of intersex activism (p109) while anti-DSDers noted the importance in disability rights in moving away from pathologization (p109).

Those who didn’t like DSD but who saw a strategic purpose for it argued it would “preser[ve] the psychic comfort of parents”, that there is basically a necessity to coddle the parents of intersex children in order to protect the children from their parents. (p110) 

Some proposed less pathologizing alternatives like “variations of sex development” and “divergence of sex development” (p110)

The DSD treatment model and the intersex treadmill

Remember all intersex groups were united that sex assignment surgery on infants needs to be abolished. The DSD framework that was sold as a shift away from surgical intervention, but it never actually eradicated it as an option (p112).  Indeed, it keeps ambiguous the difference between medically necessary surgical intervention and culturally desired cosmetic surgery (p112). (Note from Elizabeth: funny how *this* ambiguity is acceptable to doctors.)

What DSD really changed was a shift from “fixing” the child with surgery to instead providing “lifelong ‘management’ to continue passing” (p112), resulting in more medical intervention, such as through hormonal and behavioural therapies to “[keep] it in remission” (p113).

Cheryl Chase coined the “intersex treadmill’: the never-ending drive to fit within a normative sex category (p113), which Spurgas deploys to talk about the proliferation of “lifelong treatments” and how it creates the need for constant surveillance of intersex bodies (p114). Medical specialization adds to the proliferation, as one needs increasingly more specialists who have increasingly narrow specialties.

There’s a cruel irony in how the DSD model pushes for lifelong psychiatric and psychological care of intersex patients so as to attend to the PTSD that is caused by medical intervention. (p115) It pushes a capitalistic model where as much money can be milked as possible out of intersex patients (p116).

The DSD treatment model, if it encourages patients to find community at all, hence pushes condition-specific medical support groups rather than pan-intersex advocacy groups (p115)

Other stuff in the chapter

Spurgas does more Foucault-ing at the end of the chapter. Highlight: “The intersex/DSD body is a site of biosocial contestation over which ways of knowing not only truth of sex, but the truth of the self, are fought. Both intelligibility and tangible resources are the prizes accorded to the winner(s) of the battle over truth of sex” (p117)

There’s some stuff on the patient-as-consumer that didn’t really land with anybody at the book club meeting - we’re mostly Canadians and the idea of patient-as-consumer isn’t relatable. Ei noted it isn’t even that relatable from their position as an American.

***

Having now summarized the chapter, here's a summary of our discussion at book club...

Opening reactions

Michelle (M): the way the main lady involved became medicalized really made my heart sink, reading that.

Elizabeth (E): I do remember some discussion of intersex people in the 90s, and it never really grew in the way that other queer identities did! This has kind of helped for me to understand what the fuck happened here.

E: It was definitely a very insightful reading on that part, while being absolutely outraging. I didn't know, but I guess I wasn't surprised at how pivotal US-centrism was. The author was talking about "North American centric" though but always meant the United States!!! Canada was just not part of this! They even make mention of Quebec as separate and one of the opposing regions. I was like, What are you doing here, America? You are not the entirety of our continent!!!

E: The feedback from non-Anglophone intersex advocates that DSD does not translate was something that I was like, "Yes!" For me, when I read the French term - that sounded like something that would include vaginismus, erectile dysfunction - it sounds far more general and negative.

M: the fuckin' respectability politics of DSD really got under my skin, as a term! I know the importance, as a queer person, of not forcing people to ID as queer, but this was a lot.

E: it was very assimilationist in a way that was very upsetting. I knew intellectually that this was going on. There was such a distinct advocacy push for that. The coddling of parents and doctors at the expense of intersex people was such a theme of this chapter, in a way that was very upsetting. They started out with this goal of intersex liberation, and instead, wound up coddling parents and doctors.

Solidarities

M: I feel like there's a real ableist parallel to the autism movement here… It dovetails with how the autism movement was like, "Aww, we're sorry about your emotionless monster baby! This must be so hard for you [parents]!" And it felt like "aw, it's okay, we'll fix your baby so they can interface with heterosexuality!" [Note: both of us are neurodivergent]

E: A lot of intersexism is a fear that you're going to have a queer child, both in terms of orientation and gender.

E: You cannot have intersex liberation without putting an end to homophobia and transphobia.

M: We're such natural allies there!

E: I understand that there are these very dysphoric ipsogender or cisgender people, who don't want to be mistaken as trans, but like it or not, their rights are linked to trans people! When I encounter these people, I don't know how to convey, "whether you like it or not, you're not going to get more rights by doing everything you can to be as distant as possible."

M: it reminds me of the movements by some younger queers to adhere to respectability politics.

E: Oh no. There are younger queers who want respectability politics????

M: well, some younger queers are very reactionary about neopronouns and kink at pride. they don't always know the difference between representation and "imposing" kinks on others. In a way, it reminds me of the more intentional rejection of queer weirdos, or queerdos, if you will, by republican gays.

E: I feel like a lot of anti-queerdom that comes out of the ipso and cisgender intersex community reads as very dysphoric to me. That needs to be acknowledged as gender dysphoria.

M: That resonates to me. When I heard about my own androgen imbalance, I was like, "does that mean I'm not a real woman?" And now I would happily say "fuck that question," but we do need an empathy and sensitivity for that experience. Though not tolerance for people who invalidate others, to be honest.

E: The term "iatrogensis" was new to me. The term refers to a disease caused or aggravated by medical intervention.

M: So like a surgical complication, or gender dysphoria caused by improper medical counselling!

The DSD debate

ei: i think the "disorder" discussion is really interesting. in my opinion, if someone feels their intersex condition is a disorder they have every right to label it that way, but if someone does not feel the same they have every right to reject the disorder label. personally i use the label "condition". i don't agree with forcing labels on anyone or stripping them away from anyone either.

M: for me, it felt like a cautionary tale about which labels to accept.

ei: i'm all around very tired of people label policing others and making blanket statements such as "all people who are this have to use this label”... i also use variation sometimes, i tend to go back and forth between variation and condition. I think it's a delicate balance between being sensitive to people's label preferences vs making space for other definitions/communities.

We then spoke about language for a bunch of communities (Black people, non-binary people) for a while

E: one thing that was very harrowing for me about this chapter is that while there was this push to end coercive infant surgery, they basically ceded all of the ground on "interventions" happening from puberty onward. And as someone who has had to fight off coercive medical interventions in puberty, I have a lot of trauma about violent enforcement of femininity and the medical establishment.

ei: i completely agree that it's psychologically harmful tbh…. i was assigned male at birth and my doctors want me to start testosterone to make me more like a perisex male. which is extremely counterproductive because i'm literally transfem and have expressed this many times

Doctors Doing Harm

M: for me, the validation of how doctors can be harmful in this chapter meant a lot.

E: something that surprised me and made me happy was that there were some psychiatrists who spoke out against the DSD label. As someone who routinely hears a lot of anti-psychiatry stuff - because there's a lot of good reason to be skeptical of psychiatry, as a discipline - it was just nice to see some psychiatrists on the right side of things, doing right by their patients. Psychiatrists were making the argument that DSD would be psychologically harmful to a lot of intersex people.

ei: like. being told that something so inherently you, so inherently linked to your identity and sense of self, is a disorder of sexual development, something to be fixed and corrected. that has to be so harmful

ei: like i won't lie i do have a lot of severe trauma surrounding the way i've been treated due to being intersex. but so much of my negative experiences are repetitive smaller things. Like the way people treat me like my only purpose is to teach them about intersex people …. either that or they get really creepy and gross. I’m lucky in that i'm not visibly intersex, so i do have the privilege of choosing who knows. but there's a reason why i usually don't tell people irl.

M: intersex and autism have overlap again about how like, minor presentation can be? As opposed to the sort of monstrous presentation [Carnival barker impression] "Come see the sensational half-man, half-woman! Behold the h-------dite!" And like - the way nonverbal people are also treated feels relevant to that, because that's how autism is often treated, like a freakshow and a pity party for the parents? And it's so dehumanizing. And as someone who might potentially have a nonverbal child, because my wife is expecting and my husband and she both have ADHD - I'm just very fed up with ableism and the perception of monstrosity.

Overall, this was a chapter that had a lot to talk about! See here for our discussion of Chapters 5-7 from the same volume.

[marrowdaughter]

“When biologists claim that “sex is binary,” they mean something straightforward: there are only two sexes. This statement is true because an individual’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) their primary reproductive organs (i.e., gonads) are organized, through development, to produce. Males have primary reproductive organs organized around the production of sperm; females, ova. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes that a person can be. Sex is therefore binary.

It is important to note here that the binary nature of sex is compatible with sex ambiguity because ambiguity with respect to sex is not itself a third sex. However, many gender activists falsely assert that the “sex binary” must mean something like “every human who has ever existed and will ever exist can be unambiguously categorized as either male or female.” Given this, they contend that providing examples of people with ambiguous sexual anatomy (i.e., “intersex” conditions) not only disproves the sex binary but also demonstrates that biological sex is a meaningless and even oppressive categorization scheme. (We will leave aside for now the fact that many of these same activists do recognize an alternative version of “biological sex” in the form of gender-identity bio-essentialism, or the theory that a person’s subjective self-conception of male or female is rooted in the brain itself.)

The chain of reasoning goes something like this. Sex is not binary because intersex people exist. Their existence demonstrates that biological sex is a spectrum. Since sex is a spectrum, that means no line can be perfectly drawn separating males from females. If no single line can be drawn, then anywhere someone chooses to draw one is totally arbitrary and subjective. If it’s totally arbitrary and subjective, then that means the categories male and female are also arbitrary and subjective “social constructs” with no firm root in biological reality. If that’s the case, why are we categorizing people in law according to these arbitrary labels instead of letting people simply label themselves? To do otherwise is to oppress people based on a biological falsehood.

This is just how the argument is made, and it is made with stunning success. Children in K-12 are regularly taught these days that sex and gender exist on a spectrum. Parts of the scientific establishment and the medical profession have also embraced this idea.

Perhaps nobody is more well-known for relying on the existence of intersex conditions to supposedly disprove the sex binary than the historian of science Alice Dreger. In her book, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, Dreger refers to intersex individuals as “hermaphrodites,” and says: “Hermaphroditism causes a great deal of confusion, more than one might at first appreciate, because—as we will see again and again—the discovery of a ‘hermaphroditic’ body raises doubts not just about the particular body in question, but about all bodies. The questioned body forces us to ask what exactly it is—if anything—that makes the rest of us unquestionable.”

Those without a firm background in biological science may read such passages and feel something akin to having an epiphany, but Dreger is peddling pseudoscience. This desire to extrapolate a small blur at a boundary to the entire picture is rooted in the postmodern impulse to “queer,” and thereby eliminate, natural categories. In the queer-theory worldview, categories are themselves oppressive, and human liberation requires the “troubling” of categories (to borrow Judith Butler’s term), including those of sex. Yet Dreger’s account does not accurately describe biological reality. The existence of “questionable” cases with respect to sex classification does not automatically cast a degree of doubt onto everyone’s sex. For most people, their sex is obvious.

Besides, our society is not currently experiencing a sudden dramatic surge in people stricken with ambiguous genitalia; we are experiencing a surge in people who are unambiguously one sex claiming to “identify” as the opposite sex, or neither sex.

Another false depiction of the sex binary is that it refers to sex chromosomes, with males always being XY and females always XX. Activists purport to debunk this misrepresentation of the sex binary by pointing to sex-chromosome aneuploidies—instances where an individual may have missing or extra X or Y chromosomes, such as in those with Klinefelter (XXY) and Turner (X0) syndrome, among others. How could sex be binary and based on sex chromosomes, they argue, if there are more combinations beyond XX and XY? They may also highlight examples of XX males and females with Y chromosomes as proof that chromosomes do not determine an individual’s sex.

There are several major issues with this line of reasoning. The first is that the vast majority of people with sex-chromosome aneuploidies are not intersex; their primary sex organs and anatomy are unquestionably either male or female. Other compositions than the typical XX and XY arrangement do not represent additional sexes beyond male and female, but instead represent chromosomal variation within each of the two sexes. A person with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY), for example, isn’t a new sex in the same way that a person with Down syndrome (who has three instead of two copies of chromosome 21) isn’t a new species.

Second, the notion that XX males and females with a Y chromosome debunk the claim that sex is determined by chromosomes erroneously conflates how sex is determined with how sex is defined for an individual. “Sex determination” is a technical term in developmental biology referring to the process by which certain genes trigger and regulate sex development. Mammals, which include humans, have evolved what’s called “chromosomal sex determination,” meaning that certain genes residing on chromosomes guide the development of males and females in utero. The Y chromosome is considered “sex determining” because it usually harbors a gene called SRY that triggers male development, and in its absence a female typically develops. But in very rare instances an SRY gene can find its way onto an X chromosome, resulting in a male with XX chromosomes.

This process stands in contrast to sex-determining mechanisms in other organisms that do not rely on chromosomes, such as “temperature-dependent sex determination” that occurs in many reptiles, where the temperature at which an egg is incubated triggers male and female development. In the alligator A. mississippiensis, for instance, higher incubation temperatures (>34°C) produce males, while lower temperatures (<30°C) produce females.

In both chromosomal and temperature-dependent sex determination systems, though an individual’s sex is mechanistically determined in different ways, it is always defined the same way—by the type of gamete his or her primary reproductive organs is organized around producing. This should be obvious, as it would have been impossible ever to have discovered these different sex-determining mechanisms without first knowing what males and females are apart from sex chromosomes and incubation temperatures.

These efforts by activists serve a single purpose—to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as simply either male or female is grossly outdated and should be completely abandoned in favor of “gender identity.” This entails that males would not be barred from female sports, prisons, or any other space previously segregated according to our supposedly antiquated notions of “biological sex,” so long as they “identify” as female, whatever that means.

But while sex development is a complex process, it does not follow that the outcomes are equally complex. Dreger’s claim that the existence of edge cases “raises doubts not just about the particular body in question, but about all bodies” is not true. A person’s sex is almost always completely unambiguous and recorded correctly at birth.

While it may be necessary to outline reasonable policies and laws for hard cases, we need not pretend we’re all hard cases. Failing to reject Dreger’s rhetorical sleight-of-hand prevents us from calling a spade a spade.”

Article published on August 4th, 2024. Emphasis is my own.

[fang-toothed]

The book “Trans” by Helen Joyce is one of the most profound and important evidence-based theory books I have ever read, and I strongly recommend it (if you haven’t read it already!) Here’s her website, where you can learn more about her and her efforts:

One quote from Chapter 2 is the best summation and interpretation of trans vitriol I have ever found.

“In ‘Galileo’s Middle Finger’, [Alice] Dreger offers another insight: since autogynephilia involves a fantasy of truly becoming, or already being, a woman, any reference of it can be considered an insult. ‘There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labelled,’ she writes. ‘When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak it’s name.’

“This explains why such rage is mostly directed towards women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard’s observations of extremist transactivism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.’” (“2: Sissy Boys and the Woman Inside.” Trans: When ideology meets reality, Oneworld, London, 2021, pp. 44) [Please cite your sources, kids!]

I would say, based on the latter paragraph, that the disturbing and disgusting graphic descriptions of imagined rape by TiMs (and, in less sexual terms and more vague threats of violence, some copying, particularly desperate to be seen as masculine TiFs) are autogynephiles’ only way to reconcile with not being accepted as women in blunt and uncertain terms: they take their fury and sexualise it as they do women in general, perhaps even describing their own internal fantasies but with “TERFs” in their place. We are the women they are desperate to be - of the female sex, largely lesbian, and fully aware that we cannot ever be removed from the category. Of course, autogynephiles are blind to the knowledge that being a woman is not fun and games and as erotic for us as it is to them, but they still envy us. And in the ultimate male move, they take that anger and fantasise about degrading us by taking the male social standards of women (‘virginal’ and ‘unsoiled’) and ensuring we are ‘wrecked’ or ‘ruined’ - raped, ejaculated within, and/or impregnated into submission.

[tanadrin]

AGP?

autogynephilia, part of the belief, per a certain sect of old school psychologists like ray blanchard, that male-to-female transsexualism is one of two types: very effeminate gay men, who transition because they want to have sex with straight men, and men with a sexual fetish that constitutes an "erotic target location error," like someone who is attracted to women's shoes; except the thing they are aroused by is themselves, as a woman.

as a model it has deep problems, not least of which is that i don't think it accounts for the profound dysphoria that accompanies a lot of trans womens' experiences, especially those who express a female identity from a very young age. while all categories of sexuality and gender identity are fuzzy at the margins, the central examples of such trans women and the central examples of even very effeminate gay men don't actually much resemble one another in their experiences.

the "erotic target location error" concept makes no sense to me; it presupposes an etiology of (at least a type of) sexual fetish that has not been well established, because the fact of the matter is we don't have a good model for how paraphilias emerge. on top of that, both categories that blanchard proposes not only can't really account for the intensity and nature of gender dysphoria, they ignore many aspects of gender euphoria (flattening it all into a paraphilia, basically), including--most damning of all to me--that the experiences and the reason for classifying those experiences as a paraphilia are indistinguishable from the experiences of cis people, who also frequently delight in, or are even aroused by, consonant self-expression of their authentic gender identity. by blanchard's typology, a huge number of cis people have that same paraphilia, to the extent that calling it a paraphilia makes no sense.

a lot of people dislike it on political grounds, as well--"trans women are just perverted men" and "trans women are trying to trick straight men" are popular and very old stereotypes--and the fact that there's a guy with letters after his name saying this stuff has given a lot of ammunition to terfs and garden variety transphobes. those criticisms are correct; but unfortunately the defenders of this theory like alice dreger ignore its scientific problems and assume this is just the Woke Police trying to suppress Real Science.

the only feature of the theory that seems to reflect a real thing to me is the apparent bimodal distribution on when trans women (and blanchard is mainly interested in trans women) seem to transition and/or recognize their gender identity, i.e., very early in childhood, or around/after the onset of puberty. i think trying to create a classification on intrinsic factors is born out of the fact that psychological methodology is not very good; you could point out that degree of dysphoria, the genderedness of one's upbringing (i.e., did your parents freak the fuck out if you, as a small boy, asked for a barbie for christmas), the physical changes wrought by puberty, and having the language to conceptualize and express concepts around gender identity, are all confounding variables that make trying to suss out the nature of the actual distinction present here (if any) nearly impossible. but like the proverbial drunk searching for his car keys, confronted with an inability to differentiate extrinsic factors, a lot of psychologists seem to throw up their hands and not even try. needless to say, i'm not very impressed by the blanchardian typology, and even when people like alice dreger say, "well, just because trans women are pervert freaks doesn't mean we should be mean to them" i do not feel much better about the theory they are advancing.

[trixree]

so... this claim about XY sex chromosomes but phenotypically female development (you made it on a post) ....... I have 2 thoughts there. 1 is that this occurs because specific genes, like SRY, that are critical to male development in humans can be absent/nonfunctional on that tiny Y thus rendering the person actually X- (single X) in terms of gene expression, which leads to being female but often with health complications. That is an important distinction to me... just from a intersex/DSD health and research standpoint. Not only does it not produce hermaphrodism (there is no true hermaphrodism in humans) ... it isn't someone "magically" having XY and being female out of nowhere. The "being female" part happens for a reason, and that reason isn't gender/society-culture related. It's a unique genetic event with very specific causes. And it's reasonable that a lot of people don't know about it or skip over it in casual discussion, and it still means functionally, if you have a functional Y, you develop male. My 2nd thought is I just don't get what disorders of sex development have to do with gender to you. It's its own thing.

Hi! I don't know exactly what post you're referring to, so I can't make direct reference to it.

I'll answer your second question first, cause that speaks to my answer for the first question!

I bring up disorders of sex development often when discussing gender broadly because disorders of sex development help complicate the binary model most people are working off of. It's an important starting point when many folks are coming at issues of transition and gender from a foundational knowledge that says "there are two distinct ways of being, male (XY) and female (XX) and anything else is a rare aberration". Historically, it is actually intersex people who shaped our models of normative human sex/gender; and I take care to say "sex/gender" here because at the turn of the 20th century, it's important to note that these concepts were not distinct - "gender" as we think of it didn't really enter the scene scientifically until 1940 and was popularized in 1970). Challenging this fundamental misconception that this male-female sex binary is both natural and discrete - it was not natural nor discrete, but constructed out of experimentation on intersex bodies (usually of children) as a project of normalization - is important foundational work for understanding parts as seperate from people and identity.

Which leads me to this statement you made, that "there is no true hermaphrodism in humans" which is simply not correct in the way that hermaphroditism functions as a meaningful political and medical category. While "true" instances of hermaphroditism are rare (OVO-DSD or XX-intersex), hermaphroditism historically has meant broadly anyone with ambiguous sex organs, which today would cover all intersex conditions (of which OVO-DSD/XX-intersex is one) This broad category crucially helps us renders violence against ambigous bodies (often queer and trans bodies) more visible, both in our present moments and in our history.

In this book, I use the general term "hermaphrodite" for all so-identified subjects of anatomically double, doubtful, and/or mistaken sex (that is, supposedly mislabeled sex). But I do this not because I think the category 'hermaphrodite' is self-evident or because I think it forms a clearly bounded, ontological category that cannot be disputed [...] I use hermaphrodite to refer to my historical subjects first because it simplifies my narrative. A single so-called hermaphrodite could, in the scientific and medical literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, go from being officially labeled male, to female, to hermaphrodite, to a subject of mistaken sex, to a subject of doubtful sex [...] it is simplest to use the word hermaphrodite for anyone whose 'true' sex fell into question among medical and scientific men. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, Alice Domurat Dreger (1998) - From Chapter 1, Doubtful Sex

It's important to know that in many cases of intersex children, the cause of the intersex condition is never known, which begs the question is the particular diagnosis ("true hermaphoritism" vs other intersex conditions, which can be much more ambiguous) especially meaningful in terms of ones' daily life?

Your example regarding Sewyer syndrome (the non-functional SRY gene on the Y chromosome) is correct, but I'm not following your reasoning that this constitutes an "important distinction". Why is that an important distinction? You say, it's not "true hermaphroditism" and it isn't "magically having XY and being female", "being female happens for a reason, and that reason isn't gender/society-culture related." Again, I don't know the original post you're referencing, but I'd agree with you that this isn't "magically being female"! We do understand the mechanism of this genetic anomaly. However, the reason that a person who develops female secondary sex characteristics (i.e., looks female), regardless of their chromosomal sex or the presence of any sex anomalies, is most likely to be raised female. This is, quite literally, the way our gendered society is intended to work.

So, when we uphold the uncomplicated binary model of sex, when we don't talk about interesex people in conversations about gender identity and queer/transness, we obscure the complex nature of gender identity and ones' sex assigned at birth. (While simultaneously erasing a history of sex that was literally build on the bodies of intersex people as living laboratories.) This history is intentionally made obscure and the voices of those intersex people silenced in their own records and in our own queer history.

Now, anon, if you're still with me (and I hope you are!) I'd like to tell you one of these stories of a real intersex person - a child diagnosed as a hermaphrodite in 1915 who was treated by leading professionals in the field of sex development and endocrinology at the Harriet Lane Home at John Hopkins (emphasis added):

In his memoir, Young describes a 'case that did not end happily' to introduce [Robert] Stonestreet. As Young remembers it: 'A boy was brought to us years ago for operation on account of a genital defect. Dr William Quinby... discovered that the patient was a girl, and advised the father allow him to carry out operations to make his child normal." Like Young, Quinby was most interested in the possibility that overactivity of the adrenal glands from fetal life on had resulted in the masculinization of Stonestreet's body, leading to his assignment as male at birth despite his having "female" gonads. Stonestreet had been raised without question as a boy for ten years and unambiguously understood himself to be a boy. Indeed, when the Stonestreets brought their child to the Institute, the reason was "hypospadias and undescended testicles", not hesitation over his sex.

Young and Quinby undertook an external and internal physical exam, followed by radiographs, a urine test to establish kidney function, a syphilis test, a blood pressure check, and a blood count [...] Finding nothing out of the ordinary, aside from the appearance of the genitals, they moved on to an exploratory laparotomy. Finding 'an infantile uterus with tubes and ovaries of normal appearance,' Young and Quinby were faced with a contradiction. According to a gonadocentric paradigm, the presence of ovaries would trigger a diagnosis of 'female pseudohermaphorditism' and sex reassignment as a girl. 'The sex of an individual must always be determined by the nature of the gonads, regardless of the presence of other abnormalities either of other parts of the genital system or the secondary sexual manifestations of the body as a whole [...] Consequently, this patient is of the female sex; and this in spite of so many secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite, male sex.'

According to Young, when Quinby advised Stonestreet's father 'that the patient was a girl', the response was 'that he had six girls and that this boy, although only ten, was a valuable worker on the farm. He refused to have another girl added to the family and departed.' The Stonestreets might have also recognized their child's self identity as a boy as real, choosing to reject the medical model.

Twenty one years later, Stonestreet returned to the Brady Institute. Now in his thirties, he had lived his whole life as a man and was engaged to marry a woman. Their priest, however, had refused to perform the ceremony because Stonestreet's father had told him about the childhood hermaphroditism diagnosis. Stonestreet now demanded that Young provide medical proof that he was a man, not a woman. 'After a careful study I had to tell him,' Young claims, 'that no mistake had been made. The two left in tears.' Three days later, Young was summoned to the Institute. He found Robert Stonestreet there, on his deathbed. An autopsy found that he had committed suicide by taking a lethal dose of mercury. Young took advantage of Stonestreet's death to verify his theory of adrenal hyperplasia during the autopsy. A few years later he published photographs of Stonestreet's autopsied adrenal glands in his memoir.

Histories of the Transgender Child, Julian Gill-Peterson (2018) - From Chapter 2 - Before Transsexuality

Let me ask you this: what matters more, the way that Robert understood himself to be (unquestionably male) and the way that he lived his life (as a man) or the diagnosis of hermaphroditism that rendered him "female"? That rendered instutitions, like medical and marital ones, incapable of seeing him as he actually was? I'll ask you directly: do you know your chromosomal configuration? Do you know your full genome, every condition or aberation in your body? No! Even the most highly medicalized among us (those living with multiple diagnoses, chronic illnesses, disabilities, or otherwise in close proximity to medicine and medicalized life) would contest the idea that our most fundamental biology matters most, that we can (or even should) know everything about our genes, or even that this information has great bearing on who we become. But I'm certain still, without having the full sequence of your sex chromosomes in front of you or without submitting to a medical examination of your genitalia, you already have some understanding of who you are. Our genetics are not reflective of who we are and who we understand ourselves to be; they never have been a reliable picture of who we will become.

[vamptoll]

Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger is an incredible book. The first chapter is about how doctors are awful for thinking they know better than intersex people, and how intersex people deserve the right to speak for themselves on what they are, and the rest of the book is about how transsexuals need to shut up and accept their sex perverts because a psychologist said they were.

Also the transgender lobby is such a powerful and influential force that they can destroy anyone's career through a website that mentions people's children, but her writing a big 5 published book about multiple trans women's sex lives is just little guys looking out for each other.

[vonne-gut]

There are so many things to say about this ridonculous post—the absurd out-of-pocket ad-hominem attacks; the way that the OP has more than 42,000 notes but the author went out of their way to flame the three users who had criticisms, which really does nothing but make the author look wildly insecure about the accuracy of the post; the full-chested assertion that none of these three people is intersex, a belief for which the author has absolutely no evidence—and which turns out not to be true (shoutout @booksmartlifestupid); the way the post utterly fails to engage with the actual criticism, providing other irresponsible restatements of the fabricated statistic as proof that the statistic is not, in fact, fabricated; the way the author seems to believe the only way to advocate for the fair treatment of intersex people is to peddle a fake statistic to exaggerate their prevalence in the world’s population, an absurd logic that undermines the underlying message of minority rights at its very core. 

But this was so full-chested — and the author even went to the trouble of tagging us — so I’ll engage, which I’m sure is exactly the response desired, but hey, what’s the internet for.

To take this post line-by-line: 

First, I don’t know the other two users tagged. I don’t co-sign their statements and I don’t care to support or defend them. My criticism is one and it’s simple: The author’s statistic is fake. The author is spreading misinformation—which is always a net-negative. There is no need to engineer fake facts in order to argue for a (very correct) ideological position. We live in an age of disinformation, cherrypicked and corporate-sponsored data, and deliberately fabricated empirics. We should call it out here and call it out everywhere—including on posts with which we agree. The author could have simply accepted that this statistic is illusory but—whatever the correct number is—the rights and privileges and experiences of these people have no less significance, however numerous they are.

But let’s get into it:

Intersex Society of North America states 1% 

This post cites, for its statistics, an article entitled “Ambiguous Sex or Ambivalent Medicine?” by Alice Dreger. Dreger never offers the statistic the Intersex Society cites. 

Dreger’s states: One 1993 gynecology text estimates that “in approximately 1 in 500 births, the sex is doubtful because of the external genitalia.” I am persuaded by more recent, well-documented literature that estimates the number to be roughly 1 in 1,500 live births. [FYI, that's .067%.]

The cited academic, therefore, advocates an estimate more than ten times smaller than the one ISNA irresponsibly ascribes to her.

Dreger’s article also states the following in its footnotes:

The highest modern-day estimate for frequency of sexually ambiguous births comes from John Money, who has posited that as many as 4 percent of live births today are of “intersexed” individuals (cited in Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes,” The Sciences 33 [1993]: 20-25). Money’s categories tend to be exceptionally broad and poorly defined, and not representative of what most medical professionals today would consider to be “intersexuality.” (Notably, John Money—who peddled the fake stats—was a mid-century "sexologist" who advocated that "physicians could essentially create any gender out of any child, so long as the cosmetic alteration was performed early. Money and others repeatedly asserted that “Johns” could be made into “Joans” and “Joans” into “Johns” so long as the genitals looked “right” and everyone agreed to agree on the child’s assigned gender." Money was part of a team at Johns Hopkins which, in 1963, removed the testes of a male child after a botched circumcision and forced the family to raise him as a girl. [See the article referenced by Dreger.])

According to Denis Grady, a study of over 6,500 women athletes competing in seven different international sports competitions showed an incidence of intersexuality of one in 500 women, but unfortunately Grady does not provide a reference to the published data from that study.

So that’s fooey! But maybe one of the other articles is legit.

2. Okay, onto the two Intersex Australia links. Their website reads:

In the absence of better internationally-accepted data, Intersex Human Rights Australia cites a systematic review of medical literature in the American Journal of Human Biology by Melanie Blackless, Anne Fausto-Sterling and others showing intersex to be around 1.7% of all live births. 

The only reference cited which is from an actual empirical source is the number from Fausto-Sterling’s research—which, as the literature review of the previous article provides for us, is not her own research. The number, as other peer-reviewing scientists note, is inflated to the point where it’s useless to anyone trying to glean any actual demographic information about a very understudied and underserved group of people. It’s also notably not from an empirical study, but a composite review of demographics generated in studies by other scientists who weren’t studying the same thing. “We surveyed the medical literature from 1955 to the present for studies of the frequency of deviation from the ideal male or female. We conclude that this frequency may be as high as 2% of live births.” Whether or not you think that exaggeration of these numbers is a good thing—as Intersex Australia seems to—doesn’t change the fact that they are nevertheless not real. 

3. Onto Intersex Youth – Same source. See supra.

4. The Intersex Society of North America link-graf seems to engage with an argument I didn’t make, and only again cites the same source debunked above. 

5. Human Rights Campaign does not cite their source. I can only assume it’s also the same, but I’m not sure. 

It is absurd to say that somebody doesn’t believe in intersex rights—or “hates intersex people”, a wildin’ and desperate barb at which you can only really laugh—because they take issue with your fake facts. You don’t need to believe intersex people are more or less numerous to believe they deserve greater respect, greater political attention, and freedom from societal erasure. In fact, the absence of reliable data about intersex people should be the first tip-off that they desperately need the care and attention the author advocates. 

On a broader note, it is really amazing that good-faith engagement with empirics has been lost to a culture of out-soapboxing each other; you are not a better or stronger or more loyal advocate because you blindly accept facts that (you think) bolster your opinion, and you are certainly not becoming a better advocate of intersex people by widely disseminating statements about the intersex population that aren't true.

The author writes, “Google is very free. But critical thinking skills apparently aren't.” Agreed! So sad you didn't employ any.

"But only 2% of the population is intersex. It's not that common. Why should we reframe or perception of gender for intersex people?"

Completely ignoring the fact that empathy exists. You do realize that 2% of the population in the medical field is considered very common, yes?

2% of children and 0.5% of adults have a peanut allergy and that's so common that they have entire rules around in in public spaces.

0.24-1% of the population has Rheumatoid arthritis. That's an eighth to a half of the number of intersex people!

1-2% of people are estimated to have autism, and that's considered a common condition.

0.1%-2.6% of people will get melanoma in their life time, and that's considered common.

1.2% of people have epilepsy and that's considered common.

Completely ignoring statistics like 6% of women have PCOS (which is a condition that can fall under the intersex umbrella). 2% of the population in the medical field is considered a common condition, and ergo by medical terms intersex is in itself common.

I don't think you realize how big 2% is. That's 2 in 100 people. If you walk into 3 fully filled classrooms (when I was in school a full classroom was 40 students). Chances are you just saw 2 intersex kids and didn't even know it.

So yeah. I think intersex is common enough to include in our discussions around gender and how transphobic rules affects intersex people.

-fae

[epitome-the-burnkid-viii]

🧩The good, bad, weird, & wild📺 Welcome to the 🎱#youtuberecommendedchronicles🔮 Come find my shows #SupplementalBroadcast & #PanPanenPiousPropheticPonderings on YouTube & Rumble!🎟️ #CurrentEvents #History #Eschatology #Knowledge #TheGreatAwakening 🙏

[deerydear]

I linked to this interview in the post above, but since one has to register to view the article, I'll post the full text:

What Is Autogynephilia? An Interview with Dr Ray Blanchard

Ray Blanchard is an adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto who specialises in the study of human sexuality, with a particular focus on sexual orientation, paraphilias, and gender identity disorders. In the 1980s and 1990s he developed a theory around the causes of gender dysphoria in natal males that became known as ‘Blanchard’s transsexualism typology’. This typology—which continues to attract a great deal of controversy—categorizes trans women (that is, natal males who identify as women) into two discrete groups.

The first group is composed of ‘androphilic’ (sometimes termed ‘homosexual’) trans women, who are exclusively sexually attracted to men and are markedly feminine in behaviour and appearance from a young age. They typically begin the process of medical transition before the age of 30.

The second group are motivated to transition as a result of what Blanchard termed ‘autogynephilia’: a sexual orientation defined by sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a woman. Autogynephiles are typically sexually attracted to women, although they may also identify as asexual or bisexual. They are more likely to transition later in life and to have been conventionally masculine in presentation up until that point.

Although Blanchard’s typology is supported by a wide range of sexologists and other researchers, it is strongly rejected by most trans activists who dispute the existence of autogynephilia. The medical historian Alice Dreger, whose 2015 book Galileo’s Middle Finger included an account of the autogynephilia controversy, summarises the conflict:

There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: Most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labeled. When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name. The ultimate eroticism of autogynephilia lies in the idea of really becoming or being a woman, not in being a natal male who desires to be a woman.

I interviewed Blanchard over email and Skype. The text has been lightly edited for clarity.

***

Louise Perry: What has been the response to your work on autogynephilia, both within the trans community and without?

Ray Blanchard: I introduced the word and the concept of autogynephilia—the tendency of certain males to become sexually aroused by the thought or image of themselves as females—in 1989 as an extension of the concept of transvestic fetishism. The DSM diagnosis, Transvestic Fetishism, was defined in psychiatry at that time as sexual urges and fantasies involving cross-dressing in heterosexual males.

I published my early writings on autogynephilia in specialty journals with very small circulations. I intended them for a tiny readership of clinicians who specialized in the assessment and management of gender-dysphoric patients. However, this work attracted the attention of two individuals who decided to promote it more broadly, one online (Anne A. Lawrence) and one in a book (J. Michael Bailey). These efforts, especially the book, enraged three influential trans women—two of them senior academics—who attempted to get Bailey fired from his teaching position at Northwestern University for writing it. This campaign has been documented in detail by Alice D. Dreger, a medical historian. Paradoxically, the efforts of trans activists, then and today, to completely suppress any mention of autogynephilia in public discourse has resulted in an increased public awareness of it. I think the self-defeating behavior of trans activists has persisted because the idea of autogynephilia cuts too close to the bone. If the idea had no resonance with them, they would simply have ignored it, and the idea of autogynephilia would just be one of many forgotten hypotheses of gender identity disorder.

Subsequently other strange and unexpected (to me) events befell my notion of autogynephilia. Modern trans activists reframed transsexualism/transgenderism as a political problem rather than a clinical problem. The flat denial that autogynephilia exists became a canon of modern trans activism, trans activism become a sub-department of the Social Justice Movement, and the Social Justice Movement became a primary combatant in the ongoing, pervasive Culture Wars.

The upshot is that most trans activists—and, in solidarity, their “allies”—deny that autogynephilia exists. Since most university psychologists, sociologists, and humanities professors are “allies,” the topic of autogynephilia may be omitted from Human Sexuality or Gender Studies courses for a generation. The other side in the Culture Wars (whatever one wishes to call that side) are prepared to recognize the existence of autogynephilia as soon as they learn of it, but they tend to hurl it as an insult at male-to-female trans who offend them. That, of course, is not what I intended when I coined the term 30 years ago.

At present, many heterosexual MTFs—in their own view, lesbian trans women—police online forums ceaselessly for any mention of autogynephilia. If a newcomer posts that he thinks that autogynephilia describes his own experience, they will quickly let him know that this is wrongthink and that autogynephilia does not exist. It is therefore hard to get any sense of how many autogynephilic gender dysphorics privately think that autogynephilia describes their own experience, because stating that online will produce scorn and other negative reactions.

Has the prevalence of autogynephilia increased in recent decades, or are autogynephiles simply more likely to transition than they once were?

I very much doubt that the prevalence of autogynephilia per se, or the prevalence of autogynephilic gender dysphoria, has increased. I think that what has changed is the proportion of autogynephilic trans who have “come out” to their families, friends, and employers, not the total number of autogynephilic trans. Forty years ago, an autogynephile’s decision to transition to the female role often had negative consequences in the personal and employment spheres. Now that decision is as likely to get them praised for courage as it is to get them criticized for selfishness and irresponsibility.

The change in consequences for the androphilic trans has been much less. They tend to be conspicuously feminine (or effeminate) in manner, even when they are trying to “butch it up,” and this was as true 40 years ago as it is now. The androphilic trans had less social status to lose by transitioning then, and that is also true now.

When I looked at the relative numbers of autogynephilic and androphilic gender-dysphoric males back in 1987, the autogynephilic cases were already a majority, approaching 60 percent. The proportion had reached 75 percent by 2010, and it might be even higher now.

I don’t know of any evidence of significant populations of autogynephilic MTF trans in any non-Western countries. That doesn’t mean such individuals don’t exist. It could simply mean that, for non-homosexual males, the social cost of “coming out” as trans is much higher in non-Western cultures.

Would you recommend medical transition as a means of treating gender dysphoria in patients with autogynephilia?

This depends on the intensity of the autogynephilia and, perhaps more importantly, on the severity of any gender dysphoria that arises in consequence of it. For mild or intermittent gender dysphoria, counselling or cognitive behavior therapy may be sufficient to help the patient through “flare-ups” of dysphoric feelings. This would be a logical choice of treatment if the patient has a marriage that he wants to maintain or a valued career that would inevitably suffer if he attempted to transition to the female role.

For sustained and severe gender dysphoria, hormonal treatment and sex reassignment surgery may offer the best chance of bringing the patient peace of mind and an improved quality of life. In my opinion, responsible clinicians should require patients to live for a significant period of time in the cross-gender role before approving them for surgery. One year is a bare minimum, but I think that two years is preferable.

I do not believe that autogynephilia per se—or any other paraphilia or sexual orientation—can be extirpated through treatment. In my opinion, people can be taught not to do what they want—when what they want is harmful to themselves or others—but they cannot be taught not to want what they want.

How do you respond to the claim that autogynephilia is also found frequently in natal females?

I do not believe that autogynephilia occurs in natal females. The only evidence that it does was a tendentious study that asked a small number of unrepresentative women the wrong questions. This study, by Charles Moser, M.D., was immediately acclaimed by members of the trans community because it asserted what many MTF trans were desperate to believe: That personal histories of autogynephilia do not contradict their convictions of being psychologically identical to biological women, because biological women experience autogynephilia too.

Moser’s study was criticized on methodological grounds by another physician, Anne A. Lawrence, M.D. Lawrence, who wrote the most comprehensive scholarly monograph on autogynephilia, Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies, is a postoperative autogynephilic transsexual herself. She argued that the questionnaire items that Moser used to measure autogynephilia in women (29 hospital employees) do not adequately assess the essential element of autogynephilia—sexual arousal simply at the thought of being a female—because they do not emphasize that element.

My own arguments against the claim that autogynephilia frequently occurs in natal females were more general and not directed at Moser’s survey. I wrote, for example, that the notion that typical natal females are erotically aroused by—and sometimes even masturbate to—the thought or image of themselves as women might seem feasible if one considers only conventional, generic fantasies of being a beautiful, alluring woman in the act of attracting a handsome, desirable man (or woman). It seems a lot less feasible when one considers the various other ways in which some autogynephilic men symbolize themselves as women in their masturbation fantasies. Examples I have collected include: sexual fantasies of menstruation and masturbatory rituals that simulate menstruation; giving oneself an enema, while imagining the anus is a vagina and the enema is a vaginal douche; helping the maid clean the house; sitting in a girls’ class at school; knitting in the company of other women; and riding a girls’ bicycle. These examples argue that autogynephilic sexual fantasies have a fetishistic flavor that makes them qualitatively different from any superficially similar ideation in natal females.

There is also the telling phenomenon of autogynephiles who are involuntarily aroused by cross-dressing or cross-gender ideation, and who complain about difficulties changing into women’s attire without triggering erection or ejaculation. It seems likely that few natal women would give the analogous reports that they wish that they could put on their clothes without triggering vaginal lubrication or orgasm.

Do you think that natal females ever experience autoandrophilia [sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as male]?

Clinical mentions of heterosexual women with strong masculine traits who say that they feel as if they were homosexual men and who feel strongly attracted to effeminate men go back over 100 years. I do not think they are the female equivalents of autogynephiles, and to underscore that point I have started referring to them as autohomoerotics. Some of these individuals do develop clinically significant gender dysphoria, and it is well documented that at least a few autohomoerotic gender dysphorics have undergone surgical sex reassignment and were satisfied with their decision to do so.

Until recent times, autohomoerotic female-to-male transsexuals were quite rare. The differences between autogynephilia in males and autohomoeroticism in females may seem subtle. Autogynephilic (male) gender dysphorics are attracted to the idea of having a woman’s body; autohomoerotic (female) gender dysphorics are attracted to the idea of participating in gay male sex. For autogynephiles, becoming a lesbian woman is a secondary goal—the logical consequence of being attracted to women and wanting to become a woman. For autohomoerotics, becoming a gay man appears to be the primary goal or very close to it.

There are also striking differences in developmental history. Many autogynephilic trans people report a period in their lives, usually during puberty, when they put on women’s undergarments (often “borrowed” from their mothers or sisters) and masturbated to orgasm. In contrast, self-reports of masturbating to orgasm in men’s underwear are missing in the histories of autohomoerotic females.

Why are paraphilias found overwhelmingly in men?

In order for us to know why many or most types of paraphilia are more common in men than in women, we would also have to know what causes each type of paraphilia. For example, we understand why osteoporosis is more common in elderly women than in elderly men because we understand that osteoporosis is related to low hormone levels.

I think we are very far from comparable knowledge on the causes of paraphilias. To put this ignorance in perspective, consider research on sexual orientation. Homosexuality is not a paraphilia, but it serves as a useful point of comparison. Much more laboratory research has been done on homosexuality than on any paraphilia, but we still have only little bits and pieces of knowledge on what factors influence sexual orientation.

Do you think there is a way of discussing autogynephilia without igniting controversy?

I know that it is possible for people to discuss autogynephilia in candid and dispassionate—or even compassionate—ways, because I have seen this happen on my Twitter feed.

On a few occasions, (anonymous) autogynephiles have posted articulate and well-organized threads explaining what it feels like to be sexually aroused at the thought or image of themselves as women, how these sexual feelings relate to emerging aversion toward their male bodies and their desire to possess a female body, and the deleterious effects of autogynephilia and gender dysphoria on their personal relationships and their general mood and functioning. These threads have always stimulated a few other followers to post messages of congratulation for honesty and courage along with declarations of sympathy. Nobody has ever said, “Now that I understand your type better, you disgust me even more”—even though people on Twitter are not known for their self-restraint or charity.

However, I don’t know whether such discourse without controversy has ever been, or ever will be, possible in more public arenas. It is probably not possible right now, because of the current politicization of the term autogynephilia.

-----------------

I speak so strongly of autogynephilia, because of the people I've known in-person. I knew how they thought of women. I actually don't know if I fully agree with Blanchard, that women do not experience autoandrophilia. The mind is malleable.

Speaking as someone who used to be tangled in this mental maze, if "being aroused by the simple thought of being male" was considered culturally "more male" than "being aroused by the idea of gay male sex", then I know I would have shifted myself... if I felt incentivized to value "portraying maleness" moreso than "just being a fujoshi". My brush with modern, online trans communities did catalyze this imbalance. It became self-destructive. Better to keep up a lie (and keep up the appearance of a social position), than to tell the truth and be rejected..... or so I felt, until I was galvanized by the fire.

Auto(gyne/andro)philia is not simply about bodily appearance. It incorporates the cultural frill and symbolism that we dress up sexual difference in. Each person has a different narrative. Just like there are many varying cultures all over the globe, where the gender expectations are completely different. Even two families living in the same city may raise their own children with differing values. We are all people.

I speak so harshly about this mental disorder because I knew people, personally.

There was one man who became obsessed with a little girl who I knew. He tried to hit on her. He was obsessed with her. Looking in his eyes, I could almost see the fucking obsession.

Last I heard of him, he told everyone he wanted to be a woman, and he moved away. He wanted to rape that little girl. This was fucking real. It wasn't words on a screen. It was not an abstract concept. This was a man who had a sick perversion.

I see his atittude reflected in the same attitude of so many autogynephilic MtFs. The same way that these men discuss women. So many of them are obsessed with little anime girls, lolicon. They don't see women the way that other women see women. They see "person I am attracted to". Not like a lesbian.

A lesbian sees "myself", first. A MtF sees "traits they are attracted to", first, then adding on "myself"... secondarily.

The order matters. This matters. These are people, not cartoons.

This is not a television show.

You may say, "it's so restrictive to classify transsexuals by their sexual orientations". Except for the fact that we are human beings. We sexually reproduce. Our brains are wired towards reproduction.

I knew an autoandrophilic woman who started to inject herself with testosterone, thinking she'd become a gay man. The hormone literally made her sexuality change. She had a heterosexual brain (meaning: attracted to someone different than her). She started to look manly, and as she did so... she found herself becoming repulsed by men. She became territorial, basic instinct. She found herself feeling attracted to females, because "they didn't look like she did" anymore. She told me about this stuff, after she detransitioned.

She said that the male hormones made her brain believe she truly was male. Beforehand, she was mostly operating on the level of social stereotypes. She didn't have "true gender dysphoria", she even told me that she knew it... but that she wanted to "fit in" to a transgender role.

The HRT caused her to develop true gender dysphoria. I remember reading the blogs of transmedicalists who predicted this would happen if someone without dysphoria transitioned.

Yet, I have also read accounts from people who went through all the medical screenings, who had legitimately diagnosed dysphoria... and yet those people regret it, and they detransitioned. Most of those cases seem to be "lesbians who repressed themselves," preferring to imagine themselves in a male role, rather than admit to being a lesbian.

I've read accounts of self-admitted autogynephilic men who wanted to transition. They found affirmation, instead of scrutiny... So one man went as far as to get penile-inversion surgery, where the surgeons removed his testicles. As soon as he woke up from surgery, he said "what the fuck have I done?"

His 'nads were what were driving him to desire "being a woman". Without them, he realized he was just a man, and that it was just a sexual fetish.

So much of the psyche seems to be driven by hormones. We should never take it for granted. Always stay curious and humble towards the natural world, including your own.

okay. listen. if you ever find yourself falling into a new ideological circle, pay attention. if you notice that you’re among people who define themselves as part of an “in-group” with a pre-prepared human “enemy” to constantly rail against—if everyone fantasizes about the mental state of these loathsome monsters, if they participate in witch hunts or (perhaps worse) poke bears and court harassment on purpose to comfort each other over—get the fuck out. you haven’t been enlightened to some grand conspiracy, there are no evil “enemies” or “degenerates” trying to rip apart the fabric of society, and you do not have the moral duty to “enlighten” anyone to whatever you think the “truth” is. it’s neither safe nor normal to spend hours of your day fighting with strangers on the internet

a lot of people wear this shit like a badge of honor, but it’s also not normal to hide your “in-group” status as a form of martyrdom, relishing when the “enemy” slips up around you. it’s comforting in the moment, but in the long run, you’re alienating yourself from the world outside of your bubble. the more you alienate yourself, the more vulnerable and lonely you become, and the harder it is to reject the comfort of belonging to the “in-group”

i’m writing this from the perspective of someone who grew up in a cesspool of awful, cult-like rural churches—which is its own situation—but i see similar shit happening in online communities all the time, both within and 800 miles outside of my own ideological principles. yes, every toxicass radfem i block seems to be trapped in a version of this vicious cycle, but i also see it happening in random queer circles and niche fandom communities. no one is immune, not even me. i’ve watched people fall into this shit and never make it out. be careful

[watchingcbeams]

[hondacivictrucknuts]

No boy need be taught the rules of king-of-the-mountain: whoever topples the king, becomes king. Whether or not actual gangs operate this way, plenty of fictional ones do, enough that everyone is used to the format.

This is not how scholarship is supposed to operate, and generally it's not. But a lot of gender theory seems to follow this pattern: an author (Butler, Dreger, Rubin) points out some problem or contradiction with our common understanding of sex or gender or sexuality, and then having knocked off the alleged ruler, proceeds to assert whatever she pleases in its place.

This is obviously madness. Imagine if other fields worked this way! Ed Gettier disproves Plato's definition of knowledge, and then claims to know the colors of everyone's underwear. Ken Arrow proves his impossibility theorem, then asserts that random dictatorship is the best social choice rule. Mike Brown shows that any criteria for planethood met by Pluto is also met by a handful of other rocks orbiting the sun, and redefines the solar system to stop at the asteroid belt.

Nonetheless, it is intuitive, which perhaps explains its popularity.

[thisismyideaofhumor]

sometimes i forget that shinigami eyes (the browser extension) isnt perfect. saw a name marked red on wikipedia and clicked for more info, turns out she's just defended some antiquated medical theories on gender dysphoria in the past. i mean yeah thats nice to know but its not at the same level of being actively transphobic. maybe there should be a yellow color. anyway the point is to always do your own research when someone tells you someone is problematic, because not everything is black and white